More from the trip

While Garrison was getting his 5050 Nick was skating in the street. After Garrison got his everyone joined Nick.



Security cares... Not really


Mach Ten 360 flip




Jovi doing his best switch 180, me doing my best attempt to rip off a Ray Barbee add


"Wake up Jeff, put your shoes on, we're at Grandma's house"

Guth Family trip

A couple days ago I hit up Guth for a pre-work sesh. The usual heads were there: Garrison, Jovi, Nick, Mikey, Cale, and some others who aren't really relevant to this story. And Jeff was there. It was the first time I'd seen him since he blew out his knee (speaking of his blown out knee, he went in for surgery this morning to get it taken care of. Get well homie!) and he was mobbin around on his cruiser.

Eventually the talk of going skating came up, and some of Garrison's spots came up. There was a bump to bar and this thing called the Swamp Rail. Eventually (45 minutes, pretty quick for Guth truth be told) we piled into the cars and went to the rail. Here's what we got:



Glenn got out of picking up a family member so he could come and try front boards. Try being the operative word


Glenn's board shot into the swamp after a bail...


...And everyone came to survey the incident. Jovi saved the day with a giant ass hangar


Next board up for a trip into the swamp was Garrison's


Perched like a bird


Cale said it best: George of the jungle

Lesson Learnin Time

So this week I've had 2 shoots in which I've learned some very important lessons. Let's start with the first shoot and what I got out of that:



Lesson 1: Fresh Batteries every time, all the time.

If you poke through the massive 4 picture set on flickr you'll notice that there's a lot of flat light going on. Why is that? Well it's because my transmitter/receiver set was low on batteries, specifically on the receiver side. That meant I had to be hella close to the receiver in order for it to fire. By hella close I mean 18 inches, therefore the flat light.

Lesson 2: Do not piss off the locals, cause they were there first. I managed to piss off the neighbors when I took this shot:



From what I was told (I was being yelled at in Spanish, so the owner of the car had to translate) my flashes were lighting up their house about 125 yards away. I didn't understand much, but when I heard "policia" and "aqui" I decided to change my set up.

Lesson 3: Photoshop when you need to.



Look at the CRX. Look closely at it. Look around the passenger side headlight. Notice something? It's the flash I used to light up the Civic. I was going to take care of that, but I got lazy. And now it haunts me, like the beating of a hideous heart!

That was Wednesday, now on to Thursday's shoot:



Lesson 4: Chicks > Cars

Don't get me wrong. When I saw it coming down my street I thought it was an R35. It's a gorgeous car, no arguing about that. And the owner's girlfriend (my friend Kathleen) is equally gorgeous. This brings me to my question: Which photo is more popular?:

a:


b:


If you guessed A then you're wrong. B currently has 24 views while A has 16. This trend is true of every photo on my flickr page where there's a girl and a car. The girl picture always has more, no matter what. Hot girl pwns record holding Supra, 9 second Civic hatchback, drift car. There is one odd trend, but that's another topic for another day.

Lesson 5: Look before you leap.




I'm catching a lot of flack for these two shots in particular. Why? The glare from the over head lights and my reflection in the front bumper. Did I notice the glare? From the moment the owner parked the car, but I didn't care. It looked cool and and brought out some of the more subtle lines in the car. My reflection, on the other hand, I noticed when I was in Photoshop cleaning up the front bumper. I would have nixed it, but the owner and his girlfriend don't seem to mind (or if they do they aren't telling me) so I'm in one of their pictures.

Learn from my failings and you will succeed! Well, maybe not succeed but you'll do better.

AND I made a literary reference somewhere in this post. First person to correctly identify the reference (title and author of oiginal work, and quote the reference back to me) gets a free reasonably priced lunch on me!

My Aunts' trip to The U

A few weeks ago my mom had surgery and her sister's flew out to Utah to help my brother, father and I take care of her and hold down the house. My mom bounced back pretty quick so My brother and I took them up to the U for a tour. Here is what transpired on our adventure:



First stop was The Huntsman Center, where Jason (my brother) spends 40-ish hours a week. He also works at Starbucks and is a full time student.


Jason gave us a little tour of the basketball office. Inside there were the MWC Regular Season Champion and Conference Tournament Trophies. We share the Regular Season Champion title with The Team Down South and New Mexico, but the Conference Tournament title is all ours


The Huntsman and it's newly refinished floor. My Aunts were nervous when we all walked in and it was dark. They were scared when Jason wandered off to turn on the lights, and they were in awe when the lights came on.


Here's some detail of the floor. MWC logo in the keys, UTAH on the baselines.


There are my Aunts!


There's Jason, running the clock so my Aunts can see the scoreboards lit up and shot clock light behind the backboards light up.


This guy is the reason Coach Boylen is our coach. He found this a week before he interviewed for the Utah job and saw it as a sign. I think it was a good sign, Coach B is the fuckin man


Jason had to go turn off the lights after he showed us the locker room. This is the view looking out of the home team tunnel. It's intense, especially if you can imagine the stands full of screaming fans.



Here's some of the better drawings on the temporary wall in the Starbucks in the University Hospital. Chris, a nurse, started it by drawing every employee at Starbucks on the wall one night. Soon everyone with a Sharpie took it upon themselves to add it the drawing. Most of it sucks

Hype List 2

Album: The Blueprint 3, Jay-Z


Song: Photograph by Def Leppard


Random cooking utensil seen on TV: Perfect Brownie Pan. It's the greatest thing I've seen in a while


Activity: Spot Hunting. Driving around, ducking down alleyways, jamming out to the radio. Good times

TV: Sons of Anarchy



I'll have some new photos this week and a story about the U

Some photos and stories from Go Skateboarding Day

I'm only 3 months late, get off me. They're still good, and semi-relevant cause one of the guys made a move to a different team!

So first thing, I had to take Alex Carolino and Marquise Henry to Fairmont. They were following a couple of guys who didn't know how to get to the park from Blindside. How you get lost on a 3 block trip is beyond me, but never the less they managed to lead an up and coming dude and a Brazilian pro away from the park. I found them, led them over and had a nice little chat with them both. Then we got to the park, and they got to business.


Alex, backside nosegrind


Alex, kickflip over the rail


Marquise, switch frontside nosegrind

The handrail wasn't the only thing that was skated, but it was the only thing I had good angles on. The euro gap got a beating, but the lack of a proper wide angle prevented any good shots and the picnic table thing got a work out too, but I couldn't get a good angle for fear of being killed by either a) everyone skating around it or b) the official DC filmer who didn't seem like the kind of guy who wouldn't have appreciated me shooting next to him. Anyway, let's talk about Tommy.


Tommy Finn, front smith

Tommy was a nice guy. He's on DC flow and Santa Cruz flow, and he was the only one willing to talk to me during both the signing and the session. He's a nice kid and he rips. He hit everything, from the euro gap to the handrail even the bowl saw some action. I really hope he gets big time, cause he deserves it.

In addition to the DC guys there were some locals out there. Nobody I really knew, but locals nonetheless. One of them was this kid Brody. He was a one man wrecking crew on the handrail: back smith, front smith, kickflip back smith, kickflip front board. The kid killed it.



He also won himself some scratch in the best trick contest, including taking $50 off of Marquise by doing a nollie heel crooks on the the ledge in the middle of the park. Now while Brody was taking out the ledges one by one, there was a guy doing something in a different vein: He was frontside flipping from bank to bank. He didn't get it during the contest, but he did get it that day.



The best trick contest, and the obligatory product toss, rounded out the day. It was a hell of a day

Hype list #1

Shit that's been getting me hyped/inspired lately.

Album: Weezer, The Blue Album


Single: New Perspective, Panic! At The Disco


TV: Criminal Minds


Movie: don't watch movies fool

Skater: Justin Brock