Like most people, I spend way more time than I should on social media just scrolling through imagery. I find myself visually attracted to images with a cinematic feel, that are dark and moody, with lots of deep blacks. While most of my work I shoot is on the brighter side I was inspired to create something that had this feel.

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.

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.