Photography on the slopes

A snowHead

I'm looking to take my Canon 10d on the slopes this year, does anyone have any advice or experiences to share?

A snowHead

Think carefully about how you'll carry your gear. Unless you can find a way of insulating the camera body you'll get a lot of issues with batteries dying. Keeping the body under your jacket and the lens somewhere else is fine, but hardly gives you much chance for 'opportunity' shooting.

You should be able to get away with 1 lens for most situations. A small flashgun is nice too as you get lots of deep shadows on faces etc.

I invested in a Canon S3/IS this year and found it a very capable substitute for a DSLR - and so much easier to carry about as it will comfortably fit under a ski jacket in a soft case.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Few assorted quick tips:

Spare batteries and a charger are always useful. The cold can really eat battery life.

If you want to capture falling snow-flakes, force your flash to be on. It obviously makes little difference to the general scene, but you get bright white reflections from the flakes.

On overcast days without sunshine, it's hard to get much colour. You can post-process some of this later. But photos typically work far better on the days when you have natural light.

Slopes never look steep looking up from the immediate bottom of them, and are very difficult to photograph from the top. If you want to impress friends with the slope you went down take it immediately across the slope (with trees/life poles to show vertical line) or some way from the bottom at a slight angle (makes it look steeper)

Unless you ski by yourself, try and keep your camera accessible. Your fellow travellers won't alwasy appreciate the 10th stop in an hour whilst you try and take yet another photo of a mountain view.

Simple action video is fairly easy to do with a still camera. The length of such footage increases significantly if you can ski behind someone, however be careful doing this unless you are a good skier or have the luxury of empty pistes.

In terms of composition, the best photos I've seen have a great depth of shot to them. With objects (e.g. people, huts etc) in the foreground, nice snowy pisted in the middle and backdrops in the background. Pure mountain shots get boring quite quickly.

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Fantastic tips guys, thanks! What about condensation in the camera - have you ever had any issues with this?

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

Watch the metering. I've found I need to over-expose by 2/3 of a stop or more to get the white snow to actually look white. As there's often so much white in a scene this can lead to the metering giving you a washed out grey looking result. Shooting raw is worth doing if you don't normally. And I second what mike and kamikaze said re cold and the batteries, take a spare and a charger Cool

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Good advice above. I use a small digital cam (casio EXZ-750) which drops nicely into a jacket pocket and can store hundreds of pics or about half an hour of 640X480 video on a 1gb sim. (I also carry a spare sim). Spare battery is a good idea, but TBH I keep the cam in an inside jacket pocket and it stays warm and functional. No probs with steaming up, and skiing with a camera in one hand shooting video is not too hard Laughing

I usually let the cam work out the white balance and exposure and so far it seems to work fine. example pics from tignes on the 'pix from tignes' thread snowHead

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

If you have to take a shot looking up or down the hill, don't have the skier in the centre of the shot -try to have the camera as level as the subject allows - ie have the skier at the bottom of the shot if looking down, and at the top if looking up. eg:

or

After all it is free

snowball, nice - can you tell us where that is?

Good thread guys. Replies have gone staight to the nuts and bolts of the question.

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Dolomites, Sella Ronda - off-piste from the Passo Pordoi (Sp?) cable car. Top one the skier is Cedric, bottom taken by Cedric.

Another example: This doesn't convey the fact that the slope was quite steep, but I just edited it on Photoshop and now Here it does show that aspect a bit better. The Portrait (vertical) format helps (and I added some extra snow on the bottom by cloning a few bits of the existing picture).
But looking down is generally better because the distant view gives more idea of the position of the horizon line. This is the same slope from above !!!!

And I agree about overexposing half a stop or so.

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kamikaze, snowball, Thanks for the tips, I stuggle to get my pictures to show how steep it was.

snow reports

The biggest (and potentially most expensive) problem is condensation. Bringing a cold camera into a warm hotel will cause condensation to form on the surfaces.

In the latest issu of EOS magazine (January-March 2007) there is an article about some polar explorers.
A few tips about how they kept condensation at bay:
1. Breathing on the cameras while taking pictures would cause condensation to form inside the camera.
2. They sealed their gear in airtight bags BEFORE they came in from the cold and only opened them when their gear had reached room temperature.

And finally - their cameras were cold enough that skin would freeze on contact. It was very painful peeling their noses off the cameras!

Help!!

Photography on the slopes

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