Previously Unreleased.

This photo has been sitting around for years.  I used another angle of the trick for something back when it was new (Cole's interview in theProgram, I think), but while looking for another photo, I found this version.  Upon further review, I think I actually like this one better.  I guess I'm in a "photo mood" these days, which will hopefully mean more new photos to look at.

That being said, this one is new to you.  Cole Wilson, pivot fakie, somewhere north of SF,CA.

Original Intent.

I've been skating more than shooting lately.  Infinitely moreso, in fact.  However, a recent slam has taken me out for several weeks, so I'm going to try and focus on shooting more photos.  Mostly just photos with my friends, old-man-hammer style.

I shot several of RJ's frontside surf slashes and settled on a vertical shot to post on the internet last night.  However, this morning I realized that my original intent was to shoot a horizontal photo and that I should go back and take a look at the horizontal shots.  I like this one, so I decided to post it in order to trick myself that my original idea was, in fact, good.

RJ, slash attack.

Back in the Saddle.

i need to get back to shooting.  soon.  i really do miss it.

this photo of cole wilson was shot after a shorter-than-the-current hiatus from shooting.  during the time when we were running the "random acts of gnarness" with theProgram, we were building and fixing a lot of spots around the city of louisville.  the ledge went unnoticed for quite a long time and, in fact, i still haven't seen anyone shooting or filming on it.  it's pretty gnarly, actually.

anyway, you may not be able to tell from the photo, but the spot was originally intended to be skated the other way.  the ledge is shorter from that direction and the gap to the ledge isn't as long.  but if you know cole, then you know he has to go against the grain with a lot of what he does.  i think this was the last photo he shot before cutting his hair, as well.  maybe someone out there can confirm that?

when i look at this photo, i remember one thing, really:  cole and i weren't really "gelling" this day.  he was bummed about something already and i was just bumming him out even more.  one of my flashes was humming loudly because the battery pack was dying, i was tripping out because he kept falling awkwardly into the gap on the other side, and it was probably 100 degrees.  after one fall, we kinda had a little back and forth that was, well, less than friendly, but we worked it out and banged out this photo.  eventhough he made the back smith, he figured out that it was actually easier just to do a backside 180 out of it because it made clearing the gap a little easier.  skateboarding is an amazing thing.

cole wilson, backside smith grind, backside 180 out.

perfectly imperfect.

typing that title reminded me of one of my favorite songs by circle takes the square, so it's playing as i type.  but i digress.  or progress, i suppose, since i haven't even started discussing this photo.

if you know case mahan, you know he likes the pivot to fakie.  and you know that he can do them on anything.  there's a reason we call them "case to fakies."  this particular case to fakie was shot in a backyard in lexington, kentucky.  one day i realized that i knew of a ton of DIY-style spots and backyard ramps and i decided that i was going to put together a backyard ramp article and pitch it to magazines.  i shot all the photos and wrote up a little teaser piece, but none of the mags bit.  budgest are tight, you know. as it was, this photo wasn't part of the package anyway.

this "ramp" is really just a lumpy piece of concrete that is one of the hardest things i've ever tried to skate.  case and his brother-in-law reid (seen in the background chugging a beer) had no problems, however.  i distinctly remember shooting this photo because i was trying to get as close as i could to case because i wanted his red wheels to really stand out.  when i chimped the screen after shooting this one, i was so stoked on the lighting and the whole scene that i didn't give two shits about the nose of his board being out of frame.  in fact, i kinda dug it even more.

the balance of the red in his shirt with the red wheels and the deep blue sky on the light yellow house makes this photo pleasing to my eye.  i don't know that anyone else has ever seen this photo because i know it's not necessarily one that other folks might appreciate.  i hope you do, though.

untouched.

this photo is from several years ago.  probably 3 if i had to guess.  oh, 2.5 according to the meta data.  i got a call from gary saying that he'd found a backhoe parked next to a ledge so that you could skate the front bucket and was instantly intrigued.  i'm trying to think back to the exact details, but i know matt ballard and i drove out to the spot and had to wait in the cold for what seemed like forever.  it was definitely cold, i remember that.  why we had to wait, i'm not quite sure.  either gary was late or ended up talking to his girlfriend on the phone for a long time or something.  either way, it was cold.

the spot was so damn photogenic, i knew there was no way that it wasn't going to be a good photo.  bright yellow backhoe, crazy background machinery, middle of the night, skateboarding on the front bucket...all things that should have made for a winning photograph.  then gary took his sweatshirt off and had a green shirt on...BINGO.  yellow backhoe, blue machinery, green shirt.  it was all coming together.

and then this photo came out.  i shot probably 20 photos of him doing the tailslide, further frustrating ballard because he wanted to film it fisheye and i wouldn't let him film it until i had the shot i wanted.  if you haven't picked it up by now, i'm trying to say that i blew the photo.  absolutely hate this one.  and the other 19 i shot too.  i couldn't even spruce it up in post, which says a great deal about how poorly shot the photo was.  so here's gary's ridiculously gnarly tailslide on the front bucket of a backhoe without a touch of color correction from the RAW file. 

think it wasn't gnarly?  think about your foot going over the back of the bucket.  think about how sharp the edges of those buckets are.  think about the fact that it was well below freezing and he's in a tee shirt.  trust me, it was gnarly.

gary hall.

Shuffled.

for a while there in 2009 and 2010, i was making a lot of trips to lexington to shoot photos with the guys up that way.  i loved the energy they all had and felt like they appreciated every spot, opportunity, video clip, and photo.  it was always skate all day, party all night, wake up and do it again, which was a nice change of pace for the way my life was being lived at the time.  no way i could do it now though (read:  i've become an old man).  well, the partying part mostly.  but i digress.

after we built the quarterpipe pictured in the previous post, the lexington guys got stoked to start building obstacles of their own.  i think this crusty quarter in the ditch in the woods was the first project, but i could be completely wrong.  either way, it was a great idea and an honorable effort that actually afforded us some good photos, so it was well worth the trouble.

as far as i know, this photo is still sitting on thrasher's servers "waiting to be printed."  if you're unfamiliar with how freelance photography works with skateboarding magazines, i'll give you a quick synopsis:  you send low-res samples of photos to them, they say "we like it, upload it to the server," and typically the photo gets lost in the shuffle.  occasionally you'll see one actually make it out into the real world, but the rest go to the same place as all the lost left socks.  if i had to guess, i have between 10 and 15 photos sitting there just waiting to be used. 

with that said, i'm going out on a limb and guessing that this one of brooks shuping's frontside ollie isn't going anywhere.  i know i wouldn't use it if i was running a print mag.  we shot probably 30 or 40 versions of this photo and this is the one that actually looked how i wanted, except that his hand got in there and created a huge shadow on his face.  it was stupidly hot the day we shot this and i felt like i'd put brooks through enough an called it a photo.

i don't want to sit here and explain how hard this trick is, so you'll just have to believe me that it's completely ridiculous for him to be boosting that high out of that terrible little lump of concrete.

brooks shuping, frontside ollie.

.

some friends and i decided to build this quarterpipe at an abandoned train station a while ago and it actually turned out to be pretty much perfect.  we parked illegally on the side of a main street, lugged bags of concrete back to this wall, and started slapping it down, not fully expecting the results we got.  we had 6 vertical feet of wall to work with and 5 horizontal feet from the end of a sidewalk to the wall, so i knew that a 5' tranny would be perfect.  i knew it was gonna be a tight quarter.  what i didn't know is that when you've got that tight of a tranny with about a foot of vert on top of it and two huge pillars at the base it gets a little hairy trying to come back into the thing.  you've surely seen photos of tricks done on this thing and if you've skated it, you know how hard those tricks are.

zitzer took to this thing like a duck to water.  i knew he'd have some tricks for it but i didn't know he'd skate it as well as he did.  maybe i shouldn't have been surprised.  being able to scoop backside ollies over head-high on a vert ramp probably helps in scooping them on small, tight tranny.  i guess.

i shot a lot of photos at this spot (difficult because it actually kinda sucked for the types of photos i like to shoot) but this is absolutely one of my favorites.  i'm always drawn to how paul's body is positioned in the air and how it makes no sense that his board is staying on his feet. 

paul zitzer, backside ollie.

initial.

keeping an official portfolio page just got to be too much of a burden (read:  i forgot to renew the domain name and now they want $100 to recover it), so i thought a blog would be cool (read: we'll see how long this lasts).  my plan is to give you a little back story to photos you've seen and to some you might not have seen.  my hope is that this will spark my interest in making concerted efforts to go out and shoot skate photos again instead of waiting on phone calls to do so.

to kick things off, here's a photo of cole wilson doing a frontside double truck bash in a really difficult to reach place (what, like the back of a volkswagen?).  this ditch is close to my house and i drive past it practically daily.  so last fall when it started to dry, i made sure to let everyone i know know about it.  the amount of insane skateboarding that happened in this ditch in the month or so it was dry was absolutely incredible.  i didn't get to witness all of it, but what i did get to see what nothing short of amazing.

cole had already done this trick several days before for video footage and volunteered to do it again for a photo.  i had been wanting to do the uber-cliche "circular shutter drag" for a few months and this was a perfect time to try it.  hell, he'd already done the trick once, right?  the biggest trick to taking photos with good skateboarders is acting like you know what you're doing when you're shooting.  this was the first (and probably last) time i had shot a photo with this technique.  i like it well enough, but it's just not my style.

thanks cole.