Snow Board / Skiing photography with 10D

[mpkirby]

A friend of mine from work is pretty good a snowboarding, so he and I are having an "off-site" design meeting at the local ski mountain.

I want to shoot one of those shots you see on the big posters where they do the long carve, leaning heavily into the hill with their hands touching these snow.

I'm told that without 3 feet of powder, I can't get the big spray affect, but that's okay.

I was wondering of folks have any pointers to shooting good snow boarding shots / setup / camera setup / etc...

We plan to go from about 1:00 to 5:00pm. I'm hoping for a reasonably sunny day (not likely here), so I can get shadows on the snow to capture some texture. He has both a carving board and a regular one, so if he is daring, we might visit the half-pipe and try to get some arial shots.

Mike

[ilya]

Mike-

Lighting (obviously) makes a huge difference. If you get him on the side with the light, that gives you nice exposure, speed, blue sky in the background, nice white snow color, etc. Shooting into the sun makes for poor results. I don't like overcast either.

Shoot with at least 1/500, or faster, that freezes the snow spray, unless you want pan the camera and blur background. Generally, overexpose by a half to a stop, because the metering tells the camera that you are shooting a bright object (snow) and will tend to underexpose the entire frame making snow a drab grey color. May need a Circ Polarizer; I always use one. Use Servo focus mode, with center point. Generally, ISO 400.

I've blown this one of my wife up to 20x24 with absolutely amazing results (mpix.com). I shot this in "sports" mode, which surprisingly works just as well as most folks can do most of the time in manual under well-lit conditions.

http://images.fotopic.net/?id=2249933&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1


This one of me isn't particularly impressive, and I have to do a lot of work to get the right snow tone and highlights, but just to show the diff between good light and bad light.

http://images.fotopic.net/?id=2082802&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1


In terms of setup, just get a couple of clear signals down. Tell him you'll raise your arm first when you're ready with the cam, and he would confirm. Nothing worse when he's already past you and you're still fumbling with the switches.

On the half-pipe, depends on your focal length. If you don't have enough length, then plan for that one shot where he knows he'll get air, and be close to that. If you do have 200mm or better, stay off to either side towards the end, and get a few frontsides and backsides. If he isn't in the air its not very interesting. Again, mind the light.

One more bit of practical advice, the 10D does 3FPS and has a 9 shot buffer, if you get started too soon with the shutter, you'll fill up your buffer, and miss the really good ones up close that fill the frame. Also, Raw will force you to wait much longer till the buffer is cleared.

Edit: PS, you can get plenty of spray even on groomed runs, just have him hard-slide the tail on a few. You will need to be on a good incline. In general, that perfect shot that you describe requires perfect timing and positioning from you, and good execution from your subject. Lots of things need to go right - you only have a seconds where he's in a focal sweetspot. But I'm sure you'll have lots of fun trying!