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"The snow-covered mountains in the background form a canvas that I can paint on... that's when I have the most fun."
My first encounter with photography was as a junior high school student when I borrowed my big brother's camera and took some shots. Later, in senior high school, I was chosen to shoot photos of my school's sports day. But it wasn't until I joined the photography club at university that I finally got my own camera. Probably because Mt. Tateyama was nearby, and because a lot of my friends were into skiing, my first subjects were landscapes and skiers. That was my first exposure to sports photography.
Although I was a student at the time and didn't really think of myself as a professional, I started taking sports photographs seriously at the Skiing World Cup in 1969. But my real professional debut came in November of 1970 when I was paid for an assignment as a correspondent for the Asahi Graph magazine.
At the time, there was nowhere to go to formally study sports photography, because virtually all the photographers in the field were under exclusive contract to the newspapers. So I used to look through and cut out photos from foreign sports magazines to pick up ideas about composition and other tips to develop my technique. I remember it was during this period that I took a shot that, for me, captured the true essence of sports photography. I think it was this shot that determined the direction my photography would eventually take.
In skiing photographs, the important thing is how you capture light and shadow. To effectively express these two elements, the first thing I do is decide which side of the course to shoot from, so the snow-covered mountains in the background form a canvas that I can paint on. There's a lot of tension in the air, but that's when I have the most fun.
In the photograph of the snowboarder shown here, I composed the shot so the plume of snow falls at the boundary between light and shadow. I think I managed to precisely catch the image I had in mind, one that is perfectly in tune with the snowboarder.
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