Having come up in the game, documenting dance music in its heyday and providing the visual style for the new media movement that was the Men’s Lifestyle press, Cody Burridge has gained a sturdy, artistic reputation on the London photographic scene, conceptualising a striking, surreal aesthetic in both his editorial and advertising work.

Like laughing children pulling the wings off a fly, we thought it would probably be pretty funny to take away all of his film cameras, kick him out of the studio and plot him up in a hostile, uncontrollable and potentially limb-threatening environment to road-test the Olympus E-1 digital system. And see if he would break his legs.

Never the man to shy away from a challenge (seriously, throw down the Bboy gauntlet and watch him Moonwalk you clear off the floor) Cody squared up to us at the Orange Brits, UK snowboard championships in Les Deux Alpes, France for his first taste of the Winter sports and the digital format, not to mention the creation of some truly stunning, Del Boy-esque cockney Franglaise.

In his early days at St Martin’s, Cody originally trained as a painter. His style involved the painstakingly accurate recreation of the real, and then the distortion of this clarity – much like the domino toppler who spends hours setting up intricate patterns of tiles, only to find the true beauty come with the entire arrangements’ collapse.

Photography was a logical progression of this art. Photoshop, years of practice and a perverse love of operation manuals, enabled the painterly style of distortion to be realised in a new medium – a style Cody terms as the, ‘Real Surreal’.

-So do you think that people these days no longer want to see images of people who look like real people - are we pursuing a kind of impossible iconography?

“It goes in two ways really. There was a stage where in Loaded magazine etc. they’d have a female icon and re-touch it to the hilt and she’d end up looking like plastic - that was a trend and that got boring and so they wanted stuff to look more real. Now we don’t re-touch pictures, we grade them more – enhance skin tones and colours so people still look real but kind of amazing. It’s getting more and more like the quality and detail that films go into - total control over all your tones and colour range and mapping people in etc.”

-All this manipulation seems to lend itself very much to the digital format, so how come you’ve never used a digital camera before?

“Everything I shoot on film gets scanned in immediately, gets outputted through the computer digitally, everything is digital in that process, the only thing that wasn’t digital was the initial capture and the reason for that was basically, that I was very fond of grain, but also the quality of the original digital image wasn’t good enough. You got a lot of break-up very easily, the pixels weren’t handling where you wanted to take the colours and so on, so I always started off getting a flat scan and then you’d have enough scope to be able to be doing what you wanted with them.”

“But I think that’s what’s been so interesting about the Olympus E-1 technology, the fact that when you stretch an image or push an image it doesn’t break up, it’s got continuous tone to it - shooting as raw files you could blow an image up to magazine cover size and quality.”

-So how much of a shock was it to get thrown out of a studio on to a snowboarding slope with a digital camera?

“It was a big shock. It was a lot of fun. I think the hardest thing was actually getting to the actual places where I wanted to shoot. I was perhaps not the most ‘outdoors’ man and not that much of a snowboarder to say the very least but I picked it up quickly. It was actually very hard but very, very enjoyable. To be honest I was hoping – you know when you imagine ski slopes, you imagine great light and colour definition, but unfortunately for the first days of the event we didn’t have any. It was all very flat blankets of light – pretty tough conditions to work in. But we did have a few fantastic days at the end with great light and I was able to get some really good shots. It was good to be tested, thrown in the deep end.”

-And the format?

“And the format, yeah. But I didn’t think the format was so hard to grasp, it was more the way the camera worked with the format. Because I’m used to working with 35mm SLRs - the way you could check what you were getting right away, and keep or discard and get the feedback from the camera was really good. Also the information of how the picture was shot was really helpful to start off with, until you’ve got the measure of the system.”

-What was it in the Great Outdoors that you enjoyed shooting the most?

“I did enjoy doing some of the winter sports stuff although it was very difficult given the conditions, but what I most enjoyed really were the views. At the very top of the mountain was a glacier and ice cave and I really enjoyed taking pictures of details of the ice with the macro lens, you know stuff that I wouldn’t normally do. It was a bit more like a studio in a funny way, you could take time over the shots and control conditions a little more, so that’s what I enjoyed most of all. It started getting back to the original roots of my work - they became more like paintings, not to everyone’s eye but to a painters eye or to a a a….”

-An alcoholic?

“Yeah, to an alcoholic, or a drug addict maybe.”

-Anything else which grabbed you?

“I liked a lot of the sculptural structure of the lifts which were in contrast to this beautiful nature - untouched landscape and then suddenly you’ve got these massive iron girders and they were very visually striking, and I kept on thinking, if you could just have a girl there in a Nicole Farhi outfit it would be great…”

-Is there anything that really sticks in your mind most about the event?

“What like DJ Ronnie getting her jugs out…? No I better not tell that story or we’ll have to stick the picture on the site. There were a few funny things that happened, a lot of them based around using CB radios to co-ordinate in the resort and forgetting that they work on open channels which anyone could hear – I think it’s safe to say we’d made a few enemies by the end of the week, not least the French emergency services…Most of the really funny stories I probably just can’t tell.”

-So, having got to grips with the E-1 system, do you think there’s a rosy future for you and the digital format?

“Yeah definitely, I’m already using the E-1 for a lot of the commercial and product shoots which I do and I’m starting to incorporate it more into my fashion work. I’m actually waiting to hear back from Esquire at the moment about an image I shot on the E-1, which they’re considering for the front cover. As it stands, when you chuck in Polaroids and all that, I reckon using digital could probably save me over twenty grand a year in film and processing costs!”

-And how about the boarding?

“A definite convert – I’ll be back.”