Dan's Photo Blog

New Blog is done!

2009-10-15T17:21:00.009+11:00

The new blog I've been working on for the past few weeks is finally done and live.
Unfortunately the RSS feed and URL have changed just a bit, so head on over to the new site and let me know what you think of the new look. While you're there update your bookmarks!! The new blog can be viewed here and the feed for the new blog here.
All the archived posts from this blog have been migrated over to the new blog and it is, in my opinion looking pretty good!

Snow Photo of The Season on Sydney Morning Herald online

2009-09-29T21:10:00.011+10:00

The last couple of weeks have been pretty interesting. Last week one of my photos (the one above) was voted by the readers of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspaper's websites as the snow image of the season. I was pretty surprised that the image was the most popular as I almost didn't even submit it. You can view the original page and reader's comments for the vote here The shot was taken at treble Cone in New Zealand during the Billabong Catalogue shoot I was on recently. I didn't win anything (a lot of friends have asked what I won!), but it was definitely interesting to read through comments from people not necessarily associated with action sports or the snow industry.Stoked that my photo resonated with so many people!

Billabong 2010 Catalogue Shoot New Zealand

2009-08-30T12:04:00.007+10:00

I've been in New Zealand shooting the 2010 Billabong winter catalogue for the past two weeks. The weather hasn't been very nice to us this year and I'm writing this while it is raining and super windy outside.
We've been staying in a great little house in the Cardrona valley complete with perfect mini ramp out front - unfortunately we've only been able to skate it twice, due to the rain!
The South Island of New Zealand is crawling with pro skiers and snowboarders at them moment. After dinner a couple of nights ago we went for a few drinks in town and inside the bar was literally a who's who of international snowboarding stardom - yes, even the "Flying Tomato" was there!
At our house is the Euro and Aussie Billabong teams and the house has also been a drop in for other traveling pro shreds. Staying at our house are photographers Eric Bergeri, Vanessa Andrieux and myself, along with pro shreds Anne-Flore Marxer, Wolle Nyvelt, Sylvain Bourboison, Robbie Walker, Clint Allan and Erin Tanner. Rookies - Michaela Davis-Meehan, Nick Wood and Jesse kennedy and the gel that holds everything together, team managers David Pitschi and Woody Sedgman. Yeah, it's pretty much a mad house!
The Billabong USA team is staying a bit closer to Wanaka.
Nightly tournaments of Fifa 09 on the Xbox 360 turn our house into a screaming den of French rage and cursing. These dudes take their football seriously - even if it is only a video game!
The riding is pretty serious too, and although I can't show much until the catalogue is done I can say it is a pleasure to work with so many professionals on a daily basis!
Here are a few B-roll shots from the trip so far. Look out for a full editorial feature in Issue 1 of Australian Snowboarder Magazine next year.
I'll do a more photo nerd specific update later.

Some recent snow work

2009-08-17T08:57:00.009+10:00

It's been a while between posts, mostly due to the amount of work I've been doing - shooting, driving, shooting, re-touching, more shooting, delivering finished images etc..Anyway, I can finally show some recent snow shots which were taken just a few weeks ago in Thredbo. The images have been published in the third issue of Australian and New Zealand Snowboarding as part of a story I wrote and shot about the Thredbo terrain park team and pro snowboarder Charles Beckinsale's incredible skills behind the controls of a snowcat/groomer. Charles is an amazing park builder and he built a great little unique feature up the top of Thredbo just out of sight of the main run. The idea was to get something a little different mid season and try to make the third issue of the current year's magazines as most images in the mags are shot the previous season.
The weather wasn't super kind to us and we only ended up having a small window of a day to shoot the feature that had taken just over two days to build. Thredbo resort has to be commended for supporting the vision of their terrain park managers Sammy Towers and Charles Beckinsale. There are a huge bunch of extremely talented skiers and snowboarders here in Australia and it's a shame they have to travel overseas to ride decent challenging parks and terrain. It's great to see these one off builds for film and photoshoots finally happening here in Australia, everyone benefits! More images below the cut.

Lighthouse Lab

2009-07-08T19:15:00.007+10:00

Just noticed today that the lab where I get my film processed has put up a nice little blurb about me on their blog here. Stephen Frizza at The Lighthouse is an absolute genius when it comes to processing and printing film. I have been getting my film processed by Stephen for many years now and he processed and printed my black and white portrait series which I exhibited last May at the MTV gallery in Sydney. It was all shot on 6x6 medium format Kodak Tri-x 400 and I was amazed when I went in to pick up my prints, Stephen is such a perfectionist and did an amazing job dodging and burning my 16 x 16 inch prints and not only is he a master printer he is also a really nice guy! I haven't shot much film lately and am long overdue to drop off the few exposed rolls that have been sitting on my desk for months now. So do yourself a favour and go out and shoot a roll of film and take it to Stephen! Remember that feeling you used to get when you would go pick up your film/proofs/slides? You can still get that you know!

The image in the screenshot is of Australian Snowboarder Mikey Williams, it was shot in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2007 and was part of a series of 12 images that were exhibited. Image here.

French climber Alain Robert appears in court

2009-06-03T16:57:00.005+10:00

Today while doing news photography I was covering the French climber Alain Robert's appearance at the Downing Centre courts in Sydney. Robert who calls himself "the real Spiderman", yesterday climbed the 41 storey Royal Bank of Scotland building in Sydney's central business district without any ropes or assistance. He faced a charge of risking the safety of another, and was fined $750 by the magistrate. Robert has climbed over 80 structures around the world and was last in the headlines in Australia when he climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2003.
What I found most impressive about Robert, aside from his incredible climbing ability, was the outfit which he wore to his court appearance. He turned up in a bright red leather jacket and black leather trousers which both had "Mellencamp" emblazoned on them! I'm assuming that's John Cougar? He looked more like a rock star about to go onstage. Priceless!
Click "read more" for more photos

My photos featured on Nikon Professional Services Member portfolio slideshow

2009-05-29T19:21:00.003+10:00

This week I was super stoked to find out that four of my images have been included in a slideshow put together by Nikon Professional Services Australia, to showcase the work of their members.
I'm excited to be included in a portfolio which includes many amazing Australian photographers including Mark Watson, Christian Blanchard, Paul Miller, Delly Carr and Simon Carter to name just a few.
For best results click the high def button. The original appears on Nikon Australia's site here

Day of the Undead

2009-05-17T21:41:00.005+10:00

Today I went down to a Zombie Lurch in Sydney. Basically a bunch of people who love the undead and dressing in full costume, get together once or twice a year and lurch (march, shamble or shuffle) through the city to a pub or other venue where they then party zombie style!
This year's event took place in Newtown, Sydney, and was pretty awesome! The zombies gathered in Sydney Park, St. Peters and limped, dragged and lurched up King St. making for a pretty cool spectacle. The looks on driver's faces as they were stopped in their tracks by a mob of zombies covered in fake blood and special effects make up was priceless!
My favourite zombies were the bride dragging a severed leg, and the prom queen with a knife through her head. Also worth a mention was the guy with the meat cleaver hanging from his belt and the shark attack victim.
The undead really know how to have fun!
Lots of photos after the cut.

"Recruits" series promo shoot

2009-05-03T22:12:00.006+10:00

I was recently commissioned to do a shoot for Network Ten's new reality drama "Recruits", for advertising and promotion of the new show on billboards, bus shelter light boxes and print ads. The shoot took place in a lane way just outside the Sydney Central Local Area Command's Police station. The series follows a group of police recruits from training through to their first days on the beat and beyond. It is the first time that level of access has been given to a t.v. crew in Australia, and looks to be pretty promising in terms of "reality" programming as it is a lot more real than say putting 15 people in house full of cameras!
The brief was for the shots to be as gritty and real as possible and to try and show the personality/vulnerability of the recruits. I had under one hour to do the shoot as two of the probationary officers were actually on duty and could have been called away at any minute, so much so that one had to have his radio at his ear during all of the shoot. The shoot was challenging in the sense that the time with the three recruits was limited and the number of shots and variety of compositions was such that I knew an hour would not be enough. I used a little fill from a single Elinchrom Ranger head shot through a 40 inch shoot through umbrella to fill the shadows from the police hats and slightly drop the ambient light on the alley in background to create a bit more of a dark gritty alley feel. In post the saturation was dropped a little and the blacks pumped up a bit for the final print version, but overall very minimal re-touching.
Click below for the original shot from the camera as well as some examples of the shot on bus shelter light boxes in Sydney's central business district. The show starts this Monday at 8 pm on Ten.

Wild Sydney Weather

2009-04-20T15:00:00.004+10:00

Yesterday the weather turned quite nasty here in Sydney and I noticed the swell was pretty big and that dangerous surf warnings had been issued.
I grabbed my cameras and headed down to my two local beaches, Coogee and Bronte. Coogee is usually a pretty mellow beach and doesn't often get big waves but it was like a giant washing machine, windy and super messy. Bronte was much the same except that there was a bunch of young groms hanging on to the rope on the edge of the ocean pool and getting themselves smashed by the double and sometimes triple overhead sets that were coming through.
All in all, great entertainment for a Sunday arvo!
Click below for more shots.

Behind the scenes of a product shoot

2009-04-14T13:55:00.005+10:00

About a week ago I did a product shoot for Australian & New Zealand Snowboarding magazine here in Sydney. The shoot was for a buyers guide style product page and was shot on location at a bar in Sydney called the Minus 5 bar It should be called the minus 14.7 bar as that was the real temperature inside the walk-in freezer/bar. When the owners first gave the go ahead to do the shoot there, they told us we could not shoot for more than 45 minutes at a time inside the bar as apparently "the human body cannot withstand exposure to that temperature". Being the seasoned snow climate people that we are we laughed this off and replied that we often spend whole days out shooting and riding in temperatures much colder than -5 C or even -14.7 C, however that kind of backfired on us when we turned up on a balmy autumn Sydney morning dressed more for a semi cool night than say 3-4 hours in a commercial freezer the size of a small house!
Australian snowboard legend and all round top bloke Nick Gregory came along to assist me and to get some experience outside the snowboard bubble (well kind of outside the bubble!) Nick also didn't really think about the prolonged freezer experience when dressing as he wore classic Aussie tennis shoes without socks!
Nick was kind enough to roam around with my second camera body and snap off some shots when he wasn't helping me move frozen flash equipment around the bar.
The finished shot will be seen in the first issue of Australian & New Zealand Snowboarding, which will hit the news stands in May.
Click below for more of Nick's shots.

Nikon D3 and 200-400mm f4 VR for a weekend

2009-04-02T18:44:00.004+11:00

A couple of weekends ago Nikon Professional Services were kind enough to lend me a Nikon D3 and the 200-400mm f4 VR zoom lens to play around with.
It was a last minute thing and so I quickly tried to arrange to shoot as much as possible in the two days I had this amazing set up.
In the one weekend I shot a game of Rugby league, Tony Hawk demoing at Monster skatepark, a NSW Premier League Soccer match that evening and the following day I shot a handfull of overs in the final match of the Women's World Cup Cricket, and then another Soccer game that night. I definitely put the camera to the test, especially the high ISO capabilities. Most small club fields in Sydney have terrible lighting and I was shooting at ISO 6400 at f4, and shocked at how well the camera not only handled the noise at that ISO but also how well the camera was able to focus the long lens in such crappy light and keep up. On my D2x when shooting sports like soccer, the keeper rate is probably about 2-3 sharp shots in a burst of 10. The D3 was 9-10 tack sharp in a burst of 10! Seriously worth every cent.The other thing worth noting is how sharp this lens is for a zoom! You would think the images came from a prime 2.8.
It has been pretty hard to go back to the old cameras after using the D3.
Time to sell everything I own!!
lot's more shots after the cut.
.

Tony Hawk at Monster Park

2009-03-26T18:00:00.006+11:00

This past Saturday I was fortunate enough to be shooting the legendary Tony Hawk in Sydney. The birdman was out here as part of a Birdhouse skateboards tour, and it was the first time Hawk has been in Australia for nearly ten years.
I remember sometime in the early nineties when Hawk, Frankie Hill and a very young, virtually unknown kid named Bucky Lasek came out here on tour, and came to the town I grew up in! It was pretty amazing as these guys were the skateboarders we had been looking up to for years and they visited our shitty little suburb. They didn't skate, but they did come to the local skate shop and hang out and do the usual signings.
So Tony's a little older these days and Bucky is a skate legend in his own right but one thing is for sure, Hawk is still the man when it comes to skating vert!
The guy came straight from the tour van, sat in a small stinking hot room for over an hour and patiently signed autographs for the throng of fans, some so young they wouldn't have even been born when Tony still rode for Powell, then he walks up to a vert ramp he has never skated before and did so many rad tricks on his warm up run that most skateboarders would only ever be able to dream of! Seriously impressive!

Below are some photos.
Enjoy!

The hand of god?

Hawk mctwists over Shaun Gregoire's 540

How many autographs do you think he signs in a day?

Australia's Renton Millar, Frontside air

Renton Millar, Frontside tailslide

Surrounded by snappers

Classic Hawk style, pop tart

Saves the Day and Rival Schools - Sydney

2009-02-24T18:00:00.008+11:00

I went to the Alkaline Trio/ Rival Schools/ Saves the Day show last night in the Manning Bar at Sydney University. I didn't originally intend to take photos and didn't have a photo pass, but decided at the last minute to see if I could smuggle a D200 and 50mm 1.4 in.
After getting through the bag check with camera undetected it was time to have a few beers and push up close to the front and snap off a few shots. I didn't have much mobility up front as I couldn't get in front of the barrier. Still got a few decent ones though. There's a couple of Alakaline Trio shots at the end. I stayed in the crowd for their set. More photos after the cut.

What the Aussie pro's are rockin'

2009-02-02T15:34:00.004+11:00

Ryan Tiene corks out a frontside 5 on the gap jump, Style Wars, Falls Creek, Australia

This past August while shooting one of the bigger snowboard competitions on the Australian calendar, Style Wars, I decided it would be fun to shoot photos of the other photographers.It was one of those events where I knew only a couple of my shots would get a run in the magazine, and it was also the first comp I had covered in that season where I wasn't being paid to shoot for the event organisers or sponsors, So I decided to have a bit of fun and shoot the other guys shooting!

Here are a few shots from the three day event.

Falls creek's resident Ski Photog, Charlie Brown rocks a Canon 1Dmk II

Mt. Buller, Victoria local and all round nice guy, Kit Rundle showing how lazy he is by resting his 70-200 f2.8 on a monopod! C'mon Kit, it's not surfing!

Johnny MacCormack prefers the high life, on a lift tower with his Canon 1D mkIII

Video legend Rob Norman and some serious harness action

Chris Boadle goes for the low angle with his Canon 20D and 15mm fisheye combo

Lee Ponzio, aka "The Fonz" gets the sneaky foreground elements in shot with his 1DmkII and 70-200 f4

Australian Snowboarder Magazine editor Ryan Willmott prefers to not show his face

Alex Roberts rocks the Nikon D300 with 12-24mm Nikkor combo

Sean "Radman" Radich takes sun protection seriously and weilds his Canon

Lee "The Fonz" Ponzio tries to copy my idea!

Erin Tanner Portrait Session on Snowboardermag.com.au

2009-01-19T16:16:00.004+11:00

I have been working on a series of portraits for an upcoming editorial in Australian Snowboarder Magazine. The series is to document the real jobs of a bunch of up and coming snowboarders in Australia. These riders all work real jobs to fund their travel during the Northern hemisphere winter. It is a common misconception here that just because these kids grace the cover of magazines, they must be a fully paid professional rider. This editorial will show just how far these riders go for their love of snowboarding, and their dreams of one day getting paid to do what they love.
Snowboardermag.com.au has posted some behind the scenes images and video from the shoot here. I will post up some out-takes and image mock-ups as soon as I get clearance from the magazine picture editor.

Cricket

2009-01-19T14:28:00.012+11:00

Continuing with my self-assigned mainstream sport photography, I went and shot a one-day cricket match between NSW and Tasmania in late November.
It was another first for me as I have never shot cricket before and had previously thought it would be right up there with Golf in terms of being a boring, long day behind the lens. I was wrong, and found it really enjoyable. I played cricket for a few years in my early teens, before skateboarding totally took over my life!
It was a history making game in that David Warner from NSW scored the highest runs ever in a sate match - 165 not out! His innings consisted of nine 6's and 19 4's, beating the previous record of Rick McCosker in the 1981-82 season. Warner has since been called up for the Australian 20-20 and One-day teams and caused a huge media buzz on scoring 89 runs of 43 balls in his debut match for Australia against South Africa.

Time for some updates

2009-01-19T14:04:00.011+11:00

It's been quite a while since I've updated, not because I haven't been shooting, mainly it is because I have been trying to change over to a Wordpress blog. I have been using most of my spare time trying to implement a new theme and template and today have decided for the time being I am going to give up. It has been far too time consuming and I'm officially over it! I am not a web developer and struggle with even basic HTML, so for now, I'm sticking with this blog!

I have been shooting a lot since my last post so I will put up a selection of pictures I have been taking the last two months.

There are some exciting projects coming up and hopefully I will be able to get this updating happening a lot quicker than before!

NBL Basketball - Sydney Spirit v Adelaide 36ers

2008-11-24T13:39:00.002+11:00

I went out to shoot my second game of NBL basketball on Friday night.
The league is struggling in Australia at the moment, the stadiums are pretty much empty, and that is at the weekend games! Sydney lost one of it's teams last year due to a financial backing collapse and is now left with one team, who in my opinion, have possibly the worst name ever for a professional mens sporting team - The Sydney Spirit!
regardless of name choices, there is no question that the league is full of talented players and both games I have been on the baseline shooting have been super entertaining, with lots of great plays and down to the wire finishes!
I've been to a couple of great NBA games during my snow shooting trips in the USA, and the only thing these games had that the Aussie games lack is the spectacle. NBA is pure entertainment, almost a bit too over the top. Fans pack the stadiums to the rafters and cheer loudly. Here, however there is no spectacle, just the game. I do presume that would be enough for most of us, that is if the stadiums were close to being full with other fans loudly cheering the home team on.
I don't know what the solution is, maybe it's time to give away lot's of free tickets, get people there, get the seats filled, and hopefully that will lead to people wanting to come back for more.
More photos after the cut.

Rip Curl "Girls go surfing day"

2008-11-24T13:10:00.005+11:00

It's been a while since updates but I have been doing a few random shoots lately so I'm going to post a few today.

Last week I was asked by Rip Curl to shoot their annual "Girls go surfing day" at Manly beach in Sydney. It's basically a program set up by Rip Curl to get women involved in surfing and the day is subsidised by a bunch of sponsors, which means girls get a couple of hours surf lessons, all the gear and food for something like $40, which is pretty rad!
Junior women's surfing sensation Tyler Wright was there to help the girls out on the day. For those that don't know who Tyler is, she's the 14 year old that beat pro veteran Layne Beachley in her own competition, the Beachley Classic, a few weeks ago. It was quite the upset as this was the contest that Layne announced her retirement from professional surfing at. I'm sure she would have much preferred to have gone out with a win, rather than being flogged by a 14 year old!
More shots after the cut.

Danhimbrechts.com is back!

2008-10-13T19:57:00.009+11:00

Well it's been a long couple of months, but the website is finally back live and working!(click here to see) For those that missed the drama that unfolded, here is a play by play of how a simple website which has been working fine for a number of years can all of a sudden turn into a massive nightmare!

The headache began whilst I was on an Australian Snowboarder Magazine editorial trip in a remote valley of New Zealand's south island. I was there to shoot a story about "Heli Park" an amazing little Heli ski lodge set in one of the most breathtaking valleys I've ever seen! Heli park is so remote there is no internet, mobile phone coverage or T.V out there; you're disconnected from the outside world and it's a great thing!
While I was enjoying the serenity of spending four days with a couple of good friends in paradise (with a helicopter on standby parked out the front!) I had no idea that my website had been targeted by some nasty web parasites apparently originating from Russia. I was uncontactable, and friends had been trying to let me know something was up. What made this random situation all the more troubling was that I had just been featured on two of the biggest news websites in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.com. They ran a gallery of some of my best winter action shots and a little story about dream jobs. I was featured as the snowboard/ski photographer. They linked out to me, which normally would have seen an unprecedented amount of first time visitors to my site, however the Russian hackers had other ideas and their little parasites that trawl web server's looking for back door vulnerabilities sure found one in my website. This so called "sequel injection" (as I was later to find out) rendered every image on my site non-viewable and users of a Windows machine were greeted with a message that they had just received a Trojan from me! Talk about bad timing, I don't think it gets much worse.
As soon as I reached civilisation again, I was greeted with this news, and a few 80 dollar phone calls to my web hosts in the US later and things were all sorted out - or so it seemed. The back door was shut and I was assured that nothing could penetrate my site, well it did and it did four more times in the space of a single week!
It was decided best that my site be shut down until the whole thing could be re-coded into something much less vulnerable to random Russians!
So here we are, nearly two months later and it's finally back up! Everything looks and feels the same although I've put up quite a lot of new images as well as some old favourites that I just can't seem to let go of. I'll be adding more images over the next couple of days, but am relieved that it's finally back up and one less thing I need to be working on everyday!

Why film can never die

2008-10-11T21:22:00.005+11:00

So it's been a while between posts here. I've been busy trying to get my website back in order and live, it's been a struggle but the good news is that the content has all been re-uploaded and the website has been re-coded in PHP, and I have a brand new content management system.
Today I was going through some old boxes and found some film from a New York trip that I couldn't remember ever having scanned, so I dusted off the cobwebs from the film scanner and got a few of them scanned.
One thing that kept going through my mind while I was scanning was just how incredible film looks! Even when it's scanned (and essentially digitised) it still has that look and feel that I believe cannot yet be replicated by digital cameras. The dynamic range of a well exposed image shot on Kodak Tri-X or the colour and saturation of an image shot on Fuji Provia or Velvia, is just not there with digital. It has been a day where I have promised myself that I must shoot more film in the future, especially black and white.

Boost SnoSho - Perisher NSW

2008-09-02T14:51:00.009+10:00

The Boost SnoSho has just wrapped again for another year. I shot the event again this year, as I have for the past 3 (or is it 4?)years now. This year saw an incredible field of international riders out to compete for the $15,000 in prize money, some of those who came out were Torstein Horgmo(NOR), Danny Davis(USA), Mikkel Bang(NOR), Chas Guldemond(USA), Marko Grilic(SLV), Chris Sorman(SWE), Luke Mitrani(USA) to name a few.
In true Boost tradition it was perfect weather right p until five minutes before the start of the competition, which always runs under lights on a Saturday night. This presented plenty of problems considering all the flash gear I had out to capture such a competition at night. I had an Elinchrom Ranger with two heads and a number of Metz 45's and 60's on different PocketWizard channels so i could switch between different banks of lighting. As it rains every year I was kind of prepared for the rain and had come armed with a bunch of extra large ziplock bags and small garbage bags for the pocketwizards and battery packs.
It seems as though everything survived the drenching, however I think next year I'll pack a Nikon D3 and shoot it all in available light at ISO 6400!
Photos below the cut.

Style Wars

2008-08-29T11:36:00.003+10:00

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.

New Zealand and my hijacked website!

2008-08-06T19:16:00.005+10:00

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!