Ian Hylands Makes Pictures, Damn It

Park City, Utah—Ian Hylands stands in the high grass above the Deer Valley Resort just off a beautiful Utah switchback with a backpack full of camera gear and a long zoom pointed at a group of willing photo subjects ripping single track. The late afternoon sun is just about to reach the witching hour when the sky turns a rich blue and the sun warms to a golden glow.

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If you look closely, you can tell Ian is getting excited. But he’s not the type to let this excitement pour out of him. So he contains it. Like all the great photographers I know, he doesn’t want his excitement to be a distraction. He wants to focus and make sure he capitalizes on the moment, and the light.

Ian is here in Utah because he’s the full-time photographer for Niner Bikes. It’s a good day, and you have to admit, a pretty good job.

“Hundreds of people wanted the job. I went through a lot of really compelling portfolios,” says Carla Hukee, the former Global Marketing Manager at Niner who gave Ian the job.

Here’s how he got here.

Ian was born in San Mateo, but raised in Vancouver.

“I grew up with a camera in my hand, always had one,” he says. “A Kodak Instamatic when I was a kid, one of those weird disc negative cameras when I was a little older and then my dad’s old Nikon SLR in high school. My dad let me use his old Nikon whenever I wanted.”

His professional career started when he sold a photo to Mistral Snowboards in the early 90s. He shot that sport for several years until he got tired of making long, sequential shots of snowboarders flying through the air. So he switched to mountain biking and hasn’t looked back.

He freelanced in the bike world until 2010 when he landed at Pinkbike.

“I’d had other regular jobs and retainers before that, but I think Pinkbike was probably the first contract that I considered a real job,” he says.

In 2013, he got the job at Niner.

“My favorite thing about Ian is watching him work on location,” Hukee says. “Professional dancers have this quality about them where as soon as the music starts, they look like they were formed there on stage, just for that particular piece. The same thing happens as soon as Ian has a camera in his hand. Every gesture becomes so purposeful and his economy of motion produces such beautiful images. It’s a perfect mirror to the athletes he’s shooting.”

Although his job is better than 99 percent of the other jobs out there, Ian will admit that there are some parts of the work he’s not thrilled with. For example, he’s spent a lot of time photographing bikes in the studio, which can be monotonous.

“I think I’ve probably shot close to 150 different bikes on white backgrounds in the past year,” Ian says. “I’ve got that down to a science.”

There is also a lot of event coverage, which is fun, but Ian says he sometimes finds himself wishing he could chase larger, more creative projects.

“Creating is my favorite part of it, but it’s also the part that I do the least of,” Ian says. “That’s what really got to me after shooting an uncountable number of events. When you shoot an event you need to be really creative, but you’re usually just recording what’s already happening, you’re not creating anything new. I’d much rather come up with a concept, and then go out and make it happen, and I like working with other people, making images that hopefully people will remember.”

And so it is with dream jobs. They always end up being part dream, part job.

A perfect day in Ian’s life: “Waking up really early and shooting something amazing against a backdrop of the rising sun, getting a half day of work in and then going for a great breakfast somewhere. Followed by a bit of office time downloading images or video, maybe a nap, and then getting ready for an evening shoot somewhere against a backdrop of sunset and evening light.”

You see a theme developing here?