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.