Island Rec Skateboard & BMX Tournament Shoot

I have been rather tardy at keeping my blog updated of late. There are a few things I should catch up on that have happened since I moved back from Norway to the Island. But rather than give the game away by telling you a little of those events, I am just going to dive straight on into today's post. The other stuff can wait for another day. Isn't procrastination useful?

Anyway, a few weeks ago I woke up with the tail end of a brilliantly vivid dream. I can't remember the specifics of what was happening suffice to say that I was on a skateboard and it felt awesome. Not only was I ultra comfortable on these slippery and speedy devices but I was performing 360 flips over and over again, nailing them repeatedly with beautifully elegant precision.

Don't know what a 360 flip is? Well until I actually perform one outside of my subconscious I'll have to let Stefan Janoski show you how it's done. (click here if you don't see the video below.)

Isn't that the coolest thing? I think so.

So following on from this intense dream I did what I do best; researched skateboards and bought my first deck, trucks, wheels... everything to get me started including the necessary helmet and pads for every joint possible. Alas, at thirty-six I am not made of rubber bouncy ball material like the kids at the skateboard park are. When I hit the ground it's like a sack of hammers. ☹

Conveniently enough, Elsa mentioned that Island Rec (or San Juan Island Parks and Recreation, as it is officially known) organizes an annual skateboarding tournament during the County Fair. Looking on the web I found out that it was actually scheduled a little later in the year, on August 25th.

Now I knew for sure that there was no way I could enter the Novice class. I'm not even sure they would let me enter up against the little kids. So I did the next best thing: I emailed and asked if I could photograph the event.

Now if you read any of the old school skateboarding magazines and look way way back at early Skateboarder magazine, you'll see the fisheye lens being used for skateboarding shots. Warren Bolster is credited with introducing it into the skateboarding scene back in the 70's, with himself already an established surf photographer; the switch to using it on land was natural.

One of the nice things about the Internet are the vast resources that become available immediately to hand. I found seven lens rental companies across the country that would, for a fraction of the cost of the actual lens, let me have one for a week or so. $32 later (+$16 shipping - both ways), and I had booked a Sigma 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye from Borrowlenses.com. Wow, what an incredible amount of distortion having 180 degrees of view can give you. Instead of seeing a rectangular image, I was now looking at a circle. So lots of cropping would be needed to make any shots useful.

Alas, the island weather was very uncooperative for the weekend of the tournament. It rained and rained and rained, so the event was cancelled and reschedule for September 14th. I didn't really consider the money spent on the lens rental as wasted, because I got to try a funky lens and realize that this wouldn't work too well for me.

So September 14th came around pretty quickly, and this time I had ordered two different lenses to play with: Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G AF-S ED and Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8 AF DX Fisheye. I figured I would put the DX lens on my D200 and use the wide zoom on my D3.

Both lenses are extremely interesting to work with, and if I had pots of money, I would add them to my camera bag. Of course, the fisheye is perhaps not the first lens you reach for, but the classic distorted image was exactly what I wanted for the skateboarding shoot. And on September 14th the weather couldn't have been more different: beautiful sunshine in a cloudless blue sky.

Like a good little boy scout, I packed ALL my gear into my camera bag, which I couldn't really close with the extra two lenses added to my Nikon quiver. But I was so glad that I took everything with me as within a few minutes of shooting the practise sessions it became apparent that I really needed to bring out the big guns and have my 70-200mm f/2.8 on the D3. As beautiful as the 14-24mm was, it was useless for 80% of the shots around the skateboard park. I needed to be able to follow the action, so having my huge zoom telephoto lens was to be the most effective tool for the job. The dinky little 10.5mm stayed on my D200, and compared to the heft of the D3, it slipped comfortably into my hand and I shot one handed all day without complaint. As the day progressed I could swap between each camera with remarkable speed; shooting with the telephoto as the kids came towards me and switching to the fisheye when they were practically flying overhead.

In total I shot 2679 images that day, with a final post production cut of only 92. Much like my experience of shooting equestrian events, there are only one or two shots in a sequence that are of any quality, and given that the kids were not landing every trick they tried, I was very glad I could pick the first couple of frames before everything looked like it was going out of control.

As my comfort level increased with anticipating what the kids were going to try next, I moved onto the concrete to get some of the more interesting close-up shots. Something that is not apparent with shooting with a fisheye lens is how freaking close you are to the action. Michael, attempting a 720 on his BMX, was only about two feet away when he flew past me. Yikes!

I had a great time shooting at the skateboard park, but often I will have a quick review of the images on the back of the camera and get all excited about something, only to discover that once on the big screen back in the studio, the image is not as good as I anticipated. I've learned the hard way not to get my expectations up, and even with this knowledge I was disappointed not to get something fabulous being that close to an airborne BMX; that was going to be the shot-of-the-day, at least I thought so.

Yet more often than not, it's the images that initially don't look spectacular that turn out to be the ones you are most proud of. You spend some time working them over in postproduction, and then the gems are discovered. With digital photography, as in traditional photography, if you are comfortable in the darkroom/digital darkroom, then images have a much greater potential than in their virgin state.

So as much as I loved the beautiful blue skies and the perfect sunshine, the skateboarding images deserved something a little more 'gritty.' Going to absolute black and white left them stark and cold; the shadows being so fierce thanks to that intense sunshine, so I wanted to leave some color in there. With the saturation turned back up a bit, the images then just felt washed out (which worked for the Tempest images last month, as I wanted to create a sun-bleached, lost-at-sea, washed-out feeling with those), so I dropped the saturation on everything except the reds and oranges. Then everything that lived in those pigments ranges felt like it was popping off the screen, so I dropped down 30% on the saturation of those too. Finish off with the contrast boosted all the way up, and a whole lot of time carefully cropping and tweaking the exposure/lightness and voila! You get what you see here.

You know, I realize now that I love taking pictures of people. It doesn't matter if it's some haute couture fashion model, or a grungy skateboarding teenage; over and over again I am amazed by the images I can capture and produce of people. On days like these I can actually say to myself; "F#@$ me, I am a photographer....and a damn fine one at that!!!!" Is that conceited to say so? Maybe, but I think I need to take the time to remind myself that I am actually good at this. It isn't luck, or taking a million pictures to get one good one. I have something here; a gift, an ability, a hidden talent?

Now, the tricky part is making a living off it. ☺

There are eighty-nine other images of the skateboard tournament, and they can be found at: http://www.sanjuanskate.org

Enjoy!