I took this shot in august 2008, at SnowParkNZ in amazing New Zealand. I had been sent by the ski brand CoreUPT to bring new skis and take photos of the newly recruited team North American members, Colby James West, TJ Schiller and Gus Kenworthy.

We spent all our days at SnowParkNZ at first, the boys were training for the soon coming New Zealand Open, the main Southern Hemisphere freestyle competition.

This is how Snowpark NZ can look like on good weather days

On that day, the light was flat due to heavy cloud coverage, I was a the bottom of the halfpipe doing boring photos as the guys were practicing their run and tricks. It was quite windy, so the clouds were moving a lot, and the skiers struggling to find their marks.

And in the distance, on the other side of the valley, lightrays were hitting the peaks at fleeting moments ? not at all on our side of the valley, so my eyes were often dragged to those breaks in the clouds, thinking their was a potential for a strong Black & White photo.

The Cardrona range on that day from SnowParkNZ
This is how my exposure came out of the camera.
This is how the scene was sort of looking
This is what I imagined it could look like with a contrasty Black & White conversion

I didn?t bring back any worthy action ski photos that day, but liked what  the country of the long white clouds (The English meaning of Aotearoa, the Mauri name of New Zealand) gave me that day -  fleeting light painted compositions.

The Tech corner: 18/08/2008 ? Canon 40D + 24-105@105mm ? 1/640 f8 iso 200

Many thanks for Reading,