Behind the Scenes: Suicide Chute
Tony Pavlantos - Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah
For his 30th birthday, Tony Pavlantos made the goal to hike and snowboard 30,000 vertical feet on Mount Superior in Utah. This is no easy feat and it took the better part of a day to do this. He was up all night hiking and riding, and stopping for breaks in between to take a nap.
I made two trips up the canyon to shoot photos. I first came up around when he started at 5:00 am. I then proceeded to come back up that night at once the sunset again. I knew I wanted to get a long exposure shot of Tony riding down with the star trails behind him.
At one point he hiked up Suicide Chute, instead of going up the to the summit of Superior. This was where I wanted the shot, as it was the most direct line facing my viewpoint and when riding the mainline he would disappear from view for a short period.
The biggest variable of this shot was how long it would take him to ride the line. The snow was sub par, and being that it was dark, I knew he wouldn’t be charging full speed down the line. Through watching him take a few laps I had been able to judge general timing from the other lines he rode.
While Tony was hiking up I took a few test exposures to make sure I wasn’t going to dramatically over or underexpose the image. I found the general range of where I needed to be with my shutter speed. When Tony dropped in I opened the shutter with a cable release and waited until he rode out of frame. This ended up taking 334 seconds, or just over 5 minutes.
I ideally wanted to get star trails to have a more extended look then I would get with five-minute exposure. As soon as Tony rode out of the frame I immediately started two more subsequent exposures. This gave me the data for the extended star trails.
To edit this photo I used a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop. I normally try to keep my images as the raw file, unless I have a specific plan ahead of time to make an edit. My original edit in Lightroom corrected each of the three image files for white balance, a slight tweak on the exposure and the colour. The next step was to bring them all into Photoshop. I used the image with Tony riding as the base image and overlaid the other exposures over the top using blending modes.
In the end, I didn’t like the length of the star trails with the ~15 minutes exposure so I decided on going with a composite that blended two of the frames for the final image. After this, I brought the image back into Lightroom and did a final edit on contrast and colour to get exactly what I wanted.
Gear:
Canon 7D MK II
Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS
Tripod
Cable Release
Settings:
2 Exposures Blended
Settings for each exposure: 334.0 sec f/4.5, ISO 100
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Behind the Shot series where I tell the story behind my action, adventure and landscape photography and dissect the techniques and gear that was used to make it.