Falls Creek – RadMania

4 x GoodTimes With Nitro Snowboards

Four years of photo shoots with the Nitro Pro Team

With Melburnians landlocked from the mountains all winter with the COVID-19 restrictions, I wanted to look back on four fantastic years of Nitro GoodTimes camps in Victoria. The brainchild of Nitro Snowboards Australia/NZ’s Mark Bristow, Will Cheshire and “Master of Ceremonies/Mr Falls Creek”, Jimi Cordell, GoodTimes was a raucous weekend/week/fortnight to bring the extended Nitro family together with a bunch of the new boards, fresh from the factory, to shoot photos for each next year’s catalog.

I’ve been hooked up by Nitro since around 2009, so I jumped at the chance to lend my services … and it’s been a week that I look forward to most each winter. Good times, good crew … and way too many beers (bloody, Jimi!)

Please enjoy some of my favourite action shots from the last four years with Nitro.

2016: Hotham – Viking Invasion…

Led by Scandianavian slayers Marcus Kleveland, Torgeir Begrem, Sven Thorgren, Ludwig Biltoft, Jared Elston (honourary Scando/Aussie) and Silje Norendal, with Aussie Team Manager, Darragh Walsh, directing the troops, Nitro Snowboards held the first infamous GoodTimes Camp at Hotham. It was wild … and the vikings roared! My photos and words from this GoodTimes was a multi-page feature article in ANZ Snowboarding Magazine. See more photos here.

2017: Falls Creek – ANZACs…

A Trans-Tasman assault on Falls Creek coincided with one of the biggest storms of the decade. Rather than hitting the park, Nate Johnstone, Christy Prior, Harley Trivic and Toms Petrusevics (honourary Aussie) sheltered in the snowy trees … and in the warmth of QT’s balcony hot tubs. Oh, and this was the first time “Mr Falls Creek” introduced us all to his signature drink.

Pro tip: ask for a “Jimi” at Stingray next time you’re there … but don’t drink more than a couple!

2018: Falls Creek – The A List Arrives…

All the big dogs descended on lil ‘ol Falls Creek for the biggest GoodTimes yet: Marcus, Torgeir, Sven, Zoi (all fresh from PyeongChang 2018), Christy and Elias Elhardt destroyed the park – but it was Sam Taxwood who was MVP, styling all sorts of tricks that just should not be humanly possible on a 203cm “Big Pink” Quiver Cannon.

Falls Creek upped the ante with organised holiday packages for punters to get in on all the fun (and the “Jimis” at Stingray), and TM/Nitro legend Knut Eliassen just couldn’t help but throw a few handplants (when he wasn’t otherwise playing the party Pied Piper), while Nitro International’s Andi Aurhammer showed his commitment to GoodTimes by joining in the shenanigans.

But special thanks had to go to Falls Creek Terrain Parks/Events for hand-shaping the epic snake run down Last Hoot – one run has probably never received so much media coverage … and it was worth the guys getting in a bit of trouble for building it in such a high-traffic area.

2019: Falls Creek – The Good Times roll on…

Another GoodTimes, another epic storm! The crew scored … and took advantage of special lift access before the public was allowed up. Austen Smith brought his surf-styles to Falls Creek, and he was joined by the kiwi wonder women, Christy and Zoi, as well as lil’ ripper, Nico Bodi, with TM Darragh Walsh showing us all he’s still got it! And old Falls Creek/Nitro rider Jason Currie even managed to snag an epic pow spray like the good ol’ days.

Good times, indeed! Thanks to Bristow, Will, but most of all to Jimi for being the life and soul of GoodTimes.

I hope we can all get back to a GoodTimes in the future.

Nitro have just launched their updated website with their 2021 range of snowboards (which Australia/NZ received in-stores this year). Take a look here.

Snowboard Photography From 2014 Australian Slopestyle Tour

A few weeks ago the director of The Australian Slopestyle Tour called me up asking if I could help out with some media services for both The Mile High by Carlton Dry at Perisher and Stylewars at Falls Creek. He had me at hello …. beer!

It was great being back in the epicentre of the snow scene, with the best snowboarders and skiers in the world congregating on Jindabyne for their off-season, and our winter. Charles Beckinsale, had helped fashion an epic and inventive slopestyle course in Perisher’s Front Valley, and with all the big dawgs in town, the level of snowboarding (and skiing) was way beyond what has ever been witnessed in this land. I was primarily employed by Rich Hegarty to help write the press releases and add to social media, but of course I couldn’t be surrounded by all this snow-shredding awesomeness without giving my new-ish Canon EOS 1D Mk IV a work out.

Perisher’s slopestyle course is always a bit tricky to shoot, and I certainly took my best photos at the ol’ stomping ground of Falls Creek’s Ruined Castle terrain park during Stylewars. But it was a nice change to be able to act as a second shooter, alongside ANZ Snowboarding Magazine’s Alex Roberts, in order to cover all the action across the park. And it was a pleasant surprise to see The World Snowboard Tour use my shot of winner Kyle Mack for their news article.

A great two weeks filled with fun and friends … and quite a bit of that free Carlton Dry. It was so good to be back!

For a closer look, click on the photos to open them up in a gallery…

Kyle Mack spinning over Perisher’s last jump for The Mile High.

View of The Mile High slopestyle course.

Freeskier double nose grab – The Mile High, Perisher

Billy Morgan at The Mile High.

The Mile High action avoided the worst of the weather coming in…

Allie Coates, Stylewars 2014

Kyle Mack styling. Stylewars 2014.

Ryan Linnert, Stylewars 2014

Jeremy Page says that Carlton Dry gives you wings…

Will Mayo front board.

Darcy Sharpe high in the sky.

Aussie Tim Laidlaw. Steezy!

Asher Humphreys launches the gap.

Kyle Mack’s Stylewars Grandmaster-winning run. Super stylish frontside 720 off the toes.

Mats Kulisek in front of a moody sky.

Kyle Mack launching.

Black and white gap…

Logan Short wowed by the appearance of double rainbows.

Kyle Mack frontside 720 on day one of Stylewars on World Snowboard Tour’s website. Photo and press release text by Sean Radich.

Film fun…

A little while ago when I was checking out some camera gear at Vanbar Imaging I came across this Rollei Red Bird film. It’s regular colour film, that produces negatives like your normal film-of-old would, however the colour emulsion layers are reversed with the red colour on top (instead of at the bottom). This gives a weird red colour to the finished prints (or scans, in my case).

So I put a roll in my old Canon EOS 5 film body and took some test shots a a few weeks ago. Unfortunately the film roll doesn’t have the normal auto-ISO barcode for your camera, so I had to set the camera at the film’s 400 ISO rating. However, my photos came out very underexposed using the EOS’s auto-metering mode and needed a lot of Adobe Lightroom manipulation to get them to a reasonable state. So I’m not sure if I should have maybe set my camera at 100 ISO, or maybe I will go and try the film out on a full manual old Minolta rangefinder I picked up at a cash Converters for 20 buck a few years ago? I thought there might be more variation in colour, but my photos came out very, very red. So I think I’ll stick to playing around with cross-processing various cheap and pro-quality slide film to get some experimental film effects. You can also buy disposable cameras pre-loaded with Red Bird film (and others, like Cross Bird) at Van Bar Imaging.

Another little photo experiment I finished a week ago was with a Konica super wide-angle disposable camera I had bought on special at Vanbar a couple of years ago. I had forgotten about this little piece of photographic plastic, and found it again in a box in my room earlier in the season, and I thought that with POV (point of view) snowboard photos being all the rage (see right), this cheap little thing might provide some interesting shots. Well, it wasn’t going to be a huge loss if I dropped it and it broke, unlike with a super-expensive DSLR and $900 15mm fisheye lens attached. Again, the film in this wide-angle disposable was rated at 400 ISO, so I thought it might have a reasonably short enough shutter speed for full daylight action.

When I could hold the camera still compared to the movement of my body the shots came out sharp, but really, the results are a little disappointing, and I discovered it is actully pretty hard to think about getting the perfect right moment with a single shot when you are mid trick – much easier to initiate a turn or trick and hold the motor-drive down to snap a bunch of shots and then pick out the best one later. I was also hoping that the camera would be more fisheye than it is, but it’s more like a wide angle 17- 18mm.

Anyway, take a look at the shots and enjoy…

Partywars

Last week the yearly installment of Stylewars rollicked drunkenly up through the snow-laden streets of Falls Creek to the Snowdrift Lodge, and I was fortunate enough to secure a berth in the party house. Stylewars is not quite the same since the glory years in at Silverski, and this year it was dealt even harsher cards with Thredbo’s MTV SnowJam cutting it two days shorter, and then four days of whiteouts and blizzards. Reuben and Matto had built some excellent and photogenic features over on Ruined Castle: a 70 foot step-down jump into an 80 foot true-table/step-down jump, alongside the big wall-ride, 40 foot down rail, and raised gap-to-butter box. Take a look at the photos that were snapped on Sunday here. There was perhaps a slight, short weather-window late Monday afternoon, but for basically the whole event window the low clouds swirled and the snow fell…hard.

So no competition could be held out in Ruined Castle, and the only snowboarding action for Stylewars was a two-hour rail jam practice session, and then the short Wednesday night “28 Stairs” rail jam held under puking, dumping snow.

So with the weather not cooperating, take a guess as to what 50 or so pro-riders, photographers, videographers, journalists, judges and organisers did for four days cooped up in a hotel? I think Ryan Tiene’s Facebook status said it best : “big week in falls did 4 runs in 4 days and drank way 2 much!”

The lazy days were spent forlornly looking at the falling snow which cancelled the comp, then amping up to take some free pow laps through the trees on slow-running, wind-affected chairlifts, then coming back inside when your face became too frozen and getting into the swing of the nightly music and parties…and maybe finishing it off with a sneaky late-night spa. A lot of the crew entered the Room of Doom where feverish games of the Devil’s Dice were running continuously, forcing the unlucky roller to smash down shots of some sort of evil spirit or another. Before even many of the crew had arrived on the Sunday night, the Devil’s Dice had taken its toll, forcing the eviction of several drunken riders from the pub, leaving one knocked out when his head was used to open the front door, and another with a police warning for smashing a beer bottle and threatening to use it on the offending meat-head bouncer. Demon drink indeed! Others got off more lightly, but still paid the price for choosing alcohol over snowboarding. Tuesday night was Dane Tiene’s 21st birthday, and we all threw in some money to get a special show from Albury. We all waited patiently in the Snowdrift’s lounge while the boys played dice, but while the wait was too much for some, eventually the devilish weather even put a stop to these extra-curricular shenanigans, closing the road from Albury with too much snow! So it was off to the pub again…

Fortunately, as an elder statesmen, I took it a little easier, but still managed to get into trouble, ollie-ing over a snow bank on the home trail and failing to notice a branch up above, smashing my head and requiring 5 stitches down in the medical centre. Feeling a little dazed, and with the craziest snowfalls I have ever seen in Australia falling on Wednesday, I gave the 28 Stairs rail jam a miss. Officially, 54cm of snow fell at Falls that Wednesday, the biggest since 1993, and when I went to get my car out Thursday it was almost totally buried by the more-than-a-metre of fresh that had fallen since Sunday. It took over two hours to dig my car out and get chains on – not great when you’ve been told to keep your stitches dry and to not exert yourself too much.

But all was salvaged when I returned to Falls Creek for the weekend for a perfectly sunny couple of days to shoot the re-opened big jumps with the local park crew rippers, NSW’s Clint Allan and Jye Kearney, and skiers Russ Henshaw and Johnno Lipsker. It was five hours of shooting out in the park, getting multiple angles for photos to be saved for magazine publication. The chopper even hovered over the park for a while with snapper Alex Roberts poking out the door, making it seem like the Stylewars of old: sunny skies, music blaring and the boys throwing down on big jumps while the rotor-wash of the heli whipped snow off the jump. I can’t wait till next year…

Do the Dew!

What a difference a week makes in the mountains. Last Monday I left a Melbourne warmed by winter sun and made it up to Falls Creek for the usual shenanigans of a Big Cup Monday at The Man Hotel. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent shredding the pristine Falls parks under sunny skies, and snapping a couple of shots of the local boys hitting the new jumps in Ruined Castle. All the forecasts were calling for storms to head our way, and we were fortunate to get a good day of riding in on Wednesday…but by Thursday the cloud, fog and damp had set in and I made a quick trip home to dry out before heading up to Mt Buller on Friday night.

I was back at Buller for the Dew Hut Jam, which was back on busy Bourke Street, but with more invited teams and a new big water tank feature this year. Mt Buller always manages to roll out the welcome mat for the comps…well, yes and no. I had thought that the weather for the 2009 Mtn Dew Hut Jam couldn’t get any worse – but I was wrong! Yep, it was the worst weather I have ever had to shoot in: thick dense fog obscuring the sun during the day, dampness soaking all surfaces, and then by night howling winds knocking over flash stands, seemingly thicker fog and more and more misty rain.

I was up at Buller to shoot for Aust-NZ Snowboarder’s website, and you can check out the Mtn Dew Hut Jam press release with a couple photos from their assigned photog and video here. And to compare the full gallery of shots taken by Rory, who was employed by Mtn Dew for the weekend, take a look here.

I had set up three Canon Speedlight flashes (because they are easier to transport and set up than my huge Elinchrom Ranger, and usually do the job for night shooting) with one behind the main jump, one yellow-cellophaned one to the left by the water tank, and a green one to the right by the rail (I wanted some Mountain Dew-type colours in the photos). But with the cold sapping the power of the 4xAA batteries, and the dampness soaking all electrical surfaces it was a little hit or miss to get all flashes firing at once. However, this actually created some interesting outcomes and some variety to the shots. And for the very brief moments that the fog cleared the photos came out pretty cool I think. But for the last half of the night session there was basically no break in the fog, despite the wind, and I spent more time watching and chatting on the sidelines than shooting. But I’m happy with the results, even if in tough conditions like this it’s easy to miss out on capturing a killer shot of the winning team and riders.

And of course the partying at Buller was second to none – the Hoo Har is always fun, even more so when it’s a chance to catch up with a bunch of snowboard mates you haven’t seen for a while. But the walk back up the hill to my media billet was torture! Mt Buller really is some freak-of-nature microclimate, being the first mountain that the warm, damp Southern Ocean air hits, getting forced up into the cold, high altitude as storms head north east. A storm front was on its way to the Aussie Alps, and every mountain was on the receiving end of some horrible weather on Saturday before the snow started falling that night. However, Buller has a monopoly on being the only place where you can simultaneously be smashed by a tropical-strength monsoonal rain downpour, mixed with some sort of half-ice-half-rain precipitation that somehow falls as liquid yet freezes upon you instantly, as well howling winds, and blinding fog. Walking home was like being caught on some gigantic satanic Slurpee machine. And so the headache I had when I got home was definitely not from the beers, but from the ice freezing my brain!

But I awoke late the next day to a sea of white out the window where a few hours before had been dirt, grass and asphalt! The snow had finally come to the High Country, and as I write it is still continuing…so a trip back to Falls to make the most of it will certainly be on the cards soon.

UPDATE 6/8/10: Transworld Snowboarding have put up some of the photos on their website. It’s not a feature, just a news item, but it’s still nice to get shots published on their site again. Check it here.