It's one thing to take a Canon EOS-1D X or a Nikon D4 out on a snowboarding shoot and pop off 10 frames a second during a cliff jump or huge line in the backcountry. It's a completely different thing to take a film Hasselblad with you and wait for that one frame that sings.
That's been Daniel Blom's approach, and over the long run it's paid off. For years now, Blom has been shooting snowboarders around the world with his trusty Hasselblad and just published a retrospective book called Drifting Decade.
"You definitely have to care more," says Blom about lugging that camera around to places like the insanely steep lines in Alaska or the deep powder in Japan.
Not every frame in the book is on film — he does use digital sometimes as well — but the advantages of carrying and frequently using a slower camera are immediately apparent as soon as you open the book. Not only are the Hasselblad photos as crisp as you might expect from this camera, but they also have their own aesthetic and are usually more unexpected. He's got the standard big air and crazy mountain shots, but they're often seen from a unique angle or distance. When everyone else is standing in the same spot, Blom finds a way to make a completely different picture.
This alternative approach also changed the way he looked at snowboarding in general. Snowboarding, as we know, has grown into more than just a sport. It's spawned an entire industry and along with it, a unique culture. While looking for a different way to capture the action, Blom also started pointing his camera at the people behind the goggles.
"I just felt like snowboarding is so much more than just the glossy gallery shots that you see in every magazine," says Blom, who splits his time between Stockholm and Los Angeles.
Of course the magic didn't just happen because Blom decided to use a different camera. Over the 10 years that the book encompasses, he was on the road for months at a time, and at least initially struggled to make a living with his photography. For years he worked as a forklift operator in Norway over the summer to save enough money to travel and shoot. He sold a couple of editorial shots, but not for much.
Eventually, after years of pounding the snow, his stuff was recognizable enough that he got picked up as a staff photographer at two different magazines — Snowboarder and Method — and he also started picking off commercial shoots where the real money is.
Getting the shots was no walk in the park either. Hasselblad or digital camera alike, Blom had to lug hundreds of pounds of additional photography and snowboard gear around in helicopters and snowmobiles – and sometimes on foot – to get the money shot.
And unlike some shooters who prefer to set up in the valley below the steepest lines and make photos or shoot video with telephoto lenses, Blom navigated terrain that would make most people crap their pants, planted himself somewhere he wouldn't fall over a cliff and then made a picture.
"I tried to go with the riders as much as I dared," he says.
In many ways the 10 years covered in the book encompass the kind of lifestyle many might aspire to. The freshest snow, the craziest locations and free flights courtesy of the magazine that hired you. But Blom says it eventually gets old. Enough so that a 9-to-5 job started to look appealing.
Today he's not such a jet-setter and only travels occasionally. He's concentrating on his commercial work and has returned to snowboarding for snowboarding's sake. The book came at a moment when he finally had some free time and he says he wanted to create something that he could look back on in 40 years and be proud of.
"I wanted to do it for myself," he says. "I wanted to be 100 percent sure that it was something I liked."
All Photos: Daniel Blom
