Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
The Elements: presented by Red Bull is a relay race on steroids. Twelve kilometers of rowing, 1.3 kilometers running (carrying the boat), a climb to the top of a 2,000 meter summit, followed by a combination of running/paragliding down, finally landing on a barge, swimming to shore and finishing with a grueling mountain biking trail. At least Red Bull gives you wings? The popular energy drink company just wrapped up it’s third annual Elements race on Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie, France, and Alberta, Canada-based adventure photographer Alexandre Buisse was front-row for the action, shooting the paragliding portion of the race from both ground and air.
With a lot of Alexandre’s work centering around “the beauty and vastness of the natural world in which we are playing,” this project was right up his alley. He described his decision to shoot this particular event:
I have been pushing paragliding photography in the last year, and shot multiple times for my portfolio in Annecy already. I don’t shoot competition events very often, but the Red Bull Elements is very special in combining adventure sports in an innovative way, so it felt pretty natural for me to shoot it. And it didn’t hurt that Annecy is a truly stunning locale, with some of the finest mountain landscapes of the Alps.
Alexandre faced multiple challenges on this shoot. Because the para-gliders covered a lot of ground very quickly, Alexandre and his crew left multiple cars in key locations, and arrived at the summit of La Tournette early in the morning via helicopter before flying down tandem in order to focus on shooting. While shooting from the air, Alexandre fought through poor light and little freedom of movement. Despite all of this, he loved it, saying:
It was a lot of planning and work up ahead, then a few frantic hours of non-stop shooting, followed by a marathon session of editing. I definitely enjoyed the logistical challenges (I’m a bit weird that way), but above all the opportunity to create unique and striking images of the sports I love!
The post processing of the images was hectic for Alexandre, as he sifted through over 3,000 images to come up with a selection of only 40 of these for the press release, which was sent barely two hours later.
It was all worth it, as Alexandre received great feedback from Red Bull as well as a number of competitors, and has high hopes of retaining Red Bull as a client.