Bit of a different subject today. It’s not often I get the chance to photograph snowboarders, so when I saw New York was hosting the Red Bull ‘Snowscrapers’, I thought I’d give it a go…
Turned up early which was a fantastic idea – I had a pretty good spot next to the fence between the slope down… and the jump? Forgive me if that’s not the right terminology. I have no clue. Anyway, the not-so-fantastic thing about turning up early was the cold. An hour and half of waiting before it started and I was completely frozen. I’m normally pretty protective of my camera, but in this case it was every camera for itself, out there frozen hanging around my neck.
I took along the 45mm TS-E tilt shift lens and a couple of spare batteries that I was keeping next to my body for warmth – at least if the one in the camera packed up because of the cold I’d have some hot-swaps (no pun intended). As it turned out, I was impressed by the performance of the one in the camera. It must have been roughly minus one trillion degrees out there, but it still stuck at about 50% charge for the whole time, and I didn’t have to switch.
Anyway, the shot above is of the approach – with Shaun White (I think) doing the approaching. Amazing what you learn about someone on Wikipedia – how he used to be called the Flying Tomato, how he’s mentioned in Ocean’s 13, or how he has a signature trick called the ‘Armadillo’. Nice. Oh and he got an Olympic Gold at age 19. Got totally sidetracked reading the Rolling Stone article as you can probably tell.
Anyways… the snowboarders were travelling so fast that I was kept warm just trying to keep up with manually focusing the TS-E and trying to compose the shot. I always like a breath of fresh air now and again… photographically speaking, and just getting to do something completely different like shooting snowboarders in a New York park, was pretty cool.
Anyway, been a bit quiet recently, working on a series of photos which I’ll hopefully have finished soon. Urm, no promises though. heh.
Oh also, one thing I thought was cool – that thing on the right of the slope where you can see the people huddled half way down is some kind of advanced catapult as far as I could tell. Actually for the main event they didn’t seem to be using it that much – they’d migrated to the ‘get two guys to throw the boarder off the top’ method, but in the warm-up they had a water-skiing kind of setup and it literally yanked the boarder down the hill so they could get up more speed for the jump.
Fingers thawed slightly now…
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/2.8
ISO 1000
45mm (Tilt shift)
