Tips for Recreating Winter For A Photoshoot

Remaking winter, one shovel full at a time. Note the bare patches in the background.

A client recently contacted me to shoot a Nordic skiing product assignment here in Anchorage. At the time, we were racing towards spring with increasing sunshine and melting snow. Eager to get the project rolling, I submitted my bid and waited to hear back.

And I waited.

I understand that marketing directors are busy people who often have a number of projects at once, but with rising temperatures and days that lengthen by over thirty minutes each week, the window for a ski shoot was quickly closing. Alaska doesn’t have snow year round! I didn’t want the job to be canceled due to warm weather.

Finally the client got back to me. The details were finalized and I soon received the products to photograph. I contacted models, scouted a location and scheduled the shoot.

The morning before the shoot, I watched in horror as the snowplows went down the trail and scraped most of the snow away, leaving large swaths of open pavement in between thin snowy sections that were quickly disappearing.

Fortunately, my intended location still held a slab of snow about an inch thick. But by evening the slab had become a pathetic patch of mush with large spots of pavement showing through.

Suspecting that this might be the case, I had brought a shovel and spent an hour doing reconstructive surgery on the trail. While we took turns shoveling, my two models went back and forth, packing the snow down with their skis. Before long, we had successfully recreated winter with a 150-foot long section of skiable trail that was bordered by dry asphalt at both ends.

By that time, the evening light was warming up, so we started shooting. With careful lens selection and framing, I was able to make the scene look real enough, in the same way that movie crews make a partial set look like the real thing on film.

Sometimes you have to exercise a little creativity and ingenuity in order to get the shot. Conditions may not always be ideal, but the successful photographer will always find a way to make it work.