Night Crawlers

With springtime in full force, our photo shoot schedule has shifted into the later hours of the day to avoid the harsh midday sun. For Northstar however, the filmiers decided to skip the daylight hours all together and get the job done in the dark.

SPT created and built this semi-massive snow structure with varying obstacles and gaps that the riders could negotiate in a number of different ways including redirects, hip landings and up/downs. One heck of a snow pile groomed in a manner that Sollors, Zak, Alex, Ludde, Ethan and Charles had no problem getting busy with!

Seeing how there was zero ambient light while the riding was happening, we had a number of artificial lighting units to illuminate the entire area, along with eight Lowell DP fill lights (with gels). The combination of these powerful lights gave the riders and filmiers more than enough usable light for some spectacular film shots. Setting up all this stuff was no easy task, so the crew would arrive well before sunset, position the items until dusk as the riders were scoping their lines and getting a few warm-up runs under their belt. A very efficient system that required everybody pitching in to the effort bucket.

For the still photography end of things, I employed two Elinchrom Ranger RX kits, one Elinchrom Quadra and couple of Sunpak 544's. The five-flash combo was sufficient to create and capture the feeling of this nighttime session...and I rigged up a couple of surprises for y'all later on with the action shots. Blotto

All photos by Blotto © 2011