Over the years I’ve always been intrigued by the Red Bull Illume photo contest. The work that makes it to finals of this event is some of the greatest action sports photography from a laundry list of the best action sports and adventure photographers in the world. I always make a point of entering this contest and finding images in my collection to submit.

This shoot came around last minute. Keon reached out to me looking to get some photos of his bike, but wanted to get them done before he started riding it. The original photographer he was going to work with fell through. We had never met, but a friend recommended me and when he asked I immediately had an idea of how I wanted to make it look so I said I’d be down to give it a go.

This idea lived in my head for a while. When I first thought about it I was hurt, on crutches, and spending most of my time on the couch. With all this time to brainstorm I was able to come up with ideas I was excited about but had no ability to actually execute them. Therefore I sat on this one for a while and figured out the logistics of making it work.

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.