JANUARY 05: Intro
“Half the secret to taking good pictures,” a photographer friend once told me, “is just waking up early.” While the statement oversimplifies a complex art, it does help illustrate how much ski photographers depend on light. As important as good snow is to the equation, what shooters really need is the right illumination—those crucial few moments when dawn melts into the walls of the Chugach or evening descends on the Sierra.
Of course, this is also one of the simple wisdoms of good skiing. Every year, dozens of resorts are ranked on the relative powderiness of their slopes and entire vacations get planned around where and when the next storm will hit. Then the vacationers arrive, sleep till 11, and wake to a tracked-out mountain. What these people can learn from ski photographers is that you’ll always beat 90 percent of skidom to the slopes if you can just get your ass out of bed. (Hint: exchange whiskey for water before the band stops playing.)
In the right light, at the right moment, every slope is spectacular, with each flake of a storm providing one more way to look at the texture of winter. Today, like every day, dozens of ski photographers are out finding new ways to showcase our sport. They are looking for light. And if they don’t find what they like in the morning, they’ll spend all day searching for it—seeking out slanted rays through the trees or between storm clouds or beneath a skier’s contrail. Even in darkness, the light makes all the difference—how a full moon illuminates a powder field or how the false glow of a night-skiing area evokes a certain mood that daytime could never deliver. That’s the lingering image of a great ski day—or a great ski photo. The way the sun reflects off a layer of surface hoar or spreads across a valley or lights the horizon at sunset.
Shooters depend on the early-rise routine in order to paint that first picture of the day. And we’re not talking about a run-of-the-mill early rise, the kind that begins with your feet on the carpet and your stomach a few steps from the fridge. Ski photographers deliver phenomenal images of snow by being willing to camp on it, sleep in it, and trudge through five feet of it carrying heavy gear in order to get the shot. True, this may be what any hardcore skier would do. But photographers bring back something for the rest of us. —Tom Bie