Natural stone arch Aiguille Percée, Tignes, the Alps, France January 2012.

An amazing and weird structure coming out of the snow. I have never got round to hiking up to it, something I really want to do though. Taken with Canon S100 point and shoot! Amazing little camera, review coming soon.

I was in Tignes, France last week. The views of the mountains are always breath taking.

I had a week off last week and went with 40 other people to Alpe D’huez in France for a week of snowboarding. The snow wasn’t the best, but there were blue skies every day to make up for it.

Here are a selection of snowboarding and skiing pictures from my trip to Val Thorens in France late last year. This is a fun little roof drop just off of our hotel into a very rough landing! Here Jim does his best mid-air ice angel impression.

Rob is a man who is not afraid of hurting himself. These two shots were taken on Sigma 10mm fisheye lens (review).

Found a couple of fun powder runs, quite a bit of hiking at 3500m really takes the breath out of you, but well worth it! I shot these photos on the Canon 70-200mm F/2.8, a great lens as you can shot from a good distance away and zoom in to get a lot of turns in as the rider goes down the mountain.

In Val Thoren town there were a couple of jumps and drops, I wish I had got more photos of it. This was taken with the Sigma 10mm fisheye again, and using Elinchrom skyports (review) to trigger the external flash guns.

Town kicker 360 on skis

The weather was pretty bad all week which was really annoying. On the first day the lifts were shut completely, so just made some kickers and hiked up the mountain a bit. The rest of the time the weather was pretty much over-cast like this, not ideal photo taking weather!

Considering how early in the season we went (14th December 2008) I guess we were pretty lucky with the snow, the year before in Tignes was better, probably the best weather I have ever skied in! I am going back out to Italy at the end of this month for some more snow action, so I am hoping for blue skies and a lot less wind!

Christmas and New Years always seems to take up so much time! I will do a proper update with some new work later this week. For now here’s a picture of the recent snow fall in the Oxfordshire Downs, near Blewbury.

This is just a quick post to say I am back from the French Alps after a weeks snowboarding in mostly white-out conditions! Not the beautiful blue skies I enjoyed this time last year… I did improve my boarding a lot, but I think skiing is still the best way to keep your equipment out of harms way on the slopes! No damage done though, the weather sealing on the Canon 580EX MKII flash seemed to keep the snow out! Above is a quick shot of one the the lifts (70-200mm) at the top in a rare glimse of blue sky! I will post up some more of the shots from the week once I have finished editing them.