Mountain Hardwear Stretchdown Campaign

This fall I was asked to work on a project I was very excited to do: shoot a campaign for outdoor apparel brand Mountain Hardwear (click to see the photos on their site). The client selected Utah’s Uinta mountains for the location and used their ambassadors for the talent. This was a 4-day shoot, two days in the mountains and two in the studio. We shot in three different locations in the mountains over the two days, waking up at 3:30 to get the summit photos from Bald Mountain. The collaboration with Mountain Hardwear’s creative team was super fun, and I’m looking forward to more shoots with this great client!

Interesting Aside:
We were shooting in an alpine environment, especially on the first day of the shoot, and anything can happen at high elevation. We had to wake up at 3:30am to get to the summit of Bald Mountain before sunrise. When we were a couple hundred feet short of the summit, a storm squall rolled in, spitting lightning and hail, and we decided to call that part of the shoot for everyone’s safety before a frame was captured. But the squall passed after 15 minutes and before we’d gotten too far back down the trail, leaving us with amazing, tumultuous light. We watched as other squalls passed within a few miles of us, but we were in the clear for the rest of the day. Stormy weather can be a blessing in disguise because you get much more interesting photos than on a bluebird day.