Dean 'Blotto' Gray

For over 250 days each year, for the past 11 years, Gray has been documenting the snowboarding life. In doing so, he has become one of the most inexhaustible photographers the young sport has yet seen.

As the Principal Photographer for Burton Snowboards, he is among the sport’s most prolific, most widely published and most aware of snowboarding’s cultural significance.

Shown Below are a number of photo's by Dean Gray which give me ideas and inspiration for my own work.

A number of things from this image capture me. This is what I am trying to accompish in my work. It shows the interation between the subject of the photograph and the surroundings. The surroundings, in this case the fence helps to determine the scale of the image. The snow boarder in the image is well positioned in relation to the frame and everything else in it and the level of light helps to draw your eye to the snowboarder first rather than the fence or anything else.

My own attempt of something similar is shown below.

You can above that the shading and lighting levels draw your eye to the snow boarder rather than everything else in the background.

Another of Dean Grays image is shown below.

This time more of landscape photograph, but still capturing the snowboarder giving the image alot of perspective. Also the position is allowing your eye to travel towards the space the subject will move into.

Due to my own geographical location it can be difficult to capture images like the own shown above or to re-shoot at locations like this.

Below is a photograph taken by me which I think shares alot fo the same characteristics.

Though I appreciate it is not quite on the same scale of the image by Dean Gray it still gives a good perspective of the snowboarder in relation to the background.

I do think that it would of been better to have the subject in the top and right hand thirds of the photograph allowing slighty more movement of the eye from the subject to the background.