Last skiing World cup of a season - ski jumping this time

Hi guys

Last weekend was (finally) last FIS ski event for this season. 3 days of covering FIS ski flying World championships in Planica was last thing I need to do this winter season. Maybe some commercial stuff in next month or two, until snow is gone, but when it comes to racing, 3 races of Ski flying World championships were last ones in 2009/10 season. It was looooong one, so I was really happy when it was over.
In general I really like to shoot ski jumping, since you have much more options to do something at least a bit creative, but everything is different in Planica. With World's largest ski jumping hill where World record was set few years ago at 239 meters, there would be even more options, but we always struggle there. Security is unreasonably strict, we are limited like Obama would be walking around the hill, and on top of that, weather was not really all that great last weekend.
But still... here are photos

I really like these but your watermark is Soooooooo distracting it makes it hard to enjoy your photos

Primoz,

These are absolutely awesome. The photographer side of me loves what youve done with #2 and #7. I cant imagine what #7 looks like full size. I just love it.

The kiddy side of still loves the stock #5 though haha. I know its a dime-a-dozen kind of picture but I still like it. I also really like #1 and #6.

Its a shame the season is over QQ

StanNJ1 wrote in post #9853285
I really like these but your watermark is Soooooooo distracting it makes it hard to enjoy your photos

If youve seen his posts before, youve seen the watermarks. They have to be there. Just try to look past it. In all honesty these are pretty unobtrusive watermarks.

I'm sorry for watermarks, but photos are linked straight to our on-line archive so, there's unfortunately no other way. Next to that, I have seen way too many cases, when someone "borrows" photo just for a little bit and forgets to pay, and since this is our business and with this related my bread and milk, I can't really afford do it other way. Sorry again for this, but I hope you understand this.

Personally I really like #7, so it's nice to hear someone else like it too. It's a bit different way to do quite standard shot. I need to change one big (2x1m) print on wall of our office and I somehow think, this is photo that will be the one
#5 is really standard shot. It doesn't look bad for me, but it's just nothing special. Everyone are getting thousands of such photos on every single ski jumping race, so that's reason why I don't like it. It's just too common, but when working for agency you don't have other chance, then to do this kind of stuff too.
#1 and #8 were something I never tried this way. I put remote with 70-200/2.8 on inside "wall" somewhere at 50 or 60m mark, rotate it a bit, prefocus and for first time in my life, left it at AV instead of manual I set remote around 8:45 on morning, and first series started at 9:15, so there was no way to get right manual settings, especially since sun started to get out just few minutes before start, and I was standing quite a bit bellow shooting that, what you can see on #4. I dialed +2/3 compensation and I was really surprised, that photos were exposed perfectly right. Both #1 and #8 have almost no correction, just a bit of cropping on sides.

So what do you do all summer during your downtime?

love the photos, i'll look past the watermarks for the great shot!

AdamLewis wrote in post #9860853
So what do you do all summer during your downtime?

I'm still trying to find a way to be skiing down in New Zealand all summer But since I didn't find out how to survive with just few months of shooting skiing yet, I'm shooting everything else what comes this way. There's quite lot of cycling, but anything else goes too, even though any of those things is nowhere near fun we have at skiing. But you gotta do what you gotta do to survive

It looks to me like the jumper in 1 is falling off of a building or something, lol awesome shots as always though!

I'm loving the angle of 1 & 8. Very cool.

For me however, number 2 is my favourite. I haven't seen a shot like that before and love it. Everything about that shot is spot on.

Shot number 7 is going to be a nice little bread winner for sure!

Slick shooting!

Really awesome set of pictures again - I love all the different angles and views. Nice!

alpinekiwi wrote in post #9873651
For me however, number 2 is my favourite. I haven't seen a shot like that before and love it. Everything about that shot is spot on.

It was first day of competition, when race started at 3pm. Sun was on exactly wrong place for nice wide angle photos, and we weren't allowed to go to other side of hill, so we would have sun from back. So I decided to do few silhouettes, and on the end, they didn't really look all that bad. Of course you can't do this for 40 jumpers, but it was nice way to do at least few of them as a feature. And good thing is, that they actually sell. Not as photo of particular skier, but as feature which can be used for any hill and any competition. So sometimes, there's something good in all those bad things too. You just need to find different way and we always make some profit out of it