Flashgun ettiquette

I never thought I’d see the day. My Canon flash guns are almost burnt out with exhaustion.

Back in September I was commissioned by What Mountain Bike magazine to shoot two different features, both spread over several days and both quite different briefs. What held them in common ground was the use of my flashes. Now those who know my work will probably be aware of my hunger for using natural light whenever I can, and an erring towards for dark, moody shots. I’m no Sam Abell, but when you look at his work in reportage, you get the idea that flash can be a little overrated. While his long insistance on using only natural light has played a good part in molding my own ideas of what can work, of course Mr Abell didnt shoot for contemporary mountain bike magazines, for which the use of flash (or strobes as photog’s like to call them) is almost an essential requisite for fill-lighting product and adding some pop to the image on an otherwise dull day. 

Of course not using flash is quicker, with no set up times, so on multi day epics when you don’t know how long a ride waits ahead of you, or if you’re going to make the next village before nightfall, this can avoid unwanted delays when documenting an adventure. Natural light often looks, well… more natural, while flash can sometimes appear a little too artificial, at least to me, especially in the natural, mountain environment. 

So I sold out. Well, not exactly sold out, but I hammered those little flash guns to near death. At Eurobike, the World’s largest bike expo, I squeezed between the 45,000 trade visitors to capture the required images of next years product to provide the mainstay of an 18-page feature that has just emerged in WMB issue 102 this month. The second shoot was an on-mountain, action 4-dayer, that coincided with perhaps the only cloudy -nay foggy- week we had all summer and autumn. 

Now flash is nothing new to me really: I got sucked into the current (and overdone) trend for flash images in snowboarding a couple of years ago now, mostly using my Lumedyne studio set up, so I realise the potential for flash, even if my ‘mountain eye’ doesn’t usually welcome it. I see flash as a useful tool, especially for controlling the light rather than replacing it… it’s there to add effect and if used well, can stylise a photo. But I am still a fan of nice chunky shadows, adding a ton of depth and power to an image.

So here’s a sample of what came out.. the opener to the Eurobike feature in WMB mag. The brief for this shot was to capture the “bigest trend” apparent at Eurobike, something that had me and the Tech ed scratching our heads about. Finally on the last day, after he had left I decided the advent of the double chainset was the “trend” this year and pulled a Giant bike complete with Sram XX kit from Giant’s stand and asked one of the Giant’s German guys to help me shoot it outside. Afte it p*ssing down with rain all day, I scored a brief lull in the storm and I set the bike (German hand holding back wheel upright just out of shot) to have the dark, moody storm clouds parting behind and a glimmer of an old shipping container to the side (to give it that “just landed look”) and dialled in my Canon Speedlights to highlight the chainset. I lay in the rainy tarmac and made the little babies light up.

Dark, moody pics, me?

 

How to make a wet carpark and a shiny bike look.. well, moody.

 

 

The Reason.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes… well that’s a little how it seems to me. Readers of this spirited blog and many UK snowboarders alike will no doubt be aware of the demise of Snowboard UK magazine earlier this year, something that as long-standing senior photographer of said publication came as a small blow. The bitter taste left by a publisher suddenly pulling the plug (and leaving photographer’s invoices unpaid) is of course one that takes several pints of good ale to dissipate, but somehow, inside I knew something would come along before too long, something that would make for a positive way forward.

And it comes in the form of The Reason magazine: a definite fresh direction for the UK snowboard magazine. And the first issue gets the Milner treatment on the cover, with the sort of shot many mags would struggle to find a home for.

Spearheaded by the unblinkered visions of Ian Sansom, the guy who brings you tight-jeans wearing london-types Fixed (a rather natty print mag for fixie bike riders), The Reason will be ditributed free in snow-orientated outlets. Free of course is nice, but not as nice as the fact it will be printed on FSC-certified sustainable forest paper stock using vegetable-based (ie, non toxic) inks.

After bumping into Ian at the recent Eurobike expo in Germany, he asked me if I’d contribute to next winter’s new Reason mag. Certainly old chap, I said simply for the above eco-minded reasons alone. I’ve known Ian for many years, he being the first editor I worked with at SUK many years ago, a time when baseless bindings and enormously-cuffed mitts were the rage. I like his direction and style and I can only assume he likes mine: I make this assumption as I’ve landed the cover shot on the inaugural issue: The reason, issue 1. Why wait until next winter to start working again together. So, of course I’m chuffed to be a small contributing part of a new project, one that is looking outside the usual “sell it” priorities of many publishers.

From the ashes…

reasons to be cheerful, part one

Thirty Four. Just a number?

It’s just a number: thirty-four. Just a number, but it holds a legacy. It’s become the dividing line between them and me. It’s not age, it’s not time, and it’s not miles per hour. It’s teeth on a sprocket, the number of teeth on my largest rear sprocket that has pushed me further and further out on a limb. Who would have thought the humble thirty-four would reap so much havoc?

Years ago I used to ride with an XT rear cassette. It ran 8 sprockets from 11 to 28 teeth. Then came 30. By the time I fitted a 32-tooth cassette I told myself that was it, that was enough. I’d never need a lower gear than that, not with a 22-tooth chainring up front. After all 19 gear-inches is a lung-pityingly low ratio. At least that’s how I saw it, even for the first couple of years after moving to the French Alps, a place where ‘hills’ are formidable and men smell of… well, just smell. As an XC rider training for the Cristalp marathon I had the legs to push a beefy gear up hill and I was loving it. And anyway I had no other option, 32 was a lot of teeth on an 8-speed cassette.

And then Shimano threw a spanner in the works. The 11-34 cassette spanner to be precise.

Suddenly there was a lower gear, so low, with so much torque in fact that pedalling up the hour-long climbs that decorate my adopted home valley became nigh-on hour long wheelies (unfortunately the only time I can really wheelie very well). With 34 came an incredulously low 16.8 gear inches. Climbs became more bearable, lungs could relax a little. All worship the crawler gear!

But from the 34 a legacy was born.

I adopted a more leisurely pace up hill. After all what’s the rush? My priorities changed. Quad size paled in the shadow of simple stamina. My rides became more about simply getting out there, about riding with mates who also spin low gears, about getting to the top no matter how long it took and riding back down again.

Several years later I find myself chasing the back wheel of Tom Ritchey, pedalling the fast and swooping singletrack that is his back yard. His Scott Spark has no 34-tooth sprocket. He rides fast, rarely dropping from his middle chainring to power up the short climbs in the rolling hills south of San Francisco. Tom has big legs. The terrain he pedals is different to the Alps. He has no hour-long climbs to test his mettle. He has no need for a 34-tooth sprocket. And with the difference in terrain, comes a difference in muscle build. While I am rarely beaten by the big climbs of the Alps, I am now a nobody when it comes to ‘normal’ mountain biking. My legs and my lungs cant deliver that kind of unadulterated power, at least for more than a minute. The 34 has pushed me into a corner, and like an addict I have lapped up its easy-to-digest rewards. Only after a week of chasing riders in California do I feel like my legs are starting to build, that muscles are remembering what it was like before The 34.

Now I see double chainsets are sweeping aside the triples of old, even in the OE market, creating the kind of stir that has echoes of the 34 tooth cassette. I’m worried. It’s us and them again: those mashing huge gear inches with big, bulging thighs and those with the spindly, twiggy legs spinning away in crawler gears. So do I go Sram XX-style big and middle chainrings, or SLX all-mountain middle and granny? I guess there only one-way to find out: I’d best go for a ride.

Little trouble maker

What price a photo?

My (almost) trusty Leica M8 has failed. After 29 months of use it decided that it would no longer release its electronic shutter. Stuck. Right in the middle of a feature shoot for MBUK magazine at the weekend.

I am guessing that the repair bill won’t be mere double figures, considering it’s a Leica, and at over £3k for a new one, it’s not like I’m about to rush out and replace it.

Which brings me nicely to the concept of making a living as a pro photographer.

Now the profession of the photographer is as diverse a job-description as you’ll find, covering a veritable rainbow spectrum of professional expertise and styles. There are wedding specialists and food artists, there are those involved in the fashion world, those whose day job is shooting top models in underwear and there are others who spend the bulk of their time rendering into 2D images the sublime emotions that are felt when riding bikes and snowboards. They are all photographers. Neat isn’t it.

Diverse as it is, the one thing they all have in common, apart from having an eye for a shot and a monkey-like ability to grip a camera, is that they share a very diverse pay structure. Let’s just say that the artists shooting the Sports Illustrated swim suit issue or the last Hummer advert probably don’t file the same tax return as the those shooting for niche mags like mountain bike or snowboard titles.

Which brings me neatly to the question of what a picture is worth?

If you, as a viewer and reader of such niche titles, can accept that there is a certain skill involved in capturing the ‘feeling’ of such sports in aspirational imagery, then you’ll no doubt accept that such pictures should be paid for right? After all, apart from the cost of travel, essential and expected upgrades to equipment (megapixels are directly proportionate to price it seems), repairs (hey Leica M8) and insurance alone, there is the time cost involved in getting the type of shot that might make a cover or a full page gallery shot. Not every day is as productive as you might like, and let’s face it, with niche mags paying in the region of  £80-£100 for a whole page image, you need to land a fair few pages of pics to pay the mortgage each month once you’ve fielded the costs involved in the shoot.

So I was baffled recently when a pro-snowboarder I work with emailed me to enquire whether a certain image I shot of them could be used by a major commercial publication with a readership in the millions,  and that they wanted it free of charge. Yep, free. Not a penny to be paid, while they would use the shot on their website to promote a commercial venture they sponsor annually. A venture that makes them a heap of money.

Well of course, I should let them have it. After all they are offering a photographer’s credit on the shot and maybe even a link to my website. Nice. Okay you could be thinking “right-o, well your website link would be seen by millions. think what opportunities that might yield” and you’d be right. But after ten years full time experience working professionally with publications I know the ‘credit-as-payment’ deal rarely yields results and more often than not, the credit even gets missed off or typo’d (usually I’m called Miller). And that’s not to mention how FOC images cheapen photography and set a precedent that’s hard to go back on…. blah, blah.

So as you’re guessing by now, I said ‘no’. In this world of pocket digital cameras and instant Twitt-Book sharing, photography has become cheap. Everyone is a “photographer” now and professional photographers are increasingly lumped in with the digital mainstream, especially when they shoot specialist sports that are largely misunderstood by the mainstream press (hey, haven’t you got a mate that has a shot of a snowboarder we can use?). The same publications happily pay ridiculous amounts for ridiculous fashion shoots of ridiculously thin models, yet feel that specialist images should be handed out for royalty free use. Odd isn’t it.

Of course, I could just ask Leica to fix my M8 free of charge, perhaps in exchange for a link to their website on my blog.

 

there's nothing quite like a Leica.. worth a 700 euro repair bill? Leica M8 & Voigtlander 15mm/4.5.

Hardtail fascism and the school of hard knocks.

Maybe a tad controvercial in the contemporary bike world this one, but I’m a believer that everyone should have to hang up their full-suspension bike for a year and have to ride a hardtail. Instead. Why? What the hell… read on.

During my time in the USA this month, I got to chat, sup a cuppa and ride with mountain bike legends Tom Ritchey and Keith Bontrager (as well as Gary Fisher and Rob Roskopp), two names that you’ll probably now associate with great bike componentry. Both however began making waves in the bike industry as passionate frame builders (there are few of us that rode in the late 80’s and early 90’s that didn’t lust after a beautiful fillet-brazed masterpiece from one of these two stables of creations). Of course things being as they are in the corporate world of ‘stack it high, sell it cheap’ idioms, before long came mass produced aluminium and Far-East manufacturing, effectively limiting the steel hardtail to an almost forgotten chapter in mountain bike history. Twenty years later any hardtails -aluminium and steel alike- are as rare as hens teeth out on the trails. Which of course I say, somewhat controversially, is a crying shame.

Don’t get me wrong, I ride a full sus bike and love every lovely millimetre of its 140-mm travel. But I still have three hardtails in the shed, including one Ti model. I learnt on a hardtail… and that’s the key.

Okay, I’m no Raffa-wearing fixie-wannabee or steel-framed wielding, Seattle-bike courier, and I am not lamenting the limiting of the steel hardtail to the endangered species list of bikes (beautiful though many of the handbuilt steel bikes are), but I am suggesting that everyone should, at least at some time during their riding experience, get some quality time aboard a rigid rear end. The skill-set you acquire by learning to ride trails on a hardtail are ones that will not only improve your riding whatever steed you ‘progress’ to owning, but also are the same skills that let you ride in a more trail-preserving manner. Six inches of suspension undoubtedly makes technical trails instantly accessible (and less scary) to the newbie rider, and will see you over most obstacles if you have the mettle to point your front wheel downwards, but the nimble subtleties (and pinch flat/frame destroying postential) that hardtail riding requires means having to develop better speed control, more efficient use of the brakes and less skidding, better weight shift about the bike, fewer pinch punctures and essentially a better appreciation of the trail you’re riding on.

If you’re not convinced (really, you’re not?) then consider this fine anecdote that is so perfectly suited to illustrate my point it’s as if I made the whole thing up: Last autumn I was riding the Posettes trail in Chamonix,  a winding 700 m descent that is strewn with technical challenges. Half way down I met two other riders and of course, rode with them for the rest of the descent, one of whom went over the bars on almost every rooty staircase we came across. It was clear where he was going wrong: weight too far forward, too heavy on the front brake. The rider was on a borrowed hard tail, replacing his heavy DH bike to make the 700 m climb a little more manageable.  The hardtail meant he had to ride the roots slower and so rely on skills he had never refined on his DH-do-anything rig. “I wish I’d brought my full susser “ he said as he picked himself up for the fourth time.

So vote for me (sic) and when I’m mayor I’ll make hardtails available for free. And once you have acquired that badge, you can see start towards your body-armour badge, then your hill-climb badge too. The list is endless. See what fun it would be? As easy as riding a bike.

 

Hardtails never seemed to slow down the legendary Keith Bontrager. His home trail in Santa Cruz.. and not a skid in sight.

 

Thorny issues in the fat tyres of mountain biking.

Open trail access for mountain bikers has always been a controversial subject, not least because as riders, we have been the last of the user groups to take our place at the ‘great outdoors’ dining table. Right now I’m on my way back from a 2-week trip to Northern California, where I have been covering a number of commissions for What Mountain Bike magazine and during which I spent some time around Mt Tam area in Marin county just North of San Francisco, a place where “organic” is a household word and Toyota Prius hybrids rule the asphalt.

Now for those not yet in the know, Marin (and Mt Tamalpais in particular) is largely deemed as the birthplace of the mountain bike, when in the 70’s locals adorned Schwinn cruisers with cow-horn handlebars, fat tyres and gears to spawn an industry and a whole lifestyle built on riding bikes off road. (Ah, the free-spirited 70’s, when hair was long and frame angles sat at 67 degrees…  funny how things come round again). Ironically though there are probably fewer places on this great planet of ours that are as limited in terms of true trail options as Mt Tam. In the eyes of the conservative roadie scene (ah, something’s never change) the mountain bike baby was emerged as the bastard son of radical parents, an attitude that has changed little in 30 years among many hikers and authorities it seems. The irony of riding in Marin, spinning a fast lap on the 10-mile long Tamarancho trail -one of Marin’s only (legal) singletracks- while bigoted local residents sup on low fat mochas and pen letters to the local newspaper about how the evils of mountain biking should remain limited to fireroads, was not lost on me I can assure you.

But it made me consider our situation back home in Chamonix, France, a place that prides itself on its open-minded attitude when it comes to ‘doing whatever you like’ in the mountains that surround it. After all you can take a lift up and literally throw yourself off any peak around using any number of ‘crazy’ winged devices, ski off-piste through a maze of crevasses or attempt ridiculous life-threatening challenges in the world of climbing there without the authorities batting an eyelid. As I gave it some more thought though, I realised that both Marin and Chamonix (and countless other places once considered great mountain bike locations) are on converging paths, but in Chamonix/Marin’s case, paths that have started from opposite ends. While Marin with its powerful Sierra Club hiking lobby started with limited trail access and is still struggling to widen its riding horizons as the popularity of mountain biking grows, Chamonix started with open, free access to its trails but its growing number of riders are seeing their possibilities under threat.

While Chamonix boasts a new “bike park” program, it is openly admitting that once these new (predominantly downhill) trails have been constructed, access for riders to other shared use trails more suited to the “all mountain” rider (that’s the majority of us not wearing full face helmets then) will be increasingly limited.  Sure, I liked the blast of chasing my friend Patchen around the winding Tamarancho trail yesterday (ride this trail if you come to Marin!) but I’m responsible, courteous to hikers and try my damnest to avoid skidding on the trails, something that contributes massively to trail erosion. I also want more than one ten mile loop to ride.

Needless to say, Marin is also home to countless illegal trails, singletracks that wind their way down the hillsides of legendary Mt Tam and Pine Mountain; trails that have been constructed due to the bigoted limitations put on mountain biking by ignorant NIMBY locals. Only time will tell if riders in Chamonix will be taking up shovels too.

 

Not Marin county thats for sure: Chamonix' trail access - as threatened as its glaciers?

Deeper is surfacing

I met up with Jeremy Jones this week for some belly-crunching Mexican scoff in Tahoe, USA. In between making encouraging noises about the launch of his new independent, freeride-orientated snowboard company Jones Snowboards (available for wingter 2011) we mused over the imminent tsunami of magazine column inches that’s heading your way on the Deeper Alaska camping-and-splitboarding adventure we shot in April this year (see earlier blog: Going Deep in Alaska). It made me consider the project that I was involved in and the fact that on my return, somewhat shell-shocked by the experience, my initial blog post on the trip might have seemed to undersell the whole experience. Or at least look a little thin on the photo-side (and we all love my holiday snaps don’t we).

Grab a copy of Transworld, White Lines, MBM, FryFlyt or one of several other publications around the world this December and you’ll see what I mean. The Deeper trip was probably the most adventurous and original undertaking in Alaskan snowboarding, period. And with it came all sorts of challenges to overcome: -15 C nights, in a tent, gaping crevasses to hike around and ten-day blizzards; Nothing out of the ordinary for hardy mountaineers of course, but an entry ticket to a whole big-boy ball game for humble snowboarders (and photographers).

For me personally it was not only the most challenging snowboard trip I have ever undertaken but also the most, err… ‘productive’ in terms of post-trip image sales. To date the story has gone to seven magazines and images sold to O’Neill, Venture Snowboards, Scott Goggles and DC shoes. Not a bad turnaround you might think, but an essential one considering that the trip cost me approximately $4000 and a month of my time (but you know it ain’t about the money!). Anyway I digress. I just thought it was time to throw a few more ticklers into the mix here, to give you a taste of the menu offered by camping out in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park and hiking for lines and a sneak at what you’ll see in on the news-shelves.

And if you cant wait for the release of Deeper film next year, here’s TGR’s Deeper teaser: 

http://www.tetongravity.com/videos/Deeper-Trailer-abigmountainsnowboardfilm-807352.htm

 

Another snapshot of life on the wild side: the Deeper Alaska trip.

Blood, sweat and tears and the Orgasmatron Trail

Last year while shooting a feature for MBUK in Tahoe while using friend Mike Basich’s remote hippy cabin as a base, we paced his 40-acre plot of mountain land and decided that its bedrock outcrops and loosely spaced trees would lend themselves admirably to the construction of a bike trail. Well, I’m happy to say that the trail is built, as my blistered, torn, thorn-riddled, rock-battered hands will testify.

Trail building is a new art-form for me living in the Alps where there are (still at least) countless established natural trails to ride, but as you can probably appreciate, the first step on the ladder of getting the mortgage paid is getting a story pitch commissioned by a magazine, and usually that means coming up with a new slant or angle on something that’s probably been done before. My ideas for such adventures somewhat disturbingly usually involve some sort of perverse self-flagellation.

So enter the Orgasmatron: Tahoe’s newest trail, built by two cabin-dwelling, hot tub sharing, bearded fellows (that’s me and Mike) over two long days of dusty, shovel-wielding hard labour. The idea for the feature? Take one plot of mountain land and see how its topography and features lends themselves to having 500 metres of singletrack laid out across it; a real hands on learning experience incorporating the kind of challenge that might have seen Anika hang up her jumpsuit in defeat.

Of course it helps to know someone with a plot of mountain land to start with, enter Mike and his snowboard Area-241 testing ground. With only three days to both build and shoot the feature (and ride the nearby 19 mile super-trail called Hole in the Ground) it was clear that to make it work we’d have to make effective use of all and any natural features, to follow the line of least resistance if you like. Focussing on several granite slickrock sections meant less time  at the blunt end of a shovel was needed while adding a pump-track style grin factor to the test ride afterwards. Effectvely all we had to do was decide which slickrock to include, what line to take across them and then work what route to take through the trees and open scrub to connect the sections.

Oh and actually dig out the trail in between.

Moving rocks and building up ramps to scale three fallen trees and a couple of touch step ups proved finger-nail crunching and hoeing and raking a foot deep layer of old pine needles and fir cones to create the slaloming section through the forest gave birth to blisters the size of Hampshire. Finally with the sun setting we polished the final section of the Orgasmatron, a small wall ride that leads into a fast rollercoaster set of slabs and mini jumps back to the cabin.

And now, forty eight hours later I sit on a plane, squeezed into a fire-retardant foam seat and stare down at my cracked and beaten palms, knowing that  the pain was worth it, knowing that I’ve added a little creative something to the world of mountain biking and learned a hell of a lot in the process. If nothing else how to dress blisters.

Nothing beats a session with the Orgasmatron

 

the new danmilner.com website

OK it’s been long overdue (for anyone familiar with my old, rather outdated site) but finally my new website is up and online. Same address as its been for the last six or so years… www.danmilner.com… but the new site is simplified and is a way better representation of the images and subject matter I am shooting nowadays, with separate galleries for bike, snow, travel and portraiture as well as one for a snapshot for the kind of clients I work for and how they like to make the most of my pretty pictures.

So why so long in the making? Well, it turns out, in retrospect that  I’d rather be out shooting pictures than working on updating a website. The digital shooting age already means us photo-monkeys spend too much time in front of our fancy Apple displays, burning the midnight oil while the likes of Napalm Death or the Subhumans blast out from the tiny speakers that decorate any self-respecting art-tuned professional’s desk nowadays. And that is why the new danmilner.com site has been so long in the making. But here it is, launched and on line with the help of web-builder Ste Daley at snowsites.co.uk and pretty happy with it I am too.

Of course, deciding on which images to show in a totally new website is not an easy one, especially when you have several thousand images, shot over a dozen years to choose from. There are images that stand out and shout “include me” straight away, then there are the ones whose subtleties appeal to the artistic side in me, and finally others that I wanted to include for mere personal reasons: the experience of taking the shot, the personal story behind the image, and so on. It’s a tricky cut to make when you have to whittle it down to maybe 40 images in each gallery. And so the later are the shots that I probably ended up removing in the end. After all photographers are probably their own worst editors; each shot I decide to include in the site had to represent my photography in some way, rather than just have emotional strings attached (of course many have both), to tell a story that is accessible to the audience that is going to log on to the site. Okay, I have left a few quirky ones in there, many from my ‘Out of Context: 17 images in 17 years’ exhibition that ran in Chamonix a couple of years ago, just to offer a taste of my feel for travel images.

So make yourself a cuppa and enjoy, and let me know how it looks to you. www.danmilner.com. 

 

the new home page, helped visually by a portrait of a Pakistani soldier photograohed at 4200 M on the Deosia plateau

SUK RIP

Well what a ride that was! Any one familiar with the snowboard titles that punctuate dreary British winters will by now know of the demise of Snowboard UK magazine at the end of last winter. While the jury is still out as to the real reason behind the magazines downfall, it comes as a blow to the British snowboarder and the Brit’ snow scene.

Snowboard UK was started in 1992 as the first British Snowboard title, back when the Daily Mail was running headlines about the young sport including “Ban this Killer craze!”. My own involvement in SUK began by illustrating a cartoon feature for them, something that started as a single strip and became a monthly full page colour strip. That was about 1994. After a meandering path through the many challenges of shooting photos, a season sharing a house with Brit pro-riders Johnny Barr and James Stentiford and another touring the resorts of the USA to shoot with riders like Bryan Iguchi, I landed the position of Senior Photographer for SUK. I always saw the potential of SUK as a quality mainstream snowboard mag and working with seven (yep, seven) different editors and more designers than you can shake a pantone colour chart at, together we pushed for content that offered a healthy spread of creative, non-patronising features that could be appreciated by the average ‘ride around and jump off anything’ British rider. It was a roller coaster ride that’s for sure.

While the title’s demise is just another chapter in the too-often-repeated saga of leaving photographers’ invoices unpaid, the opportunities the role of Senior Photographer afforded me were priceless. I accompanied Barr and Stentiford on the first British media trip to Alaska in 1999, riding with Tom Burt and the late Tommy Brunner. Under the guise of SUK we pioneered trips to new destinations including Kashmir in 2004, when the absence of a lift to the top of the mountain left us to hike the 1200 m climb to the 4100 m summit, usually alongside Indian army conscripts while packing bags of curry for lunch. Greenland, Russia, the first Iceland Park Project, Turkey, Pakistan and further trips to Alaska and Canada (shooting with the legendary Craig Kelly) were all nailed in our quest to introduce our readers to new destinations and possibilities for expanding their snowboard horizons. By now my passport was starting to read like a National Geographic contents page, topped off most recently by the month I spent in Alaska camping out on a glacier with only splitboards and the likes of Travis Rice and Jeremy Jones for company.

While a blow, it’s no real surprise that SUK has disappeared; it’s been a while in the making, with a small industry adamant that it couldn’t support three UK titles, a publisher that was reticent to put anything back into the industry, and a struggling skeleton in–house editorial staff of one. That said, the co-existence of three UK snowboard magazines survived for a decade, even alongside the international titles like Transworld, Onboard, Method and Snowboarder on WHS shelves. In SUK’s absence of course, the British rider scene will inevitably suffer, with less potential for representation of British sponsored riders in the media. But that’s the price that has to be paid I guess. And as for me. Well, from the ashes a mighty phoenix doth rise. Or something like that.

Now freelancing again, you’ll be seeing my snow work decorating the pages of both White Lines and Document magazine in the UK and Transworld in the USA this winter. So I’d like to say a big thankyou to everyone, industry-folk and reader alike, who supported the editorial team at SUK as we steered the good ship SS SUK through stormy waters, for appreciating what we were trying to do. And of course thanks to Eddie Spearing who saw the potential I must have exhibited early on and cultivated it by making me senior photographer ten years ago. Thanks. It’s been a blast.

In case you missed any.. here is a snapshot of the 47 covers I shot for SUK starting with the first capturing Johnny Barr in Alaska 1999 and ending with the talented Mr Mike Basich, a great rider who became a good friend, Jan 2009.

 

Forty-seven: count em!

In case you’re curious, heres the who’s who of the the cover riders:

Johnny Barr, Alaska. Markku Koski, Air&style.Sean Lake, Chamonix, Gumby, Alaska. Bryan Iguchi, Jackson Hole. Tim Zimmerman, WA. Matthieu Crepel, Tignes. Tapio Kuusakoski, Sweden. Mike Basich, Chamonix. Tom Eldridge, Chamonix. Danny Wheeler, Laax. Marcus Chapman, Saas fee. James Stentiford, Axamer Lizum. Thomas Ligonnet, Mt Baker. Jonathen Weaver, Tignes. Thomas Ligonnet, Stevens Pass. Kai Arne Lien, NZ. Nelson Pratt, Iceland. Matt Burt, Spain. wan Wallace, Chamonix. Jamie Baker, St Moritz. Johno Verity, Greenland. Johno Verity, Livigno. Ryan davis, Val d’Isere. Nelson Pratt, France. Scott McMorris, Austria. Scott McMorris, Switzerland. Bruno rivoire, Pakistan. Jess Venables, Russia. Ryan Davis, France. Eric Themel, Alaska. Johno Verity, Area 241 USA. Dan Wakeham, 2 alpes. James Stentiford, Alaska. Nelson Pratt, Mammoth. Gumby, Brighton. James Stentiford, Chamonix. Johno Verity, Iceland. Dom Harington, 2 Alpes. Graham McVoy, Tignes. Eric Themel, Turkey. Bruno Rivore, Canada. Jonas Emery, Macedonia. Jeremy Jones, Jackson Hole. Mike Basich, Tahoe.