Recently I asked to shoot a portrait of Canadian Snowboarder Cam Spalding that matched some previous portraits of athletes I had shot.

When I first started shooting these portraits I knew I was going to need to repeat the look between multiple different athletes. These portraits needed to feel similar, but didn’t need to be identical. From the get go I decided to use a very simple lighting setup as I expect to need to repeat this more and won’t always have the luxury of doing so from home.

I wanted to create an image of returning home after a day on the hill skiing. I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could create an evening scene in the middle of the day. We shoot these images around noon on a partially sunny day.

Exploring different activities and learning about them is always intriguing to me. Before shooting this day I had never been around anybody boards in this way. I’ve had a few friends build snowboards, but the process is different. Other then having a general idea of what the space looked like I really didn’t know what to expect.

This image was shot as part of a personal project. I had the idea of wanting to shoot a top down image that really showed the body position of the runner through the shadow. This location is at a local park and a walking bridge passes over the gravel trail below. This was the perfect location as it allowed me to get above my athlete (Will Goneau) as he ran through. It took a few tries to get the exact body position with the shadow, but since we were working in a small space it was easy to have Will run through multiple times.

This wasn’t the particular image I had planned for the day, but I’ve had an idea similar to this in my mind for a while. I picked up the athlete, Will Goneau, from nearby this location, and thought if we had time we could check it out after we finished the original shot we planned to try this other idea I had.

We focused on the first shot, which was a top own running image in the forest. After we completed this image I asked Will if he was down and we went back to the underground parking lot.

I’ve fished on occasion throughout my life, and I keep telling myself to get into it, but it always gets pushed to the wayside when things get busy. However I’ve been visually interested in fishing for a long time, often seeing imagery come from this world that is stunning. Fishing normally seems to coincide with the early morning, or the late evening. From a photography perspective this is perfect, generally the best light of day, and the most likely time to get fog rising of water.

As a photographer, I often wish I could be in multiple places at the same time to get imagery from a few angles. This specifically happens when shooting a jump where each rider might only take a couple tries.

When I first show up to a jump I usually try and do a full 360 around the jump. Checking out every angle to see where the feature looks best. Some jumps, based off the terrain they are built in are limited and might only look good from one side. Others have multiple angles, and one isn’t necessarily better than another.

Ben Poechman had a spot in mind he wanted to hit. He had been there a few days before and set it up, but just needed to wait for it to snow for the landing to get soft. When he reached out to me he said the feature was right at the end of the forest. This was my first day back shooting snowboarding of the 2020/2021 season and while I hadn’t shot snowboarding with strobes in a while I knew I wanted to do that for this image. The feature was close to a chairlift so it took away some of the difficulty of the logistics of hauling all the gear.

I’ve released my 2022 calendar. Calendars can be ordered here.

It features 12 months of landscape images all capture in British Columbia, Canada.

From an early age, I played soccer. Starting with the leagues where all the kids chase the ball around the field, eventually moving on to indoor leagues and high school soccer. I was never the best but always had fun playing. After high school, I stopped playing, but I still enjoy kicking the ball around.

A overnight get away over the Hurley to the town of Gold Bridge, British Columbia. We were treated to the beautiful landscapes of British Columbia and a colourful sunrise and sunset. A personal trip with amazing views, some good food and beers and plenty of laughs.

Personal project shooting with personal trainer Meaghan Sutter working out and weight lifting in her fitness studio, Peak Training Whistler

Personal project shooting road biking with Emily Slaco on a sunny summer morning on the Duffy.

A woman on a cruiser bike on a gravel trail in Pemberton, British Columbia. Shot as a personal project.

Motivation can be difficult to find sometimes. On certain days I go out and the conditions aren’t ideal, and if I’m shooting work on spec I find myself leaving my camera in the bag and not shooting much. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, I’ve wanted to try and add some motivation to my shooting to make myself more engage and find the story in each day out. After something I recently heard I’ve been challenging myself to create a simple story before I even head out shooting to give myself a direction to shoot towards.

2020 was an interesting winter. In British Columbia, the season came late with hardly any snowfall in December and ended earlier than expected with restrictions being put in place. However, there was still plenty of time to get after it. I’ve put together this slideshow to share my snowboarding work from 2020. Some of the images made it to print in various magazines, others have been used online, and some haven’t been seen at all.

This interview was originally published in Prime Snowboarding Magazine Issue #24. The interview was done in English and translated to German for the publication. I imagine very few of my followers speak German so I have include the English translation here.

I’m always trying to keep my eye out for a canoe, regularly checking buy and sell pages and Craigslist to see what is available. The right one is yet to come along, but I know it will eventually. While I would say I’m far from a regular on the water, some of my earliest memories are from boats. From learning to sail my parent’s Laser, to going on canoe trips at Boy Scout camp, to taking my dad’s Adirondack Guideboat for long rows on the Finger Lakes of New York. To now owning paddleboards and using them to explore the many lakes around British Columbia. I love the ability a boat offers to switch up the perspective and look at the shoreline and provide the freedom to glide into every nook and cranny and see what is there.

When getting out for this sunrise I had a specific shot in mind I wanted to shoot. Not to long ago, I shot a sunrise image in the fall. Later that spring, a massive landslide on Joffre Peak took off half the face of the mountain, altering the mountains look. While the peak was only a small element in the photo, I wanted to shoot the same landscape and show the difference between before and after. We got there just in time for sunrise, I set up my tripod and got the shot I was after.

Josh and I had been trying to get out for a while. We kept throwing ideas around of places we wanted to go but never were able to make any of them happen. Finally, a day lined up, but the weather was looking rainy. We figured big vistas weren’t on the future agenda of our hike so we decided to go to a cabin. After some research, we realized the initial cabin we planned to go to was boarded up due to Covid. Another option we thought of was a cabin neither of us had ever been to before. I’ve heard it mentioned by friends in the past asking if I’d ever been there, but have never had the chance. We did some pre-trip research finding as much info as possible. I’m a pretty frequent user of Google Earth so once I had a general idea of where it was I was able to zoom in and find the exact spot of the cabin and plot a route. I’m not personally a huge fan of sharing locations, (I wrote about my thoughts on that here) so wasn’t surprised that I had to do a bit of leg work to find some info.