Perched at the top of your favorite ski run on a glorious powder day, you drop your skis off the catwalk and rip through a foot of freshly fallen hero snow, every turn perfectly carved.
For a lot of skiers, the only thing that makes that already-awesome experience cooler is photos of it. But that requires someone to A) have a camera B) without a dead battery from the cold and C) be reasonably competent at shooting pictures.
Between the technical limits of cell phone cameras and the challenging conditions of shooting on snow, let’s face it: a lot of the homegrown shots you see on Facebook and Twitter look more like an amateur Sasquatch pic than they do of you schralping the gnar.
There are pro photographers on ski mountains, but most of them do only happy-family portrait shots, which you’re then offered the chance to buy as something charmingly called a “print.”
That’s the current situation at many ski areas, where your options are a DIY gamble or a business model that dates back to silver daguerrotypes. But that might change with the next iteration of Vail Resorts’ EpicMix app.
Last year when Vail Resorts launched EpicMix, the social media application for its ski resorts, we described it as a mashup of Gowalla and Nike+. It was a qualified success in its first year, but one big omission held it back: a narrow focus on physical accomplishments like vertical feet skiied.
For 2011-2012, EpicMix is expanding into photography in a big way, and it’s a significant step not just for the company, but for skiers’ and snowboarders’ experiences with their sport. We sat down with Vail Resorts’ CEO Rob Katz for an exclusive interview on the intersection of snowsports and social media.
For Katz, custom images are the next frontier. “There’s a lot of research out there that shows that the anticipation of a vacation, and the memories of it, are actually more valuable than the vacation itself,” he said. “Photos are an important part of the memory aspect.”
To bring that into the digital era, Vail had to essentially blow up the current model, where you get off a lift, a photographer shoots your picture and hands you a card with a number on it. At the end of the day you go to the photo kiosk at the base, view your photos and opt to purchase hard copies.
For Katz, that’s a buzzkill of a way to end a great day. “I recently did a dolphin experience with my kids, and when it’s done you’re waiting in line, looking at every photo,” he said. “The kids want to leave and you’re haggling for $200 for the CD of images or do we just get prints for $30 each? It’s not a very enjoyable experience, and it happens at the end of this experience which was a great time.”
With EpicMix Photo, when you encounter one of 20+ professional photographers at each of Vail’s six resorts, you can get a portrait or basic action shot taken, and the shooter scans the RFID tag in your pass; the photos are automatically uploaded to your account.
And here’s the biggest shift: they’re free. You get all the low-resolution images gratis to share on Facebook or Twitter; only if you want higher-res versions to print do you pay (those get ported to your Flickr, Shutterfly or other photo-sharing account). You own the file, so you can print as many as you want, wherever you want.
That’s a big shift for a ski resort, which typically commoditizes everything from parking to ski school. But Katz said that it’s a calculated risk. “Is a photo a product we sell like food or skis, or is it part of the experience?” he asked. “We made the decision that it’s experience – and it’s risky because we don’t know whether people will buy photos or just share them on Facebook and that’s all they need.”
Honestly, it may not be that big a risk. Katz readily volunteered that the old photo model is dated. “This is happening; people pull out their phones and take a picture,” he said. So this is partly Vail’s way of not getting totally sidelined.
And insofar as people share their photos on social media, “assumably, they’re happy memories and that reminds people of our resorts,” he adds. “So it’s the quintessential way to use social media to benefit your resort: take a picture of someone enjoying your product and let them share it with their friends.”
The new EpicMix also includes other upgrades, like more digital pins, and it now works at Northstar-at-Tahoe, which Vail bought last fall and couldn’t add to EpicMix last season. But photo is the big change, and here, Vail is out front of Disney and almost every other vacation destination that does pro photography.
The reason it works, Katz thinks, is why the rest of EpicMix does: it’s seamless. I wondered last year why Vail opted for RFID technology over GPS, which would allow you to see not just which lifts you rode, but which runs you skied and how fast. Apps like Phresheez allow you to see that, and work at any ski area.
But RFID was a conscious choice in part because you can’t tag a photo subject in GPS like you can with RF. Without that, there’s no way to get your photo and share it.
Although sharing is a major aspect of EpicMix and you can create sub-groups, Vail isn’t partnering with Google+, at least not yet – the overwhelming number of Vail customers use Facebook, says Katz.
But he is mindful of where photosharing could lead. You could reserve time with a photographer to meet you at your favorite spot on the mountain, and action photography will improve, promises Katz.
And EpicMix could incorporate more parts of the mountain, and even expand into summer activities. But to work, it has to be a background part of the experience, rather than something skiers have to think about. It has to be available for those who want it, and invisible to those who don’t.
“We were able to infuse this incredible piece of technology into our resorts without bothering people who didn’t want anything to do with it,” says Katz of what he is most proud of about EpicMix. “Skiing is an outdoor, naturally based experience, and that is a core principle. Anything we do cannot intrude on that.”
