Ski Photography Tips, Tricks and Lessons Learned
I’d like to give a MASSIVE thank you to Scott Maturno and Staci Fay who are the skiers featured in this blog!
While I have focused mainly on landscape and wildlife photography since I started shooting in 2020, I have always enjoyed dabbling in other genres when the opportunity presents itself. From the cityscapes of Chicago to adorable dogs on walks, I strive every day to keep my eyes and mind open to photographing other things I encounter in my day-to-day; things that, while they may not be great works of art, are a moment in time to look back on and enjoy.
Recently I had the idea to shoot some photos of one of my favorite non-photography-hobbies: Skiing. Let me say, I learned a lot from my first attempt at action sports imagery. While I’ve enjoyed skiing most of my life, I have not had the inspiration until recently to combine it with my shutterbug hobby. I find it intimidating (and awkward) to carry a full sized, very expensive, camera and lens on the lifts and slopes. Furthermore, I haven’t been sure of how to even approach getting shots of skiers as they hurtle down the mountains. In this blog post I will discuss the challenges, ideas, and creative process of getting images of skiers on the slopes.
Challenges
Skiing is a hard sport to begin with. When you step into your bindings you’re preparing to huck yourself into steep terrain made up of varying pitches, snow and ice conditions, and hazards like trees, moguls, and other riders. In my opinion, these are all elements of the sport that you HAVE to be confident managing before you begin adding a camera to the equation.
Challenge 1: Keep yourself and your gear safe
In order to fall safely while skiing, you need to fall on your side and control your slides. If you have a camera hanging off a strap around your neck, this can become rather dangerous. Ignoring the obvious risk of a strap becoming entrapped and hanging you, cameras are rock hard and lenses contain glass - falling on them is less than ideal from a personal health viewpoint. When you factor in that the equipment costs hundreds to thousands of dollars, the photos honestly might not be worth it for most people. In order to protect myself and my gear, I for my first time out I skied much less aggressively than I typically do and I chose gear that would make my ride safer and easier.
In order to carry my camera in a more secure and safe way, I added a low-profile backpack to my load out. I wanted something slim so I wouldn’t be positioned too far forward while riding lifts (falling off would suck majorly) and I wanted a bag big enough that getting my Nikon Z8 with a 18-120mm lens in and out wouldn’t be a hassle. I chose to ride with the Camelbak Mule Pro for these reasons and it worked wonderfully! I also want to note, I experimented with placing my camera on my shoulder strap in a Capture Clip like I normally do when hiking and, while I’m sure it can work without ski poles, having the camera in a location where my poles need to be (in front of my body) just seemed uncomfortable.
Challenge 2: Weather and Conditions
Cameras are super resilient tools, especially when they’re weather sealed. Snow and ice won’t really affect them so long as you’re careful when you’re thawing them out after your day on the mountain. Warm them up slowly and take care to wipe your lens with soft, non-frozen microfiber cloths. Here’s a video from one of my favorite landscape photographers, Nigel Danson, where his camera becomes a proverbial popsicle on a shoot in the UK. He includes tips on how to bring your camera back up to temperature so condensation doesn’t develop inside of the body, lens or on the sensor that I think are crucial if you wind up shooting in blizzard conditions. One thing he doesn’t mention is that batteries lives are drastically reduced by extreme cold. I’ve seen my camera go from full to empty in just a couple of hours of hiking in winter conditions. Keeping a second battery with you in a pocket close to your core will give you the best chance of getting images all day long.
Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Auto settings are clutch, use your telephoto and selectively adjust on the fly
A massive difference between landscape, wildlife and action sports photography is the movement of the subject of the image. When creating landscape images, your subject is stationary or close to stationary. When creating wildlife images, your subject can be stationary, slow moving, or moving erratically. And, when creating actions sports images, your subject is almost always moving rapidly and mostly predictably (if you know what to look for).
For ski photography I realized that because the subject is moving, having autofocus continuous (AF-C) engaged would be beneficial so my subject would be in focus for every shot with just a single button press. Being in autofocus single (AF-S) conversely would make my job more difficult because I would have to move the focus point manually, something that is neigh impossible to keep up with for a subject moving at up to 50mph. I also realized that having a high frame rate (20 fps) would be a necessity so I could capture every small change in body position and posture - there’s no way I could time a single shot for the apex of a turn, but it’s fairly easy to time a burst of photos to capture an entire turn. Lastly, having a telephoto lens helps loads with action sports photos. Your subject will be mostly moving to or away from you and being able to adjust your frame on your terms will give you a greater chance of getting the shot.
My “photographer’s triangle” settings for this first round of ski photos were as follows:
Aperture: f/9 was where most of my shots were set. I wanted the background trees, the best part of Steamboat skiing, to be in focus as well as the skier. If I wanted to just have the skier in focus and bokeh (artistic blur) in the background, I’d have gone with f/4, as wide open as I could for my lens.
Shutter Speed: 1/1600 of a second (or thereabouts) was my shutter speed for these photos. Snowflakes were falling while snow was also blasting up from under the skis and I wanted to freeze that motion in time. In future sessions I’ll be playing with lowering my shutter speed to 1/200 or lower and “tracking” my subject while the image is captured. This should make the subject relatively sharp while motion blurring the background - an advanced creative technique that I think will be super fun if it works out.
ISO: Auto. While I mostly shoot full manual when I’m shooting landscape and wildlife images, it made sense to shoot exclusively auto-ISO for skiing because I was needing to work the telephoto while also keeping the subject in frame - Adding another thing for me to rapidly manipulate would have certainly resulted in my missing shots.
Lesson 2: Encourage your subjects to ski aggressively
One thing that’s very cool about ski photography is that the viewer’s interest is obvious - it’s the skier! Rather than composing a shot where you’re focused on subtle leading lines to guide your viewer’s gaze through a landscape scene, you’re focused on capturing the actions of the skier so they stand out from whatever is in the background. Snow makes this quite easy, especially for riders who wear darker colored clothing as that contrasts well with the overwhelming amount of white. But clothing isn’t all that goes into an interesting action photo; the skier’s actions need to be interesting to the viewer and the best way for that box to be checked is give your skier subject space to get up to speed and advise them to attack their run. During my first ski photography trip I realized that skiers who ride fast, angulate their body and legs, and hit jumps will give you incredible subjects to shoot! The drama and interest is truly in their actions!
To conclude this blog post I want to say just how fun it is to be shooting something different from my normal landscapes and wildlife. I still and will always love getting photographs of mountains and rivers and trees, but there is no denying that the creative juices are greatly boosted by finding new and exciting genres of photography while seeing how skills translate and apply in new scenarios. I will be continuing to shoot more skiing throughout the rest of the 2024/2025 winter season and I am so excited to see what doors are opened to me by it.
Thank you for reading and I’ll see you on the trail *slopes*