Depth of Field – Cam McLeod

My wife and I moved to Ogden, Utah in 2009 in the midst of the great recession. A terrible time to uproot and start over by most people’s standards but we were young, and Detroit just wasn’t cutting it. I was working in healthcare and applying to the University of Utah’s Physician Assistant program. Photography was a passionate hobby that I didn’t know how to turn into a job, let alone a profession. I’ve been obsessed with skiing since I was a kid growing up in Michigan. My mom was the middle school ski club director and in exchange for her time got the family season passes to the local ski hill named Bittersweet in Otsego, Michigan, a tiny rural town on the western side of the state that was only twice the size of my high school. When I was coming up, there was no such thing as terrain parks, so we skied icy, man-made moguls from a rope tow that tore your gloves apart if you didn’t use leather glove protectors. We had a crew and thought we were rock stars with our DIY bump pants and parliament cigarettes smashing moguls and taking knees to the chest under the lights on a Friday night. These were formative years.

Ski Photography was a proxy obsession. Going to the grocery stores and diving into the once giant magazine isle to thumb through the ski mags was a ritual. I would take them home to cut each gallery image out and hang them from my bedroom wall eventually covering my room floor to ceiling. The imagery was captivating, but I didn’t understand it was someone’s job to capture those moments and create that art. I didn’t even own a camera. I just knew that someday I wanted to do “that”, whatever “that” was.

Arriving in Utah was a game changer for me. I was in the Wasatch with the self-proclaimed “greatest snow on earth” and this offered new opportunities. In January of 2013 I decided to ditch the conventional path I was on and pursue that childhood fantasy of creating those images that, as a kid, transported me to far off places and epic adventures where steep skiing and deep snow were as mythical as the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot.

That same January, freshly unemployed (I mean, professional ski photographer), I walked into the Cinnabar at Snowbasin to have a beer with a friend. Underneath the ruby chandelier and sitting across from me was who I would quickly learn to be the most recent editor in chief of Powder Magazine, and now editor at large, Derek Taylor. After a quick introduction and a double IPA, DT told me he was working on a feature story about Ogden, and I of course listed off my extensive credentials in hopes of getting an in. He told me a couple of Salt Lake ski photographers were shooting all the ski action so no help was needed there. However, he did need some town stuff, something that told the story of Ogden with its railroad roots and its coming-of-age story as an up-and-coming ski town. Enthusiastically, I ran out that night and shot images of town to share with DT the next day. Apparently impressed enough, he sent the work on to the photo editor, Dave Reddick. A few days later I nervously hopped on a call with Dave to discuss helping out with the feature and get a few pointers. I ended up with 11 images in that feature including a two-page spread of ski action. This was the start of it all for me and I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to fulfill a dream with a publication that helped shape who I am today. — Cam McLeod

Below are Cam’s Top 5 of his career to date.