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crystal awards 2000
Jay: "The Crystal Awards is a photography competition where this year eleven photographers were invited from around the world. It’s an invite, and the photographers choose their teammates, most likely someone they have been working with for a number of years. And then you’re given five days to shoot up to 100 rolls of film. Each year it’s held in a different part of the world, so this year it was held in St. Moritz. All of the photos have to come within ten resorts or backcountry in the St. Moritz region there. And you submit photos for each of the eight categories and then at the end of the five days, 20% of the vote comes over the internet and then the remaining vote from all of the photographers and athletes themselves who are judges (22 people), but you can’t vote for your own photos in any of the categories. Then there are an additional 22 people brought in, from sixteen years old to seventy years old, and they have some involvement with snow sports. Some of them are involved with magazines, some of them are photographers themselves, some are other pro-riders that were not directly involved with the competition, some are people who originally founded the ski resorts. But they’re there to judge photos. So, they want people from different backgrounds, different tastes and things, because they’re ultimately judging the photo itself, not how fancy the trick is, or whatever. And so out of the eight categories, Justin and I won three. We won more categories than anyone else! We won best air, best turn, which is the powder turn, and best black & white image, which Justin is very known for, his black & white still photography and filmmaking. So, naturally we had a good shot at that one because he just shoots so much black & white, he’s so good at it that we had a real edge on it." Justin: "It’s really unique in that it’s not a rider’s contest at all. And everyone picks the rider they want to work with. And for me the natural choice was to go with Jay, for sure. I felt like there was a lot of luck involved that week. Good and bad. The good was I got these winning pictures in the categories I was hoping for. The bad was getting there. I had to put together a photo submission for Snowboarder the night before leaving for Europe. Naturally I put it off ‘til the last minute and stayed up all night doing that, um, and got on the seven o’clock in the morning flight, immediately went to sleep, and I think they fly us through Ketchikan or something on the way to Seattle, and made everybody get off the plane including me and I was kind of in a daze and I think I lost my ticket when they made me get off the plane because once I got to Seattle I woke up there, kinda, and had about an hour and a half to make my flight to Amsterdam and couldn’t find my ticket anywhere. So, I frantically searched all over the place and couldn’t find it, and they couldn’t reissue me another ticket in time, so I was stuck there and pissed, and spent the night. The next morning I caught another flight, they had to route me a different way through Minneapolis, and the Minneapolis flight was delayed leaving, so we got into Amsterdam late, missed my connecting flight from Amsterdam, so, um, they had to reroute me through Schtugard and then Schtugard finally to Zurich. By the time I got to Zurich no one knew where my bags were and, ah, so I just went to a friend’s house and waited there for a couple hours hoping my bags would come, and hoped that a lot of the equipment I needed for this contest would show up. And then, it finally did show up about ten, so I got my rental car, drove across Switzerland and went to sleep for maybe an hour or two on the road, woke up going over the Julier Pass, which is the last thing that you deal with before getting into St. Mortiz. And it was dumping snow on the pass and I’d heard that there was no snow at all in St. Moritz, not really sure why we were even going at that point, just because the guy who put it on was a cool cat and I’d committed to this quite awhile ago, so everyone was just gonna go anyways, even though conditions were miserable. They had the worst season I think in their recorded history or something ridiculous like that, just not any snow at all. Then it started snowing right as I was driving over the pass, it just started snowing super hard and ah, let’s see, the rental car I was in, I was driving up these switchbacks and I could tell I didn’t have much traction, and on one of the switchbacks there was a truck coming downhill and I had to stop to let it go by, otherwise we would have had like a little slow-speed head on, and so I waited for him to pass by and I couldn’t get going again, cause they forgot to take the racing slicks off the rental car, just no traction at all. And every time I’d try to go for it I’d move backwards. So I flipped it around and figured I’d have better traction in reverse. So, I reversed up the rest of the mountain. You know it was like in the middle of the night so I’m not dealing with too many cars, but the ones that did pass me were just like ‘what?’ So, I got to the top, I stopped, took a few pictures, and dropped into St. Moritz. "I was there a day late for the contest, and it’s a five day contest so I had four days and I felt like I was behind, which I was, and ah, so I slept a couple hours, went out and shot with Jay, shot the next day with Jay, and we were having a night session on handrail, on a metal, curved handrail, and it was a pretty sick set up. But the handrail broke and Jay kind of impaled himself on the support beam holding the handrail up, and he ended up getting three stitches, like in his groin area, and at the same time we had good luck because it could’ve been a lot worse than it was… "The next day, we were just like, let’s get this contest done, and Jay was still into it, so we went up and tried to ride a little bit, and it didn’t really work out that day, but the following day, he was just on it again, and was jumping off this hotel, which is also a good stroke of luck. We were looking around for something to do and the snow had all been piled up by a snowplow right under this roof, so it was kind of almost a natural transition already. But being in Switzerland I knew that the hotel manager would never let us, you know, climb on the roof and jump off it, like you know, forget it. And Jay was just all, ‘ah come on, it’d be perfect, let’s do it,’ so I know Swiss-German, so I went up to talk to the lady and she was actually cool with it. She made us sign a waver. (laughs) She drew up a waiver while Jay’s jumping off her roof (more laughing). Um, yeah, he jumped off it several times, and that was one of the winning pictures (Black & White). I shot that from inside the hotel looking out the window. The other two were taken on the last day of the contest. Which was really lucky. With the Powder Turn we were trying to do this thing where he makes a turn and then cuts right underneath his spray, like you would a wave, and he kinda went a little too far and I thought it didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted it to, but it looked good. So we submitted it anyway, it was a pretty different looking powder turn, so we submitted it. You can see a little block, like a square fan starting to rise up from his board, instead of like the usual curved snow, whatever you call it, snow fan, or I don’t know what you’d call it. Anyway, if you look at it you see that it’s a really sudden turn and that it’s square instead of rounded, if that makes any sense. And the third one was the Air. Usually we wait, I have radios to talk to Jay, and it was a pretty big cliff and it was a pretty good landing, although it wasn’t that steep, it had a lot of really good powder on it, and he jumped it a few times and the sun was kind of moving in and out from behind the clouds and it just looked really cool when the sun was slightly behind the clouds, it kind of diffused the light instead of your stock full blue shot, or full clear sun shot, so I told him ‘go, go’ and he’s all, ‘but the sun’s covered’ and I said ‘go anyway it’s perfect now’ and he went, styled it really good, and that was the third one." Jay: "We work good together, we’re a good team, you know, and since the top overall three of this year’s competition are automatically in the Crystal Awards next year, now we are back for next year, which is awesome. I couldn’t think of a more unique and enjoyable competition to be involved in. So awesome. So awesome." Teri Tibbett is a freelance writer, photographer, musician, and snowboard rider living in Juneau, Alaska. |
