Sammy Carlson had just come off a gold medal win at X-Games in the slopestyle contest and settled in Whistler for a few months of backcountry filming. He wanted to find a location where we could string together multiple jumps into one line, to show his slopestyle skills in a backcountry situation.
When we found the perfect spot to pull this off, it was already late in the day. We had some sunlight as we built the jumps but the sun sunk behind the horizon before Sammy was able to get his first run at it. The only light that was left was a faint reflected glow from the surrounding peaks but there was just enough light on the slope for Sammy to have a go and for me to get a shot. As always with these sort of jumps the athlete wants to land it first time to show just one set of tracks. No time for test jumps or speed checks.
Thankfully Sammy showed why he had deserved the win in slopestyle and stomped all three jumps on the first try. My main worry was that my camera's internal memory buffer would not be large enough to capture the whole run in a sequence. I switched the camera (a Canon 1-Series) to JPEG mode as this allows a few more images to be stored in the buffer. Then I regulated the image shooting as best I could throughout the run to make sure there were no unnecessary shots taken. Every time he dipped out of view behind one of the hills I let off the shutter button for the briefest moment to allow the camera time to save one or two of the images. In the end we took 51 photos and it was just enough to capture the full line!