Style Wars

So I’m back from an amazing trip to New Zealand. the Billabong shoot went incredibly well and all in all I spent three exceptional days in a helicopter.

I think I shot some of my best snowboarding images to date while on the Billabong trip and will post some once the catalogue is back from the printers.
Shooting with guys like Antti Autti, Scotty Lago, Marius Otterstrad, and Australia’s own Robbie J Walker, Clint Allan and Nick Gregory is like a snow photographer’s dream.
It was really cool to be involved in such a productive catalogue shoot with super talented riders.
New Zealand blew my mind, the place is so beautiful, every corner yields another postcard image. It got to the point where I had to hold myself back from stopping to take a photo every time another perfect vista presented itself

I had a few days to relax when I arrived back home in Sydney, took care of some emails and enjoyed some good coffee, then it was straight back in to the car with all the equipment to head down to Falls Creek in Victoria for the Style Wars competition.

Style Wars is a four day snowboarding event which is the brainchild of former Australia & New Zealand Snowboarding magazine editor and Aussie industry heavyweight Richard Hegarty. In it’s fourth year Style Wars is now a 4 star TTR snowboard event which draws big name riders from all over the world to compete in one of the most relaxed rider driven competition environments I’ve ever witnessed. Hegarty has done it again this year, showing that if you create an event which has great features purpose built and you have a cool rider driven atmosphere, where everybody is looked after, fed and accommodated comfortably, the big names will come!

The course this year consists of a step down drop into a 90-ft table and finally an 80-ft channel gap. These are world class features and they are built right here in Falls Creek, proving that world class snowboarding events are possible on home turf, it just requires the resorts to see the marketing value in world wide publicity from these events.
Unfortunately most Aussie resorts only seem interested in publishing higher skiier visit numbers year after year...bring on the bus groups!

A rail jam also takes place tonight on a purpose built 28 stair set rail. the jibbers aren’t left out at Style Wars.

Tomorrow I head back to Perisher in NSW to prepare for the Boost Mobile SnoSho competition which I am the main shooter for. Every year the event has taken place in atrocious weather, so I’m hopeful this year will see better conditions.

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New Zealand and my hijacked website!

I am currently in New Zealand for a few shoots, firstly I have just completed an editorial trip for Australian Snowboarder Magazine, which took in Mt Hutt in the Canterbury region of the south island and an amazing heli boarding shoot up at Mt Potts heli park.Then I'm off to do the Billabong 2009 winter catalogue shoot in Wanaka, which will be one of the biggest commercial shoots I have done yet!
During my time at Mt Potts we were without mobile phone reception, internet or television. We were truly isolated from the outside world. Also during this time I was featured on the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age's websites with a gallery of my images. What I did not know until this morning when driving back into mobile phone reception was that my website was attacked by a malicious code script which destroyed the functionality of the site and tried to upload a trojan to peoples computer's. The timing could not have been worse! This has never happened in all the time I have had a website and I couldn't believe how unlucky I was to have this happen when I was being linked to on two of the most popular news websites in the country.
Heli Park, however, was absolutely incredible! We had a whole mountain to ourselves with our own helicopter waiting for us at the bottom of the hill waiting to drop us off on the next peak. The snow was pretty amazing and did I mention the helicopter? This was my first time in a chopper, and I loved every minute of it! The scenery around this region of New Zealand is nothing short of breathtaking, it would have been an amazing experience without the untracked powder runs waiting below us, the powder though, was lots and lots of fun!

Here are some photos, more words to come very soon!

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