Jury 2010
Nick Hamilton
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY & VIDEO, TRANSWORLD SNOWBOARDING MAGAZINE (USA)
"I was snowboarding in the early 90s and luckily realized early on that I wasn’t cut out to be a pro. So I started shooting photos of my friends who were good enough!" Apart from being a good enough photographer, sometimes fortune plays a part. In Nick’s case, good and bad fortune led him on his path into photography.
One afternoon in 1995, while hanging out with friends at the local snowboard shop, in came an editor from Harper's & Queen who was doing research on a snowboarding story. Nick always carried his portfolio and camera with him and showed it to anyone willing to look. She liked his photos and – wham! – Nick was published in one of the most well respected magazines in Europe. "That was a good turning point for my parents to see, 'Okay he's not just out there wasting his time'."
However, he also experienced another life-changing moment which persuaded him that photography was the right life-choice for him. "When I was 18, I was taken hostage at a bank robbery in London. I even had a gun in my throat. After that, school seemed pretty insignificant so I moved to the French Alps to start shooting full time. It was a lucky break in a way."
The UK based snowboard magazine White Lines and then Transworld gave Nick his first jobs and commissioned him as a photographer and writer. After six years of working on shoots in France, Canada, South America and the US, he moved into photo editing at TransWorld SNOWboarding in 2002. However, he still manages to get behind the lens when he can. "Shooting snowboarding with a small group of top riders somewhere with good powder, that’s the ultimate."
How has the industry changed since he started? "When photographers were shooting film, the technical knowledge of light, composition, gear and film was incredibly advanced. So many techniques were needed to get a specific look, which took years to learn and was then kept as a closely guarded secret. Nowadays with digital, many of these techniques have been lost or are no longer needed. Photoshop makes any look attainable. Now it’s mostly about nailing that RAW image at the peak moment and processing later."
After judging in 2007, what brought Nick back to Red Bull Illume again in 2010? "You don’t get to see such a collection of most striking images from so many exciting sports in one place anywhere else. Red Bull Illume is unmatched for action sports photography. But it’s also about the amount of photography talent in these sports which I think is truly amazing and something I can’t support enough."
