Shaun White Tight Crop

This was the first Tight Crop ad I shot last season, and going into it, we really didn't know if this ad campaign was going to happen or not! Evan and Lance told me to 'experiment' with the idea and hit them with some feedback on the shooting experience and equipment used once we wrapped up the Northstar shoot with Shaun.

As for the shot itself, the idea was to crop in on the action as much as possible, use no more than two strobes/flashes, while having the rider look directly into the lens. The image would then be spread across two pages, color tones changed and the rider's name (in the Standing Sideways font) dropped across.

After the second afternoon of documenting the tabletop line, we had about an hour of light remaining to give this photo idea a shot. The snowcat quickly manipulated the side of the tabletop into a mini-shred quarterpipe, the hand shovel finished off the job and we were ready for some trial runs. While Shaun was figuring out a frontside handplant on this obstacle, I was sorting out where to put the strobes and more importantly what the composition would be.

Once both of us had our respective duties figured out, it was time to start shooting. Shaun needed to look into the camera, so the headband came out to hold back his mop. After seeing the image on the viewfinder, we weren’t really feeling it, so the head gear was removed and we decided to let the hair do whatever it was gonna do. I would say about four or five tries in, we had the image you see in the ad…relatively mellow when considering this was the trial run on what would be the major ad campaign of the season.

For more on this day, click here to check out Gabe’s Big Picture edit. Thanks for reading! Blotto

All photos by Blotto, except group shot by Gabe 2011