Did you ever wish you could have professional photos taken of you or your kids on the ski slopes and have them readily available for sharing with friends and family, or be good enough to use for holiday cards? Now you can with the new EpicMix photo features at Vail Resorts launching this ski season, which is just around the corner.

Guests just need to purchase a radio frequency (RF)-enabled lift ticket, sign up for an EpicMix account, then tell one of the official photographers available at all of Vail Resorts properties that they want their photos taken. The photographer scans their tickets, then can take action shots of them coming down the mountain or posed pictures of individuals or groups, and the photos are automatically delivered to users’ EpicMix accounts. Kids photos get sent to parents’ accounts.

The low-res images can then be shared on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media medium, photo storage sites such as Flickr, Snapfish and Shutterfly. High-res versions are available for $19.95 each, which is less expensive than it typically costs for professional ski slope photos at most destinations. Each Vail Resort will have about 25 photographers on hand, on average. Guests also can upload their own photos to their EpicMix accounts.

EpicMix is the ski and snowboard app launched last season that allows guests to keep track of their statistics on the slopes and share them. Nearly 100,000 guests activated EpicMix accounts during the 2010-2011 season (about 15 percent of guests), generating more than 35 million social impressions and racking up more than 55 billion vertical feet of skiing and snowboarding at all the lifts at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone in Colorado, and at Lake Tahoe’s Heavenly in California and Nevada. This season EpicMix will be available at the Northstar-at-Tahoe resort as well, where it was announced earlier this year that Shaun White would be designing a new halfpipe for the resort, along with a limited-edition ski pass for the 2011-2012 season in which for each one sold $5 will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Vail Resorts also announced that it is eliminating nearly all paper tickets beginning this upcoming season and instead will issue reusable RF-enabled cards, making it easier for guests to adopt the EpicMix app available via a free mobile download to iPhone and Android devices, or via online access from other smartphones or computers.

The app also keeps track of “pins” skiers and snowboards can accumulate during their runs, shows where you can find them (a new feature added this year), and provides additional trail and grooming information, snow and weather reports, and resort news and traffic updates. In addition, there is a special website for children 14 and younger that allows them to connect with their parents’ accounts and has content designed specifically for them.

For more information, visit www.epicmix.com, www.epicpass.com or www.snow.com.

Photo: Vail Resorts

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