Thursday March 30th Blue Mountain

"We've formed a BLOG!!" - Art Brut

So for my first day back on skis since january 10th when i did the splits, not in the gymnastics fashion but in the more stylish MCL busting one. Cruise the groomers for a while, make some carves in soft snow like one of those parabolic ski ads from 1998, feels great. But F that its sunny out and +10 c at least... Break out the t shirt, let the guns get some sun, and throw a lense on the camera for what might be the last chance to shoot skiing in ontario anyway.

the jump line looked awsome, had i been healthy enough to hit them this would be a 1 picture long story.

the sun came in and out but by 1pm it was almost completely clear.

Max Hill and 2 or 3 other very capable skiers had the park pretty much to themselves.

Hey its that guy!

This is where i stopped trying to shoot all the jumps from above cause well i was really lazy.

I went to a lot of work to photoshop out all the poles from these pictures, Max was actually skiing with 2 poles in each hand.

If youve shot at blue you have probably noticed that shooting downhill means shooting the skier against people back yards, not great but hey, I CAN SEE MY HOUSE FROM HERE!... or at least that my car is still parked where i left it.

given the option shooting level with the horizon is at blue is the best bet. Its not exactly AK where you can look into a cool glacier river valley or something.

if you can tell, i was only shooting at 1/400th of a second. still faster than most flash syncs (wasnt using a flash!) but the point is i dont like to go below 1/600th in daylight if i can get 1/2000th at iso 100 ill take it!!

so there is slight motion blur which i thought might offset the high dof i was getting at f10. overall meh.....

Max was spinning silky smooth switch 5 double grabs as you can see... i think the secret was the added weight of the 2 poles per hand.

these were big hits too, off the bottom of the 3 jump line, nice and floaty.

when grabbing with 2 hands i think its cool to do it 1 hand at a time, now it looks like 2 tricks... if people could do their truck drivers like that they could keep one hand on the wheel while talking on the phone or perhaps drinking a Big Gulp.

yes tail. notice the motion blur, hard to see at that size, but hey remember if you hold the camera still sure the bg will be sharp but the subject will blur with a slow shutter like that. I was alternating between 1/400th and 1/800th depending on whether i had a polarizer on or not.... i must say i think im over the polarizer.... at least with digital, it has its moments for reflective surfaces and what not, sure water, awsome..... and if you use it with Velvia film on a blue day its sick. But photoshop can pop the colours if you really want to.

and photoshop can do sequences too, so thats 2 things PS can do, i havent found a third yet but im still learning. jk.

Big thanks to max for doin a bunch of good laps thru the jump line one after another.

And for making it this far ive got desktop pictures availible..... FREE omg. and theyre 1600X1200, big enough for most rich folk.

just message me and ill either send some your way or give a link to the super secret location.