Stock photography is a very strange business, with thousands of photographers around the world trying to eke out a living by trying to anticipate the visual fodder needs of editors or designers. One of the scenarios a numbers of these guys have decided could be the next big requirement is photos of snowboarders in business suits, and some of the results are quite special...

Honest Slogans is a great single-theme Tumblr that imagines what would happen if companies used honest marketing slogans. It got us thinking what might happen to the world of snowboarding...

In 1991, Brett "Cowboy" Kobernik was the first person to saw a snowboard in half, thus inventing the splitboard. Over the following two decades splitboarding slowly become more popular as it moved from the realms of solitary bearded blokes hacking apart snowboards in garages, to being shiny products anyone can buy in shops. The last few years in particular have seen a noticeable surge in the number of splitboards being produced by a whole raft of manufacturers, but we couldn't help noticing that the unique development of splitboarding has left a slightly odd legacy...

So that's the five-ringed circus over for another four years. One of the unexpected highlights for us was the poetic musings Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood when they were let lose on the BBC coverage. To tide you over until it all starts again in Pyeongchang 2018, we've created some cut-out-and-keep memorabilia so you can relive their words of wisdom any time you like...

Just like our friends at the NSA, the team at Illicit Snowboarding have been tracking and spying on all the world's conversations. Here's the scoop of what we've found people have been talking about at the Sochi Olympics up to this point...

We though we'd have a go at creating some motivational posters for snowboarding. These things are guaranteed Facebook bait, so this post is bound to be a winner. It's just a common snowboard saying stuck on a stock photo, how hard could it be?...

We thought it would be interesting to have a crack at making some gifs, but we didn't just want to produce yet more of the same gifs of video clips that have suddenly started to swamp the internet. We thought we'd take another often maligned form of photography, the sequence shot, and see what would happen if we combined the two. It turns out that you can get some really interesting effects by reanimating sequence photography. See what you think...

What would the Internet be like without an endless stream of penguins Photoshopped onto snowboards? We're about to find out...

Earlier this year Electric decided to revamp their brand and go through the monstrous process of changing all their stationary. The resulting rebrand was all over the recent design trend of hipster branding like an ironic suit. This week we thought it would be a good idea to hipsterise a bunch of other snowboard brands...

After all the excitement of recent weeks and the sudden proliferation of posts, we're finally back to our more sedate weeklyish article rate. This week to simulate your eyes I've arted a pretty poster depicting some of the very first snowboards; a time when snowboards still weren't called snowboards and when they were so savage they all had to be controlled by leash....

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned an art competition Nokia and Burton are running. That competition is now at the public voting stage so we decided to see how things were progressing. There was good news, bad news and sphincter-looseningly-terrifying news. The good news is that 391 people entered into the competition, the bad news is that I had to wade through 391 entries to write this article, and the sphincter-looseningly-terrifying news is that now it has come to the public vote some of the most intense crap we've ever seen is somehow winning the vote. Democracy is taking one hell of a beating, and it needs your help...

We're back after a temporary travelling-in-the-middle-of-nowhere caused hiatus. This week we look at a site you're all familiar with called Fine Art America. No? You must have heard of them. Its the only place to be for all things art according to their home page: 

Fine Art America is home to 113,275 of the world's greatest living artists and photographers. Browse through our collection of 2,918,037 images - all of which can be purchased as framed prints, canvas prints, greetings cards, and more. When you're ready, we'll deliver a museum-quality masterpiece right to your doorstep.

It must be good, that's 7.5 times more museum-quality masterpieces than the Louvre...

"Picture editor, I need a photo for a story we're printing about snowboarding."

"No problem. Do you want the snowboarder to be doing anything specific?"

“Yeah, I need an action shot, get a picture of them jumping”

“Should be simple enough. Do you want them jumping in a park or do you want a freeride shot?”

“What the hell does freeride mean? Is it one of those Instagram filter things? I like the park idea though, it's much more original than a plain old mountain. Let's switch it up even more and have them jumping in the middle of a city street, without any snow.”

“In the middle of a road? Are you sure, it will only be a foot high standing jump and it will look really awkward.”

“Of course I’m sure, do you think I’m an idiot? Also I want it at night, the snowboarder needs to look petrified and I need him to be chased by a huge Ukrainian prostitute.”

“Really? Is that all?”

“Oh yeah, the snowboarder needs to be Todd Richards.”…

If you're editing a newspaper and you need to rustle up some photos to quickly tart up a crappy article about snowboarding, then you can turn to stock photography for help. Unfortunately the models don't have the first clue about snowboarding...

2012 is going to be the year of the pro snowboarder action figure. Until now only 6 snowboarders had been lucky enough to be immortalised in plastic for eternity, but this year there’s a deluge and another 16 lucky snowboarders will get their own Mini-Me’s.

Here’s a look at the runners and riders…

Just been to the London Art Fair (coz I'm all cultured 'n shit) and spotted two photographer/artists who are both hitting up European ski resorts for inspiration. There were a couple of photos that caught the eye... 

A couple of weeks ago a UK based advertising company with the sinister name of Captive Media, produced the world’s first piss-controlled computer games system. Finally we’re getting what we thought we were promised five years ago when Nintendo launched the Wii. The main aim of the system (or pisstem) is to find yet another way to squeeze just a few more advertising opportunities into the already advertising-saturated lives of the jaded public. One of the first games is a snowboard game where you control a screen by adjusting your aim. It's spawned a thousand pun headlines across the British press and now it’s spawned this article. We decided to see how this joystick-controlled ad fitted in with the other ambient or outdoor (out-of-home) advertising that's been produced, so here's the top 10 examples we could find...

This week we thought we’d try our hand at rewriting the history of skiing and snowboarding by pushing the invention of snowboarding forward by about 50 years and seeing if we can fool anyone…

Shaun White rakes in about $9million a year for this snowboarding lark according to Forbes magazine. A top snowboard pro like White can earn about $100,000 a year in prize money and that makes up just over 1% of the the pot, the other 99% comes from sponsorships. To put things into context, Shaun White earned more money in 2008 from endorsements than every single baseball player and every American football player except for Payton Manning.

Shaun White appeals to a type of audience that is not normally interested in snowboarding and because of that he is attractive to companies from outside snowboarding looking to appeal to that wider audience. You can see that reflected in a list of his major sponsors, it's an eclectic mix that no other snowboarder comes close to matching; Burton, Target, BF Goodrich, Oakley, Ubisoft, Vail Resorts, Red Bull and Hewlett Packard.

In a similar way that Shaun White appeals to people and advertisers outside of the sport, snowboarding itself has that ability. Ever since snowboarding started to push its way into popular culture advertisers with nothing do with the sport have been keen to jump on the bandwagon. Today we take a look at some of the most interesting TV commercials that have come out of this uneasy relationship...

It's mid August and already the first gear guides are in the shops. That's the internationally recognised warning sign that we’ll  soon have to pick up our blog production above our lackadaisical summer levels.

The fist magazine to come our way was Onboard's 2011/2012 gear guide and from our first cursory leaf through it looks like there’s a few other people still working on summer time in the snowboard marketing industry. Here's a few of the misguided advertising campaigns you can look forward to seeing in the early days of the new season...