At the end of January 2016, following the Red Bull Linecatcher’s cancelation, bird watcher and photographer Elina Sirparenta made the most of having Flo Bastien, Julien Regnier, Pierre Guyot and Nikolai Schirmer around to take part in a shoot in the Tignes ski area. The snow conditions were delicate so the birds, guided by the local of the group, Flo Bastien, stayed under the protective wing of the forest. As Elina was busy capturing these joyous madmen of the sky, some wonderful news was unfolding behind the scenes… Little Zelda, the future progeny of said photographer and Julien Regnier had started on her embryonic adventure. So all the photos here-captioned by their taker- were captured by a photographer who was feeling strangely tired.
That day Flo’s shadow grew bigger than Flo himself. I still ask myself how we got there.
There’s a kind of violence in these turns. All that snow we can only grasp when it’s captured in a photo, a kind of wave. And somewhere in the blueish white, Nikolai.
I love these skies, when the storm turns to nice weather and the wide-angles that make things that are close really close and far away thing really far away, like Pierre jumping and who is probably really not worried about that.
The ups and downs of winter: to shoot or not to shoot. I was relieved. I think something is happening in the background, oh yeah, it’s Julien flying.
Yes, there are crows that fly. Nikolai and Flo faced with a white out and grey sky, through the light snow.
A dream-like state took hold of us. It arrived with the snow, lightly and silently drifting down. Julien was also taken. “An enchanted forest” I said to myself tingling.
In winter, snow is always better than sun right? But when there’s sun, nothing beats a little backlighting. Flo and Pierre on a blue background.
Snow has an unrivalled ability to decorate the winter with larch trees. It modifies their texture, color and odor. All the rest matched that day, green, orange and Julien’s jump over the branch hiding under the snow.
It all started here. We just went out to see if there was any snow, just to get out, and Flo did this turn between the shadows.
What I love in light sometimes is a shadow. The winter is pale blue and feels cold, especially at the end of the day. Because of the way Nikolai went to jump, I wasn’t expecting it, but found it really beautiful.
The snow was so cold that it was laughing under our feet. Nikolai aimed for the middle of the slope between the white below and the blue above. It was like in a movie.
