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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.