virgin smiles

a friend of mine has been taking some pretty epic skate shots as of late (nigel dawes) and they were making me want to shoot skate, desperately.. and coincidentally a few weeks ago i was driving through coorparoo area on the way to pick some freak from the city and i realised it'd be in my best interest to postpone this rendevous as much as possible....

i guess it was lucky, that one of the very very rare times i've got my greasy mits on a fish i happened to be driving past a pretty tidy skate-park with some sun and 30 minutes to burnnnn. Equipped with my childhood Skate or Die 2 education, half a pair of shoes and a fancy camera i set out to learn how to shoot skate in 30 minutes. unsurprisingly, this did not happen... who would've thought a lifetime of playing skateboarding on 8-bit NES wouldn't have given me any real benefit?

quickly i scrapped the idea of b, b, left, a, up, a, up, a and started getting in peoples way and space trying to figure out who, why, what when and where i should be shooting.. pretty lucky i was in possession of a d80 at the time because the 1/200s sync on the d60 would've brung many a tear to my confused cheeks.

i'm not going to lie, especially not in order to look like i'm awesome and always get good shots, but i'm still stumped as to how i got a shot let alone a few that i enjoy the look of.. i can definitely see myself getting into a bit of skate photodoing, i'm hoping with time i'll be able to nail that little bit of greatness these images are lacking.. but for now i think i'll stick to pause+print screen of skate or die 2 (go to this game! i don't care if you play- just have a look and listen)

i tried to make something out of getting lost, it almost brought grins


this shot almost gives me a slight frown, had he been doing something fancy and facing me at the time, i'd be pretty freaking happy with this one













you could smell the stench of bat from where i was