Projects I do for fun

Hunting landscapes and wildlife is time consuming and not something I can’t do every day - but non the less I catch my self spinning on ideas for shoots to do. I often dream about remote destinations and exotic species to capture especially, the through this last year with a lot of restrictions on traveling during the pandemic. I am also a father and that requires a lot - in a good way. The days when my cravings for doing something creative gets to much to bear I try to create small projects for my self. Try to push to my self to learn something new and use a location close to home. That way I am able to complete some of the projects I have in mind.

This image is taken at a local ski slope - minutes from where I live.

The image above is taken a couple of minutes by car from my house. I asked my good friend William if he wanted to help me with a shot I had planned and asked him to bring his snowboard. I was at the location 30 min before him and started to scout for a promising location rigged some lights and found the angles I liked. When William arrived we talked the shot through - I showed him a rough hand drawn sketch of what I was looking for. After a couple trials and light adjustments we got this.

This is another shoot I did together with William also in our backyard

The above image is a result of an idea that William and I had when we where out snowboarding together. We saw this fallen tree and William wanted to make a kicker out of it. We had crazy amounts of snow that winter and we really had to struggle to get to the spot. We tested a few shots and when we where satisfied with the result we lit a smoke grenade for the grand finale. Above you see the result. A perfect Friday evening.

Selifes

I often bring friend into my shoots. Number one it is amazing to share those experiences with a good friend and two I often know how far I can push them to get a cool image. But some times I am at a really nice spot alone - and having a passion for sports my self I use me as the subject. I have done a lot of these kind of selfies on my mountain bike but this was a first on snowboard. I had looked at this spot many times and thought about a project. I hiked to the spot in my snowboard boots carrying everything I needed. I set the camera up on a tripod in the snow and attached a radio trigger from Hahnel. The one I use has a 100m range and works really good - it is pretty affordable also. For most of this kind of shots I pre focused my camera and set it to manual focus to prevent the image to chase for focus. I tend to set the focus on the jump and try to calculate where I will be landing and adjust a tad for moment towards the camera. I set the camera to continuous shooting.

Then I hiked to the top of the hill, strapped on my board and prepared. In my back hand I held onto my remote control. On approaching the lip of the jump, a snow covered tree in this case - I squeeze the trigger to start capturing images. After I landed I ran back to the camera to see if any of the frames where any good. After a good number of tries I ended with the image above.