Original subtitles

Not sure that you can get this shot,

which is sort of crazy to me.

I didn't think that I dreamt up something

that was like truly impossible,

but I don't know if this one can be done.

I think one of the basic things to being human is to tell stories

to the people around us to make sense of our existence.

For a long time we've looked at the stars to connect with these stories

and pass down myths and legends to generations around us.

So this journey to create this Nebula photograph is my way

of telling a new story about a camera.

My last celestial ski photo- graph was in the higher arctic of Norway.

A couple of skiers and myself tried to capture a solar eclipse

and to photograph skiers in front of them.

Before that there was the ski photo that launched my career

where I went up to the Yukon and shot a photo of a skier in front of the Northern Lights.

Now I'm trying to create a 3rd and final photograph in this series

of the Orion Nebula, which is a cloud of dust and gas in deep space where stars are being born.

This is something that you would associate with the Hubble telescope

but I'm gonna shoot it from earth and I'm gonna try to put a skier in the image.

This image is going to take both the hardest parts of Eclipse and Aurora

and put them together into one incredibly difficult shot.

The Orion Nebula is a thousand lightyears away

And I have to line that up with James on a ridge,

the camera has to be on a special mount that tracks the sky

And I have to do all of that with flash photography

on a night where the sky is clear and when there is no moon

that happens twice a year.

And all of that is hopefully gonna come together in this one

little moment where everything works out and

we create another impossible photograph.

50 is when we are gonna able to shoot this.

It's getting cloudy.

That's one for one on flash, that's such good news.

Right now it feels like we've a potential like alignment, stuff looks right,

if we get this flash going it's gonna work.

From Whats going on?

The flash is no longer being consistent

Didn't work, didn't work, didn't work, didn't work, didn't work.

Oh my god, the battery just started dying in the transmitter

and we got maybe about 15 minutes until Orion completely disappears.

There is nothing indicating that we gonna figure this out really well.

And then there is other stuff even once we get this flash working, it's not working on the other end.

The chaos of it I expected but right now I'm hitting a wall

that I had no idea I was gonna find.

I don't know what to do guys, I think that's a no photo night.

I got nothing, that's never happened.

That's insane

Holy crap.

Yeah buddy.

Oh my goodness, that was better than I thought it could have been.

I hope I didn't fuck that up.

I think we might be here ten months from now.

I changed my mind, maybe it is possible.

This terrain feature works, the setup works

but it's still just so ridiculous.

I got into photography mostly to find a new creative pursuit

that I didn't have in common with two older brothers growing up.

And photography started for me being a piece of an identity

that I could form who I was and do something that was intrinsically me.

I think that on the longterm evolved into me doing these crazy weird photographs

where this is my way of finding and expressing individuality

and creativity for myself.

After I did Eclipse I was like: Oh I think I peaked, I'm over,

like that's the end of me as a ski photographer, that's the coolest thing I'll ever do.

But I think there did seem to be a bunch of pressure to do

more of these types of photographs.

I took that very personally and thought I guess I still havent really proved

myself as a photographer.

For the next year that sometimes actually fostered as like a bit

of a depressive idea that I still had to do something different.

And Ive come to peace with the fact that I might now never

create something bigger, better or whatever.

but I'm still gonna express creativity in the way that I find it naturally occurs for me.

We make these stories around everything.

A camera even has a story around it.

And the story that we hear and most commonly think of is that the camera is something that captures reality and holds it.

For me I'm taking an image that I've created in my head and then I'm going out to try and find

the place and the time and the situation to be able to make that real.

The camera for me then becomes this projector where I will be

taking this image and projecting it out into reality.

And when it goes right, it's like deja vu and for this one

moment the shutter closes, I don't see anything

and that moment should be the moment that I've been thinking about

and then all of a sudden you have that moment,

you have that photograph and you have that experience.

Over the year I always sort of knew that a version of this photo was gonna be possible,

but for a long time I just didn't even want to put in the effort to create it.

I was just so burned out from how difficult and confusing the whole thing was.

The last big problem to solve was the flash photography and to do that I just got rid of it

and Im going with an old film technic where you do a double exposure in the camera.

One short for action and one really long for the Nebula.

So all that has to align on this, we need a clear sky with stable snow on this mountain;

I need... batteries never to die, this entire gizmo to work,

me be able to find the north star if that's clouded out I can't do the entire thing;

He needs to hit a turn at one specific moment with a headlamp on, a 2nd headlamp lighting up his background.

and then I need to shoot a photo of that thing, I need to switch five different things on the

camera all within a short amount of time while the camera will let me shoot two different exposures.

The setup, the check, the double check, the triple check, all of those say that

"�Yes, this is exactly where I should be sitting"�

but its so close and it just feels so nerve wrecking that

I can't tell whether or not it's actually gonna do this properly.

So I'm sweating it right now being like, I'm in the right spot, this is where I wanna be

but oh my god I don't want to be here right now

because for the next hour and a half I'm just gonna be like paranoid watching a single star

just being like: Don't go, don't go, don't disappear!

All through earlier today and last night I was telling myself,

like no, this is how success works, it feels super stressful

but like I didn't really wanna even hear my own advise.

It's honestly gonna be quite surprising if this is successful

I shouldn't say that but that's honestly the way that I feel.

I am ready.

Dropping.

Fuck, no I fucked it up.

Ah guys, I totally screwed that up, I'm so sorry.

Can we scurry you back up and set up for the next thing.

I did a 20 second exposure for the action photo, so I got a big smear brightness down the entire thing.

I am ready

Dropping

Sorry guys, no bueno on that one can we keep hiking, things are still lining up we got this.

I just need to figure out what was going on with some headlamps there,

it doesn't quite look right.

Don't you dare be gone.

That was weird, what happened, I don't know...

One, two, three, four... twenty seconds

We got it guys,

thank you so much,

oh my god!

We got it? 100%?

Yea, like it's a pretty damn cool image.

Wow, oh my...

Here you're doing the turn...

Dude, what...

You are fucking skiing in space!

You're skiing in space dude! That's insane!