Last week we had a nice pocket of sunshine here in Whistler and we all decided to use up some budget on some heli time with Blackcomb aviation.  It’s always a decision that needs some thought, heli time is ludicrously expensive ($2300 an hour of flying time) so when you split that up between a filmer, two skier and myself even a small day is going to run you $1500 to $2000 each !  When you consider the prices that magazines pay for photos it’s not something you can jump into unless you are pretty certain to return a profit.  I’m running a business after all, and whilst it might be fun as hell there’s bills to pay!  Incidentally , I didn’t ski a single run during our day for all those who think we just cruise around shredding pow 🙂  Mostly we get dropped off at the shooting spot and picked right back up again by the heli.  We shot one line with the doors off sitting on the floor of the heli hanging out the side.  Otherwise we would just point out our shooting spot to the pilot and he’d drop us right there.  Doors off shooting is obviously pretty fun, but it burns serious air time so you might end up paying $1000 or more every time you do it.  Unless we are rolling on a huge budget we don’t do it all the time as some people think.  Anyway it turned out to be a great day, the snow was a little touchy and Riley triggered a slide on his second line that nearly swept him off a cliff.  Thankfully he tumbled right to his feet and traversed out of it.  I shot a photo right as the slide cracked (see below) but after that I was too busy keeping an eye on him so I didn’t hold the trigger down too long.  Throughout the day , temperatures rose gradually and natural slides started to come down in the afternoon so we called it a day at about 3pm.  Unfortunately as always the ski photos need to stay under wraps until they are published but here’s a few shots from our day.  Click through to see more!