YoBeat: Making Fun of Snowboarding Since 1997

It was one of our best battles in weeks, but when all was said and done, Abe Blair’s shot of Cory Noble didn’t measure up according to YoBeat readers. I’m sure we’ll see more of Abe in the future, but for now, we caught up with him to find out a little more about the shot.

I was in Bozeman, MT at an ice climbing festival for my birthday, and saw that it was going to snow pretty hard in the greater Portland area.  So I changed my flight home two days earlier.  On my way back home to pdx, I got a call from the assistant TM for Dakine Scotty “The Body” Connerly, that he needed a photo for DK and had two ams with him, Johnie Paxton and Cory Noble.  They were in Hood River with another photographer Darcy Barcha, and it was dumping.  After a few flight delays I made it to Portland and my camera gear.  I did one of the worst night snow drives through the gorge and hooked up with the crew around 8 P.M.  We drove around town looking for and hitting features, but were pursued by the fuzz all night. Around 2 A.M. still no shots, and the cops were over the cat and mouse game.  They said no more warnings, if we wanted to keep hitting things the only place we could go was the skate park.  Tired and over it we almost called it but drove by the skate park and took a look around.  After some talk Cory and Johnie decided they could get speed to gap down to the micro tranny of the deep bowl and get the the to the coping on the 10 foot wall. After playing around with some angles and lighting I was getting frustrated, everything looked like something I had seen already.  Then Cory started to work on hand plants and I got in real close.  I decided to put a blue gel on my main big flash to make the pool have a water look.  I added a small flash up on the deck to light Cory up and that was it.  After a few tries, Cory got a plant up on the coping and we got the shot.  It was maybe 4:30 A.M.

The Firing Squad is a weekly photo competition. Winners of a single battle will receive a pair of Da Kine gloves and should a photo survive 4 weeks, the photographer receives a place in the Champions Gallery and a Da Kine Camera Pack. To enter your own photo in the Firing Squad, check out our submission guidelines.