A professional ski photographer who took snapshots of a middle-aged skier left dangling half nude from a Blue Sky Basin chairlift could lose his job.

Marty Odom, a photographer for SharpShooter Imaging, said Wednesday that he is trying to save his job but when asked whether he’ll be able to do so he said, “I don’t think so.”

But in a posting to a snowboarding website, Odom wrote that “the photo is worth it.”

“So much stuff has gotten said,” Odom said. He declined to comment further.

A call to a SharpShooter Imaging spokesperson was not immediately returned.

The company posts photographers at the top of all Vail ski lifts so that skiers can commission photographs of themselves skiing down the mountain.

Odom spotted the unnamed skier on New Year’s Day after the skier boarded Vail’s Skyline Express Lift.

When the skier had tried to board the lift the fold-down seat wasn’t in its proper position, according to the website thesmokinggun.com. He fell through the gap, and his right ski got caught, leaving him dangling head down with his pants down below his knees.

Odom’s semi-nude pictures of the skier – representing by his own account his best work of the season – were printed in the Vail Daily and extensively on the Internet.

Vail Resorts spokeswoman Liz Biebl confirmed that the pictures are of the victim.

In a Tuesday night posting on Transworld Snowboarding, Odom said he was suspended the day after the photograph appeared in the Vail Daily and the man announced his intention to sue Vail Mountain.

Odom explained that when he shot some pictures he was on his day off and was carrying his own camera.

“I pulled up to the lift line to see a naked man hanging from the chair lift. I shot the best photo that I’m going to shoot all year,” he wrote in Transworld Snowboarding.

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com