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.