A few weeks before this shot was taken, I was at the exact same spot, shooting on a larger version of this jump with Poor Boyz Productions at Mt. Bachelor in Bend, Oregon. We waited around for about a week for the weather to improve and it just never seemed to get the way we wanted so I bailed out for a few days down to Mammoth Mountain, CA to shoot with Level 1 Productions. A few days later I came back up to Mt. Bachelor to shoot with Rage Films for another park shoot and I got the weather I was hoping for and the shoot went off. It was one of those shoots where I got photos every day that ended up running in a mag somewhere. Needless to say it was a good couple of days with a really fun crew of young up and coming kids.
I just rolled into Mt. Hood, OR to shoot the Sammy Carlson Invitational. It’s been a few years since I was last here at Mt. Hood, the last time being when I took this photo of Tom Wallisch with Level 1 Productions while shooting for the movie “Turbo”. This shot was taken with a Nikon D70s, Nikon 18-200 f3.5-5.6, Pocket Wizard Plus 2 Transcievers, and Elinchrom Ranger RX AS Speed pack with an A-head at 1/1000 sec, f5.6, at 60mm.
For those of you wondering how I was able to sync my strobes at 1/1000 of a second, the Nikon D70s’s CCD sensor and electronic shutter allow for this to work at up to 1/1250 of a second using Pocket Wizard Plus, Plus 2, and Multimax transcievers without any adjustments in settings.
In an effort to keep myself posting more often I’ve started a category of posts on my blog called Quick Pics. I don’t always have time to make a blog post when I’m in the middle of travelling or a really busy cycle of work so I’ve added this section. Just a photo, maybe with a little bit about the photo if I have time. Judging by the traffic response so far, it seems like it’s what everyone wants to see. These photos are going to be completely random personal work, or maybe just a photo I’ve taken in the past that has been published, or maybe one that didn’t get published but I just liked it a lot.
This photo is of Anna Segal about two years ago during a trip we went on to Chile. This shot in particular was at a sunset session in the terrain park in El Colorado, Chile. There are amazing sunsets almost every day out there with all the pollution in the valley of Santiago. Shot at 1/125 sec, f5.6, ISO 100 on a Canon EOS-1D MKII, Canon 70-200 2.8 L IS lens with Alien Bees 800, Alien Bees 400, 3 Nikon SB-80DX speedlights, Pocket Wizard Plus 2 transcivers.
It had been about two years since I was last out at Miller Motorsports Park in Tooele, UT. A lot of my friends are involved in the race scene out there but with the amount of travel I’ve done in the Summer the past two years, it’s been tough to get out. A week ago my friend Stan Evans was heading out to shoot the SCCA TDI Cup for Red Bull and the movie “Say My Name” as professional freeskier Grete Eliassen was driving in the event so I went along to help out and shoot a little bit.
It’s been far too long since I had been out there, it’s such an amazing facility and we are very lucky to have it out there, especially since it’s only a 45 minute drive away from the city! It was a fun day and it being a smaller level event it was a mellow scene there and I could go anywhere. I also hadn’t actually shot from the infield before so it was nice to shoot from a different perspective than I’m used to from the perimeter of the course. They have done a lot of work to the facilities out at Miller Motorsports Park since the last time I had been there which also made it really nice to be there!
I’ll be updating the site with more stuff from MMP in the future, mostly with Quick Pic blog posts but I’m doing a few projects out there that I’ll be posting later in the Summer when I’m finished.
A little while ago Pocket Wizard announced the new v7.5 firmware for their new Multimax units that have the USB port for firmware updates. Included with the new firmware are a few useful features:
Long and short range mode
Noise sniffer
Signal strength meter
Radio relay (Repeater mode)
Since I just got the new Multimax’s at the tail end of my spring terrain park shoot season I was only able to test out a few of the new features. The signal strength meter is a really good tool for sure to have going, especially in a long range situation which is usually the situations that I’m shooting on the mountain. A lot of time’s I’m shooting with my 70-200mm lens and am pretty far away from my strobes so being able to see what the signal strength is from my Multimax is a good tool to try and pre-determine if I’m wandering out of the radio signal’s range.
The other upgrade I was able to test out was the long range mode. I was shooting photos of freeskiers Simon Dumont, Matt Walker and LJ Strenio sliding an urban rail with Poor Boyz Productions a few weeks ago and started wandering out a bit further from the scene and my lights . As I found my shot I realized I could have a few problems with radio interference with the shot I had setup. My first problem was being surrounded by some steel chainlink fence, my second was not having line of sight to my strobes, the third was laying up against the steel chainlink fence. Too add to this I was laying on the ground so I could get the grass in the foreground and to finish things off I was in an urban environment with power lines directly above me.
I was about 300 feet away, a bit on the middle end of the range of the Multimax’s but with all these factors and radio interference I couldn’t get consistent signal and my strobes were firing a little erratically. Since this was a perfect time to try out the new long distance mode I began sprinting back and fourth between my shooting location and making sure I had everything dialed with the Multimax’s on the three strobes I had setup on the scene. The long range mode worked and in a situation I may not have been able to take the shot I wanted previously, I was able to get the shot I wanted with lighting.
I spoke with some of the people at Pocket Wizard and the reason long range mode works is they slowed down the data rates and increased the error correction. This is supposed to have an impact on the maximum usable shutter speed, however I was able to sync this shot at 1/1000 of a second with my Nikon D40 body. With that being said, I’ll have to do a bit more testing to see at what shutter speed the reliability begins to degrade in long range mode.
I’m taking a break from this screen and pretty excited about it. This screen’s been haunting me for the past 3 weeks or so.
6600 Miles later. I’m home, done with the spring edit, and done looking at this screen for a bit, well part of it. It was a challenging ski season and even more of challenging of a spring with some less than ideal weather most of the year. All and all though I still came away with a bunch of shots I’m pretty stoked on and I’ll hopefully see how well they are received shortly after hearing back from the magazine editors and from my commercial clients.
I’ll be back here with some more posts and some new photos soon.
Two years, two covers with Powderhound Magazine. This year it’s Anna Segal at The Canyons Resort in Park City, Utah. I’ve been working with Powderhound Magazine for 4 seasons now, since I started shooting with the Aussies, mainly Anna Segal and Davina Williams. This photo was one I had completely planned out before shooting it. From the angle to the weather, skier, lighting, even the trick I wanted on it. It didn’t completely work out to design, the natural light wasn’t quite as dark as I wanted it to be, however the two inches an hour of snowfall we were getting did work to make the shot look cold and wintry.
This was actually one of the mellower shoots of the season. No film crew, no crew of skiers, just myself and Anna and we were in and out in about an hour. I don’t get to do that very often, to be on a shoot with no film crew, just myself and being able to go wherever I want in order to get the shot I want. It makes work so much easier when I get to do this!
This time of year is always a good pick me up as the magazine publication schedule in Australia and New Zealand is quite a bit earlier with the opposite seasons so I get to see shots published while I’m still shooting during the spring terrain park shoots!
I’ve been spending a lot of time the past few days editing photos and putting together my slideshow for the World Ski and Snowboard Festival Pro Photographer Showdown and the amount of work I’ve put into it has drained me. I’ve been feeling rather un-creative lately but my friend Kevin showed me this music video produced by a bunch of high school kids that is just awesome. So well done, especially coming out of a high school. The amount of planning and production that had to go into this to get it all to come together with kids is just amazing to me.
Could you have even tried to come up with a concept like that now? How about in high school? How about pulling off that kind of production with that many kids that are in that video? These guys killed it and I wish I could say it’s something I came up with. Go out there, get creative, bust out of the box and run away from it like these kids did.
Props to Sherwood High School, you are one creative group!
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