pleasure photo special 2010 - it's done!

hellawork the last couple of weeks, but finally it's done and in print: 148 pages full of the finest in snowboard photography. i'm really stoked on it and can't wait until it hits the shelves on january 15th!

to cut down more than 30.000 to the top 120 was not an easy task. section style again :)

thanks to all photographers involved, especially for the quick interviews. i love you guys!

have a nice christmas!

air&style 2009 II

what a weekend!

after not posting for quite a while due to extensive (and boring) office work, the air & style in innsbruck is the perfect opportunity to return to blogging.

WEDNESDAY...

innsbruck was once again hosting the air & style, first time with a straight jump again. the whole thing started off on wednesday already. stubai had prepared a nice training kicker on the glacier and bluebird plus half a meter of fresh were not the worst arguments to start the weekend even one day earlier.

a lot of the riders were up there, training. grilo (picture above) amongst them, being one of the replacement riders in case, one of the main field riders get hurt. throwing down doubles already today.

after checking into the hotel in innsbruck, öfi and i went to the riders dinner and to the jimmys later on to start off a nice series of IBK nights. i love this town, its always nice to come back here, feels almost like home already :)

funny first night with iouri and travis, opening champagne bottles the fancy way. see for yourself in the next gossip of pleasure mag...

THURSDAY...

was rather a 'black thursday'... seb toutant pulled the worst overshoot ever, checking into the jump as very first rider. speaking of 'overshooting' does not nearly describe this slam. his highest point was at the half of the landing and he crashed from around 20m of height almost to flat. (see the two crosses on the pic below)

i could not watch the impact, thinking he would for sure die. sepp braun was the event doctor again and there after just seconds for first care. of course, everybody was shocked and nobody could think of riding anymore. after an hour, rumors came through, that seb suffered only minor injuries, being fully checked in the innsbruck hospital.

after these good news, the riders decided to continue training, also to get rid of the first shock.

coming back to the hotel, we finally got the (still unbelieveable) good news, that seb only broke the inner ankle and had some smaller injuries. what a relief! of course, we had to celebrate and ended up at jimmy's again...

FRIDAY...

2nd day of training, first double corks and heavier tricks. werni stock liking the kicker and easily throwing down one front 10 after the other.

werni stock

christian brecheis and i could not watch the training though, as we had to do portraits for the upcoming article. we borrowed a sword from michi zirngibl (thanks, bro... snus is on the way!) and lolli gave us his fog machine. cyril brought us a couple meters of black photo background (thanks for that, cyril!) and so we had a quite simple setup next to the riders room at bergisel.

we shot for full 6 hours and somehow managed to get good portraits of every single rider.

the day ended at weekender LATE... first time i checked the watch was 5 a.m. resulting in quite some hangover for the main day of the event. very clever, i have to say... :( hehehe.

mugl was voted 'most drunk editor' and we had to hide his face to protect the innocent! :)

SATURDAY...

the contest day begun with a big hangover. well, it was feeling like straight coming from the party to be honest. a nice breakfast (thanks bene!) saved my life kind of.

off to bergisel at 10, trying to prepare everything for the event. lolli came early afternoon and we checked the possibilities for our new flash project that we were planning for this air&style event. not too easy, as the air&style once again made it impossible to set up flashes anywhere near the table.

it was working out nevertheless and we were super stoked with the result of the shoot.

who else was super stoked, was of course grilo, who was the most consistent rider over the whole evening and so well deserved won the air&style superfinal against peetu, wiig and iouri.

well done, grilo! big day for slovenia :)

after a quick shower, we all went to stadtcafé for the VIP party, having the 4th super fun night in a row. met so many people that night, it was unbelieveable. thanks everybody, this night (and the 3 nights before) reminded me, how i love snowboarding and all the people involved. what a great family to be born into ;)

iouri and grilo, stoooked!

hasi was there!

silli, danger, toby and mr. shitface...

SUNDAY...

sunday it was time to move out of my new 'appartment'. peetu totally overslept (what a wonder) so i took him to munich airport. he had dinner invitation for later that day with the finish president, so he kinda had to catch his flight.

turned out to be an easy one, no traffic and a smooth 1,5h drive from IBK to MUC.

what a weekend. again. thanks air&style, thanks innsbruck for one of the most memorable contests ever!

the flood...

oh my gush! rain is really the last thing that comes to your mind down here in karpathos. well, from time to time it CAN happen... but the incidents in the past 5 hours are beyond everything... its not rain anymore, its a fucking FLOOD!

the day started super nice, bluebird... i saw an insane sunrise on my daily run in the morning. no wind though... NOTHING... forecast was 2-3 bft from southeast, so worst case scenario and everybody was preparing for a lazy day with lot of reading, some naps and lots of 'mythos'.

turned out to be totally different than expected: at around 3 p.m. the wind picked up and we sailed devils bay with bigger sails first, later on around 5,7, waves getting bigger.

we finished the session at 6p.m... that's when it started to 'rain'.

at 6.30 i already had to dry my room for the first time... some plastic piece was stuck in the pipe, so my whole balcony was flooded about 10cm high and the water was starting to por into my room... towel job #01

meanwhile, the main station was already sorrounded by small streamlets, growing bigger and bigger... that was when I decided to leave the wetsuit on as it seemed to be the only adequate piece of cloth. the small riverbed next to the station was already half a meter deep and alost impossible to cross.

we stayed in the main station until half past seven, waiting for the 'rain' to stop. got some beers (still in dressed in decent black neoprene) and got some cookies from harald's room. well, that was our delicious dinner for today...

meanwhile, we ended up in the hotel bar (which literally is the only almost-dry place in the whole hotel)... i'm so NOT looking forward to tomorrow and cleaning up the whole mess...

peace & out

new baby - unboxing

i'm back down in karpathos for a short week. september sessions... way calmer than in summer. a bit less warm, no more people. perfect for a week of relaxing before the season starts off with full swing.

brought my new small freestyle wave baby with me already and set it up yesterday. weighs pretty much nothing and i can't wait to ride it now.

wind is a bit too low for the small one right now. yet, we've been sailing with 4,7 the whole day yesterday. forecast looks promising.

the macbook micro...

finally i got it! my dell mini 9 arived today and the cool thing is: mac osx is running on it. not only it runs smoothly, it also supports all settings whatsoever. no matter if it was getting online, transferring all mail accounts via the me.com account or even running system updates. this small bro takes it all, no hassle!

hansi gave me that tip about a week ago, as we were discussing wether it would make sense to take a netbook for travelling with osx running on it to have a sub sized machine just for downloading pictures from the cam to a harddisk or doing the daily mail traffic.

this little thingy is PERFECT for this... its got a 16GB solid state harddrive (does not sound too big, but its enough to take the system and all necessary helper programs, even photoshop!), 3 usb ports, a built in SD card reader, a webcam, ethernet, bluetooth and wifi.

apple should definately come up with a low end / low cost solution like this for people on the road who aren't willing to leave osx at home... !

stoked! thanks, hansi!

new gear for 2010

yiiha, the new gear for 2010 finally got unveilled. colours will be orange/violet again, the sails being much brighter though with a white framing. my choice will be the combats again for the sails (after some not-so-good experiences with the flys this year). for the boards, the choice will be the 98l freestyle pro again (with a sick new contoured deck shape) and for the small board it will be a 85l freestyle wave pro.

the sails are not pure white but slightly coloured blueish (they call it 'pearl')... looking forward to get the gear in the next couple of weeks!

- nerd -

back home... or back from home?

we finally are back home safe and sound. the travel was easy as everytime. AOK airport was rebuilt past the last six years and has now opened, so everything is even a bit more comfy. it lacks a little bit of the old charme though.

however, i was able to bring back a boardbag full of boards and sails for home use plus a stealth golf bag with station sails to be repaired. again, nothing was charged.

the weather in germany is no point of discussion this summer, but we expected worse, at least we could still wear our flippy floppies and short pants. the fridge being empty of course, we decided to go our for a nice bavarian dinner and had wurschtsalad with brezn' and schnitzel with bratkartoffeln and - of course - a good bavarian beer.

thanks alex b.t.w. for the app tipp for those nice 4-pic sheets! ;)