Colorado Backcountry Powder at its Best

Got out yesterday to enjoy our amazingly stable central Colorado backcountry snow. While pockets of instability no doubt exist, much of our mid-alpine snowpack is a bonded birthday cake topped by fluffy cotton candy — yielding that blissful experience that’s said to be addictive as crack cocaine (and sometimes just as dangerous). Yesterday in the Marble Peak area between us and Crested Butte, we were able to whiff the delicate elixir with nary a consequence but a discernible rise in endorphin levels.

Couldn’t decide which photo of Dave I liked best, so here’s a pair. My wife and son were there too, but they’ve been my photo victims so much I figured a new face would freshen up Wildsnow a bit. Besides, a red jacket is to a camera what iron is to a magnet.

Another angle. Dave is riding Black Diamond Kilowatts and shouldering a Dakine Tactic pack we’re reviewing. Perfectly red jacket is a Cloudveil.

This was my first effort at ski photography using the diminutive Canon A720 rather than my A640. I’ve really come to like the A640 firmware hack as it provides a real-time histogram for checking exposures while using manual mode. The A720 doesn’t have a firmware hack yet, so to check histo I had to keep switching to view mode — a real pain on top of fiddling with all the other settings in an LCD that’s really tough to see in bright light. On top of that, the 720 continuous mode is noticeably slower than that of the A640, as is the cycle time between shots when set to single shot. A faster memory card might help with that, so we shall see. One thing though: the A720 6x telephoto zoom is indeed the ticket.

It’s a fun challenge to get decent ski shots with a point-and-shoot, but I’m thinking for the next day of this quality I’ll lug my Canon Rebel and enjoy using the automatic follow focus it provides, as well as its faster frames-per-second.