Powder . . . - Stock Photography

Powder . . .

By John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
Jan. 7, 2008

© 2008 John Terence Turner

The powder experience is one of the great joys of skiing. It can also be a rare one, depending on where you live.

There was little room to work with here, but skier Joe Flick made the most of it and the author got his shot . ( © John Terence Turner ).

When it is deep enough that you can’t feel the bottom, there is a floating quality that is almost disorienting.

Gone is the racecourse precision of hard-pack; gone is the bone-rattling, noisy chatter of hard, icy snow.

In their place comes the soft, airy feeling of being in snow instead of on it.

Sometimes you are so in it that you have to hold your breath to keep from inhaling it.

Powder is not only soft, it is quiet.

Quiet save for the whoops of exhilaration produced by the fortunate few who’ve managed to get to it before anyone else.

One can pardon their blasphemy; sometimes you’ve just got to let out the euphoria.

Wider, shorter, softer skis make it more accessible, but for photographs the photographer must have a good location, good skiers and good weather—all at the same time.

Those elements don’t come together on demand.

But when they do, damn it is fun!

Standing on top of a mountain with freshly fallen deep, light snow is a great joy. Standing there with a good skier working for you is one of the rare moments in photography.

It also is pretty remunerative if everyone does his or her job.

Some basic rules apply. Most are obvious, some are not.

Shoot the skier in untracked powder is the first rule. The concept loses something important if your performer is the second or third person making turns on what is no longer “virgin powder.”

To achieve this, the photographer must ski to the camera position without violating the designated canvas on which precious “first tracks” will be carved. The photographer frequently must ski through trees, rocks and/or wind-crust to reach the optimum position for the killer shot.

On one occasion I had located a steep little clearing with deep, untracked snow. The clearing was only about 25 yards long, but it was backlit and the wind had not reached it.

Turner knew there would be no second chance for this shot. The photographer skied around the scene to avoid creating extra ski tracks and climbed a rock to achieve the high angle. ( © John Terence Turner ).

To get to my camera position without leaving tracks, I had to struggle through the dense trees on one side of the clearing.

Unfortunately, the trees were so close there were no spaces for turning.

Just beyond the clearing was a small cliff. If I couldn’t stop above it, I’d drop over the edge. It wasn’t a dangerous drop, but the snow was so deep that I’d have an extremely difficult time sidestepping back up to my chosen camera position.

I could see the sturdy top of a tree just to the side of where I wanted to be. There were no spaces among the trees en route.

I put my camera back in the pack to shield it, pointed my skis towards the target and let gravity take me there.

Turner and his models hiked away from the Crested Butte, CO, ski runs to find virgin snow for this image of a skier catching air off a cornice. ( © John Terence Turner ).

As I said, there was no place to turn or stop. I slammed into the treetop (it extended above the snow about 7 feet) and wrapped my arms around it, hoping no sharp branches would pierce my goggles.

With an explosion of pine needles and snowflakes, the tree bent, but it stopped me. I untangled myself, liberated my camera, moved to my spot and called up to my skier.

Joe Flick had skied for me many times. He is one of the best ski models I’ve ever used. Flick always was able to do what I asked and usually more.

The first shot is one of several keepers from that moment. The backlighting is what makes the image.

The snow is light and boiling up around Joe’s shoulders and sticking to his hair. There wasn’t room for a lot of turns but he made the most of the available space.

Sometimes a photographer must grapple with less than ideal conditions, as Turner did during this Patagonia shoot on Crystal Mountain in Washington. ( © John Terence Turner ).

I once made the mistake of asking Flick to hike back up to hit a photogenic mogul more often than I had said I was going to. I said it would be necessary to repeat a hard edge-set (with a dramatic explosion of powder) on the mogul “four or five times.”

At repetition number seven, he pointed out that I had exceeded my promise. He never let me forget my effort to extract a couple of extra runs. In his version, the number of repetitions became “at least twenty."

I should point out, that it wasn’t a powder shoot. Hiking back up in powder is exhausting and time-consuming. Unless there is a compelling reason for hiking back, it is better to just keep on going down the mountain.

Despite Joe’s good-natured complaints, the photographer usually does the hiking.

As always, planning paid off with this image. Turner had noticed that this location was ideal for a silhouette shot. He set up the shoot to be in the right place at the right time with the right model. ( © John Terence Turner ).

The shot of the three skiers on the edge of a crevasse in Canada's Bugaboos is a good example.

It takes a helicopter to get to this location in the first place.

I skied on the left side of the crevasse, to the foot of small, rocky ridge that provided some elevation.

I removed my skis, climbed up the rocks and gave the signal for the pilot to lift off, and the skiers to start their run.

The guide instructed the two skiers wearing the client’s ski suits to stay to his left to keep them from going into the crevasse.

One run, no re-shoots.

The shot of Scottie Ewing in yellow and black is from Crested Butte, CO. It involved a lot of hiking because the top part of The Butte is not served by a lift.

Accompanied by Ellie Pryor, another skier, Scottie and I climbed about 500 vertical feet to the very summit of the mountain.

There we found a wonderful cornice off which Scottie got some great air, as can be seen in the third image.

Farther down, there was a great roll of new snow that led to a very steep drop that produced the face shot seen in the fourth picture.

Not every expedition produces wonderful backlit images made magical by sunshine. Snow doesn’t always fall at night, followed by bright sunshine in the morning.

One winter I was shooting for Patagonia at Crystal Mountain in Washington. It had been a stormy week but there was a chance for a break so we went up with hope in our hearts.

We hiked into Crystal’s back country, but the break didn’t happen. On the contrary, we got hammered by more snow.

“We’re up here anyway, so let’s shoot.” I said.

It was snowing hard and the visibility was poor.

“Let’s leapfrog along and not have any long distances between us.” I suggested. I put an 80-200 Nikkor zoom on my camera, but
I’m sure I didn’t use the 200mm end of its range.

My model skied close to me, stopped and then I skied down a little and we did it again.

I didn’t get much that was useful, but I love this one. Just the Patagonia glove and hat with the pole raised for another plant sums up the powder experience in the Cascades back country.

Just because you can’t see anything, doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

The silhouette of Scottie Ewing in Crested Butte is the result of noticing that a certain steep slope lost sunshine in the afternoon while the Rockies in the background did not.

This meant that only the section that put him in front of the peaks would produce the shot I was after.

We had new snow to provide the lively foreground texture. The rays of the late afternoon sun were warm, even though the temperature was 15°. Scottie turned in the right place and the picture was made.

Powder snow. All skiers of ability seek it, some more avidly than others. Good powder pictures can earn a lot of money. Making those pictures is some of the most fun a photographer can have.

(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy, Digital Railroad and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears monthly. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)

Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.

For more of his images: click here.

For all of Turner's columns: click here.