You know you’ve made it in action photography when you travel 30 hours on airplanes to get to a country you know nothing about and work your way through customs with a visa that has your name spelled wrong.
That’s exactly what happened to Rhododendron-based photographer Darcy Bacha during a recent excursion to Kazakhstan for Transworld Snowboarding Magazine. He made it into the country just fine and got to enjoy one of his craziest trips ever, full of great action shots.
There have been a lot of crazy trips and great shots for the 26-year-old Bacha lately. First he made it to the finals of the Olympus Pro Photographer Showdown in Whistler. Then he worked his way up to number two on the Transworld “Exposure Meter,” based on the number and size of photographs published in top U.S. magazines. And now he is up for the prestigious photo of the year award from Powder Magazine for an image he captured last May on Mount Hood of Sammy Carlson flying off into the sunset through a gap in the clouds.
That photo won’t be unveiled until the next issue of Powder hits the newsstands, but I have seen it and it is amazing. Between the light, the composition, the scenery and Carlson’s amplitude and form, it is hard to imagine another photograph beating it out.
The only thing is, the judges may not feel right selecting this image because Bacha just won the same award two years ago for another photo of Carlson on Mount Hood — pulling a dub seven through surreal light high above the clouds near Illumination Rock.
In naming it photo of the year in 2012, the editors of Powder Magazine called Bacha’s Illumination shot of Carlson “one of the most unique images that has ever graced the front page.”
From Philly to Hood
Bacha got his start in photography back in middle school, where he got to use a dark room to develop his own black and white images. He started out shooting skateboarders in his home town of Philadelphia and the occasional snowboarder up in the Poconos, but he didn’t fully commit himself to being a photographer until after he moved to Oregon.
His mom and he had wanted to move to Oregon since taking a family trip to the west coast when Bacha was 12. They explored the Oregon Coast and the Redwoods, and at the end of the trip at Mount Hood Bacha got his first experience snowboarding a large mountain. They had such a good time on that trip that when a job opened up in Oregon they jumped at the chance to transfer to Mount Hood eight years ago.
Living on the mountain and riding often, Bacha became an accomplished snowboarder. But after blowing out his knee twice — once during a halfpipe competition in Jackson Hole and the other time out-jumping a landing on Hood in summer — he decided to back off from hard-core riding and focus on photography.
It isn’t easy to make a living shooting photos for magazines these days, but Bacha worked his way up in the business quickly. He worked for Timberline and Windells and before long he was landing magazine shoots. Winning Powder’s photo of the year award in 2012 was a major career breakthrough.
“That was huge,” says Bacha. “It was my first time being in such a public spotlight for my photography. I definitely picked up lots of jobs after that went down.”
Those jobs took him from Hood to Kazakhstan to Alaska and back to Hood again last season, shooting some of the best snowboarders and skiers in the world: Johnnie Paxson, Bjorn Leines, Tim Humphreys, Alex Schlopy, Tommy Ellingson and Sammy Carlson, just to name a few.
How he got the shot
Between all the air travel, gear-lugging and wrestling with 500-pound snowmobiles in three feet of powder, it was a super-busy winter for Bacha, and by the time May rolled around he was pretty tired. Until he met up with Sammy Carlson and started scouting out the Mount Hood backcountry for new terrain for fresh images.
On May 28, 2014, Bacha, Ellingson, Schlopy and Carlson and friends set out for the west side of Mount Hood, way past Illumination Rock. “It’s just endless features everywhere over there, and the snow that time of year is really good for building big jumps,” he says.
“Plus the sunsets up there are insane.”
After analyzing the terrain they found the right spot and started building their jump for maximum effect.
Here’s how Bacha remembers the shoot:
It was a quarter-pipe hip sort of feature, and Sammy was just blasting these huge alley-oop 180s. And he got that trick down during the day when the light was good. There was this massive cloud that had covered the sky, and we were thinking maybe the sun would peek out. It looked like there was a little blip right at the horizon, and I was thinking maybe we would get that red light, and it would just hit that crack and illuminate everything and you guys will drop, and we’ll get the shot.
When the light hit that crack in the horizon we literally had three minutes. I was shooting directly into the sun, using a strobe. Sammy did a massive alley oop and stomped his trick and rode out, and I was just looking at the back of my camera thinking, Holy Shit, this one is good. I mean, when I’m up there with Sammy every shot we get is usually pretty good, but this one was crazy good – like the shot we got at Illumination Rock a few years ago.
They kept on shooting for as long as the light held up. Their plan was to camp out on the glacier under the stars, but it looked like some weather was moving in, so they strapped on headlamps and made that long hard left turn through the gnarly snow to return to civilization.
They made it back to Timberline Lodge at about 1 in the morning. Bacha knew he had something special, but he says it never occurred to him that his shot was good enough to put him in the running once again for Powder’s photo of the year.
“I never expected this. It’s incredible to be a contender again.”
Here is a Vimeo slideshow of Bacha’s work, assembled for the 2014 Olympus Pro Photographer Showdown:
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Last modified: November 19, 2014
