I feel lucky to live near the mountains and to be able to go on adventures, even in the winter months when most people are hibernating. During the break in school between Christmas and the New Year, we have made a habit of gathering with friends to enjoy the snow and ring in the coming year as a group. Most of the time, our trips revolve around skiing, but if you haven’t heard, winter has been slow to make it’s appearance here in Colorado. The ski mountains have done their best to make snow when they can, but as of today, most resorts only have a fraction of their normal terrain available.

With that information in mind, I planned for a slightly different experience and tried to make the most of what was available. One day, my husband and I went with a guide to try uphill skiing. We slapped “skins” to the bottoms of skis and hiked part way up a mountain, through the trees to an area where we rearranged our gear, pulled off the skins and skied back down to where we started. It was quite the workout and as our guide said, we definitely “earned our turns.”

Another day, I loaded up my camera, a small but sturdy tripod, and a neutral density filter into my backpack and set off up the lift to see if I could capture anything interesting. Just for the record, it was a bit nerve-wracking to ski with my camera on my back…. The idea was to use the filter to purposely darken my frame so I could take long exposure pictures in the middle of the day. I have the 10 stop filter, so when I put it on the front of the lens, it allows me to take a 3 second exposure when normally only a 1/1000 of a second exposure would be possible.

The first thing I tried was to see if I could blur the motion of the ski lifts. I skied around hoping to find a good spot where there was something sturdy I could wrap my Gorillapod around. I needed to keep my camera stable since the exposure was going to be long. I discovered a snow fence near a lift with a pretty view of the mountains and I framed the scene so that the chairs on the lift would go through. I tried a lot of different shutter speeds and quickly discovered that if you go too long, the chairs will completely disappear.

I played around with faster exposures and decided that at about 1 second, I was getting the type of blur that I was looking for.

Now that I had the blur that I wanted, I had to get my timing right. I wanted multiple chairs in the scene and lots of color so I kept my fingers crossed that fate would be kind. Unfortunately, I was not so lucky, but here’s where the blessing of Photoshop comes into play. I took several pictures, opened them as layers in the same document and masked out a few of the chair lift blurs to include as a composite in one image. It’s not exactly what I was going for, but it’s getting closer.

While I was taking these shots, I had my back leaning against a nearby tree to help keep my balance. The slope of the hill was a little tricky, especially in ski boots. I heard a noise in the tree, but disregarded it, thinking it was just a bird. Then, the noise was right by my head and I looked up to see a gray squirrel just arm’s reach above me. It startled me and I fell over into the snow, probably giving anyone that was watching a nice chuckle. After that encounter, I figured it was time to get moving and find a new spot. I made a new composite from multiple shots using the same technique as before.

It’s not as clean as I would like, but it fits the criteria of what I had in my head. After I felt satisfied with long exposures, I tried to find a few other images to round out my day on the slopes. Here are a few of my favorites:

I have lots more to practice to get the shots that I want out of this idea, and I think as we get more snow (fingers crossed!) and new ski runs open up, it will give me the types of views that I’m imagining. Until the next time- Angie