the goods are elsewhere

Hi, until i've setup an RSS from my site into here plz don't expect it to be updated cuz im busy writing the same misc bullshit grey-on-black here:  https://jacoblambertphoto.com/blog-rants-stories-adventures/

Looking back as means to finally move forward.

Before I truly bring this blog into the now I’ve got a few years of retrospection to catch up on, and although most of it is gonna be between me, this text editor and the draft function, it’s something I gotta do.  I’m not saying I’m gonna start filling in the gaps since I somehow decided that social media > then this, I’m saying that I need to reunite with this fraction of my digital self.  Mainly so that I don’t spend the next year talking in past-tense.  I am going to fill the gaps, but these are a lower priority and I can slip those posts back into their correct chronology, cuz fuck the algorithm, time is true, stick to it.  Part of me wants to rant about that too, but I took care of that back in 2014, it’s on here somewhere. 

I must admit, before moving to Canada this kinds of images were but a figment, now I see them regularly.  Except only in Winter and it rains pretty much every day so it’s not the fog that I’m hurting for but the sun.

In fact it rains an average of 193 days a year here… that’s been tough.

In the recent migration of this insanity I found myself reading a lot of my old posts, more of it then I’ve ever read in any close succession prior and I’ve been struck by a double dose of wig.  Firstly, how is it even possible to be as disorganized as I used to be with photos/everything, in that I was making posts with, for eg, 6 photos that were completely unrelated to the text or each other, and from years apart, let alone a dozen hard drives and computer iterations.  The lesson? Anything Is possible if you put your mind to it..

This is usually what it looks like on a good day in winter… not the glorious nature lazers of the previous image but ample glory nonetheless, especially with Mary Lou in frame.

How?, I’m not sure, why?, I assume cuz they were in situ, but that’s the intrigue – how’d they even end up there? Well, I just dumped shit on my desktop… Ive come a long way, per se, but right now I struggle to complete a single folder, let alone dabble across 17 and pick a few miscs to wrecklessly relate through even the faintest of tangibilities, typically nonsense.

Checking in on the great great great great great great great great great great great grandma of the woods. She’s doing okay and at ~600 years she’s got a few more greats to come.

Honestly I fkn love it,  albeit in detriment to progression and re-realisation.  I sit here now, much further along my somewhat idealized progression of photo making, somewhere that would’ve dosed my amateur self in total bliss.  Yet here I am, a contemporary Lamb, thinking the shit I was spewing 6 years ago is gold.  Crazy yes, completely expected less yes, a jab in the GSD gland, FK YEEEEAHH!

Arbutus Bark bleeding rain at QEP.

All of that immediately aforementioned was unexpected, mainly because I used to think my blog’s value was the photos, and that naivety was something I’d yet to learn.

This is Spring…. Seasons are really something, when I say seasons I mean more than just the blisteringly-hot-all-day-long season of Queensland.. Do miss it a bit but.

But why the desire to get shit done?  I am now totally aware that I thoroughly enjoy the restropsect of the story and reveling in writing’s ability to imprint emotion, so trying to repeat past styles instead of progressing aimlessly is going against what I really like – truth.

Secondly (finally), If I can continue meandering alongside my desire to ignore any kind of structure or direct influence, with a goal simply to deploy nonsense to the meta verse, then I win big and every crash of my impulsive digits is time well spent, or backspaced, but either way, it’s mine forever.

Spring again, perhaps even more obviously than the last.. Vancouver rips the Chezzy Blozzas haaaardd and for a few weeks/1 month it’s insane – kinda like the Jacaranda mayhem of back home but with added colour, and mayhem (it’s insane, i guess instagram is a whole other thing compared to when I left Aus almost 3 years ago)…  This is from shooting with George Bailey  and May Constabel for Landyachtz Bikes in Stanley Park, well we rode to the west coast of Bowen Island but that’s a different rant.

Return to the blogosphere

My glorious return is nigh thanks to the extreme labour that has gone into building this site myself and now migrating and reformatting 10 years of atrociously self coded blogs from blogspot, so nigh it is that this foray into procrastination (writing this) is probably the actual return, so really its not nigh, its now.  If you’ve followed any of this, especially since the hiatus commenced in ~2017, you’ll know that producing stuff for this purposeless blog was became increasingly challenging, but the desire to post was what got me through the editing phase, my least favourite bit, but it was enough to edit – these days I pretty much just shoot (except work stuff, that requires editing) and put them in a folder I forget about.  Mb I need to reproach my current editing style in lieu of something more exciting, which’ll be tough to find cuz I kinda have issues with the very nature of editing.

Over the hiatus (which I may still be in, only time will tell) I searched for answers as to where my desire went and why, or I guess how, and while working through the blog migration process I noted a particular point in my timeline, and it was not when I stopped posting with any keen-ness, but was when I finally gave in and set up an instagram for my Photography – actually the worst thing I ever did for my photography – not only was the ‘work’ it provided the worst, and from typically horrible people, but the platform itself cares nothing for photos and works to quantify social proof through tools that don’t rank – the fact that photographers post selfies, let along get more likes is really all I need to say, but there’s more, mainly that to do well on IG you need to stick to a single subject, and to a lesser extent style, which is the absolute last thing I want to do with my photos.   I’ve always had qualms with photo-viewing in the digital realm, combine that with tiny phone screens and the masses and photos became more of a social credit than they did art, or a medium of expression, or anything worth worrying about. Instagram destroyed purity and visual splendour, instead opting for a platform designed to assig caliber to one’s ability to garner likes and to shoot the same thing over and over again.  Don’t get me wrong, the first few months were fun….

Camosun Bog, a 2000+ year old ecosystem that was almost entirely destroyed in 75 years of population, dumping and invasive species pressures – oh and they cut a powerline trail right through the middle of it…  The Sphagnum Moss found in these types of bogs is quite the organism and was used in applications from insulation to stuffing wounds – it’s like the polyester of the pre-petroleum world.

What I really enjoy, and enjoyed, about this blog is that it isn’t socials, you have to come here (these days probably from socials……….), you made the choice to engage, you weren’t forced to engage by the act of scrolling or the mechanism predicting your behaviour.  The amount of freedom of expression this enables me is immense and something I’m only wrangling with now.  I was posting on my blogspot before FB was a thing, let alone IG, so back then it was easy to stay the course but as these social apparatus invaded our culture and my psyche I got even further away from the core of my passion.

Looking west towards the Granville St Bridge with downtown on the left – shot from the lil park that Mary and I were v. hard lurkers, rain rain or rain before moving away from the Fairview Slopes… what a name.

I think another mechanism in my retreat from the blog was that I started aiming for too much, for eg, I’d go over seas for a month and then sit down and be like okay here’s 10000 photos to go through for work, and by the time I was done with editing, I was kinda done with the photos themselves – let alone sitting at my computer editing shit.  And on top of that, writing about a month tour is a gargantuan task and really the project of getting it onto blogspot was too gargantuan, and not really what I wanted this blog for.  I fell in love with this for the misc and for the micro adventures but now that I’ve got this website and the means to control it all I can now do both. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Pitt Meadow Marsh Dyke Trail – bird watching was through the roof, as were the gravel trails.  This kind of view is pretty standard in & around Vancouver but the wild thing is there’s pretty much nothing behind those mountains and this is pretty much the case all the way to the North Pole. 

This rant is serving a few purposes: procrastinating grinding through and reformatting old blogs, a marker for the blog’s transition from google’s platform to my own and to help rationalise what it is about this that is important – which is the journal nature of it.  I think my next post will be vast in time but brief in that it’ll overview my timeline over the last 2 years for my future self, before diving into journalling the lil adventures and times that make life great.  

Really it all boils down to me wanting to spend time in photoshop that i’m not getting paid for – I say this because in migration I found about 35 blogs, all with thousands of words, that are drafted.  Most of them are from the dark times, and I kinda wanna train a NLP bot on it – and another on the happy times, and see what they have to say to each other.  

Superfluousness of Purpose

 

Years of not realising, or possibly accepting, that I was most certainly no longer putting in the effort that I did during cherished times of photo-making is something I’ve been spending my recent times quite concerned with and the bliss that has ensued is wild, albeit totally expected. Whether I like it or not, and maybe photo-thinking has influenced my mind's tending towards abstraction.  In the early stages of taking my foot off the pedal I recall being troubled by purpose, which quickly lead to being troubled by the very nature of purpose.  It was challenging to learn and eventually completely differentiate the idea of purpose and goals. Just because something serves a purpose doesn't mean it has purpose. 

Southport Seaway Tanks - my happy place for a number of years.  Very few things have rivalled the joy of flipping the fear that was solidified from paddling on top of these shark (mellow ones for the most part) infested waters for half a decade.  To go under the surface and hang with those very same sharks was a mind bender.

I’m not sure if it’s born out of desire or a result of my general, but the idea of purpose has been an increasing factor in decision making - but my truth is that just because something servers a purpose, doesn’t mean it has purpose.  I don’t believe that a lack of purpose is a bad thing by any means, I think a lack of purpose enforces a move towards greater understanding of surround and self, macro causality and in-turn actual purpose; round and round.

I think what is important about purpose is ensuring I am breaking some action, idea or thing to get to it’s core elements, as with culture and one’s growth within it is so heavily shrouded in emotion and social bias, it’s hard to confidently reach an understanding of purpose. In today's world its increasingly challenging, as we're pumped with comparison, but I honestly believe that our cave-dwelling self’s suffered the same unnecessary emotional trauma - Ugbog is real good at breaking rocks.  But in saying that, perhaps current culture and our entrenchment in the most persuasive mediums, ever possibly, may be thickening the veil and pushing us further away from real purpose by forcing us into the pursuit of fickle goals that are derived from comparison.

my last animal, not ever, just the most recent: Ron.  His efficacy in murdering native animals has been something that has troubled me since he left us.

I feel like we humans are either fed, or perhaps more likely just enjoy feeding off of, the desire to add notions of purpose to an action, feeling or idea that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose. I guess one could think of this as optimism but I think that’s a shallow consideration of optimism, I believe optimism exists in even the most pessimistic thoughts.  It’s not about looking on the bright side, it’s about accepting the polarized nature of the two and the fact that pessimism necessitates optimism. 

On the other hand, I love the more functional idea of everything serving a purpose, in the sense of things on a boat, or spaceship for eg.  One can’t laden these vehicles in superfluousness, and I love the idea of carrying that thinking into the every day.  These are true cases of everything serving a purpose, regardless of one's opinion of the necessity of landing on the moon.  However, It’s probably very much worth my while to be wary of stripping back all of the unnecessary stuff that bring so much joy to my life, like lenses of the same focal length. 

Queen of my Dreams

Confer my Experientialism

So it's been a little over a year since I moved to Vancouver and it's been a ride of tumultuousness, bliss and introspection.  Relocating has its challenges, certainly in the day to day existence but the majority of my intrigue has concerned itself with the self, perhaps because relocating to Canada is more of a geographical exercise than it is a cultural upheaval.  Sure the culture is different, in more ways than I ever understood from my tourist-visa haunts up here over the last decade, but finding a groove here is certainly easy thanks, probably, to the Commonwealth.

However, the nuances of the daily are something I had in Brisbane (or anywhere), it's just easier to focus on them under the guise of a foreigner.  When I was touring, I felt like a tourist even when I was in Brisbane, seeing every thing and everyone progressing along their path in time yet somehow removed - therein perhaps lies the temporal bliss I drew from my home time, also, I never worked while home, instead opting to burn my tour pay on partying and skating.  Why did I ever think those emotions were something to expect? 

Bliss is never deserved. I honestly thought that the wave of bliss I was riding derived from my decisions, my train of thought and not at all the fact I was living in a perpetual state of holiday while barely dipping my toes in what I now consider to be reality - it was rad, surely one of my life's greatest times, but clearly I did not anticipate that the bliss was relevant to my timeline.  

If I was doing that stuff now, I wonder if I'd be as stoked? I'd say not as much, based on my evolution into adulthood, something that the perpetual holiday didn't just enforce but over time has shown me I was desperately ignorant to maturation.  Kids don't just have fun, they have naivety - something my older self wishes to shed, but something my future self will tell me that I never understood as well as I do then, as if in some paradoxical game with no end.

I finally drew the mustard to force my hand to reach into the dark in search of the aforementioned bliss and in doing so slowly realised, and will forever realise, that the bliss was a fruit of my labour but came easy as I never actually went to work, or dealt with the reality of paying rent, putting effort in with people I loved etc.  This state of drifting upwards had a profound effect on every day, including this one, as I feel like the inevitable down that I experienced was the greatest learning experience I've had in my adult life.  

Battling my psyche, the ability to work for work's sake, withdrawal and growing repulsion from life were certainly a ride!  A tough one for sure, superbly supported by the tolerant people close to me.  It kinda took moving up here to realise this and the futility of not addressing what surrounded/s me, for I've put myself there, and have not regretted the ride of the place - only I failed to commit to a better psyche through effort.  

Nothing worth doing comes for free, and that's cliche because it's cliche - things are that way for a damn good reason.  I slaved over the camera for years before it started working out; I want to slave over mental betterment and it's ensured pleasantries.  Deal with it.

I'm excited by new things, but also getting back in touch with the psyche I preferred basking in.  I think doing so will illuminate new paths and I wholly feel that my happiness derives from the new, but the notion of new is self-defined and I know it's possible to get a of pleasure out of small things as it's all I used to concern myself with (probs cuz I was turning my back on anything big).  One thing I want to do is make this blog responsive, which is quite a task, because I opted to code this thing with my ground-floor html skills back in 2009 and a few things have changed in web-world since then, like mobiles.

 

Blonde Redhead - Misery is a Butterfly (I've decided to write the titles because looking back I've noticed that many of the youtube embeds I've made over the year are gone, with no clear reference to what they were)

return to discovery

Well it's been a minute since I was last jamming pixels into this b-grade text editor and I'm certain that 2 years and 3 months ago I certainly wasn't concerned with the quality of a text editor but I certainly was concerned with what appear to be my first seemingly comprehensive existential crisis. It took me a good while to log back in to this very text editor, Seemingly a result of the data-retention goal posts changing since i was last here… something I am concerned with these days....

Swatch of the Australian Magpie/world's most epic bird 

I’m sure there is a great number of things I wasn’t concerned with and in retrospect, it feels like I was driven by the very act of not being concerned, with much, or anything at all and in recent times I was led down a thought-warren regarding maturation and how my 2009-2015/16 self was seemingly existing in opposition to the idea of it, but I only feel this now, at the time I thought I was doing it (maturing). I think maturing and learning/experience are similar but exclusive as I’m of the opinion that learning/experience is something thrust upon you, by time, your self or way of culture and schooling. Ignoring the fact humans are fiercely judgemental, I feel maturity is a yardstick defined by the self, a measure that appears to have inversely proportional potency, in that more age = less concern for maturity? I don’t think it’s as simple as boiling it down to wanting what you can’t have but that universal truth is striking ever increasing chords in my emerging desire for simplicity. I was, once again, postponing my happiness, instead of working towards being happy.  I’ve been very lucky in my life, to have experienced much joy but it all came very easily and I think the result of that was not knowing how to find it and also that I NEED to find it, shit doesn’t just fall in your lap, you’ve gotta sit under the asshole.

In the depths of this intrigue I began to realise I was resisting the very things that made me me, or at least the things about myself that I enjoyed most, as my naive self thought the unknown-growth I was pursuing was most quickly attainable through shedding my previous self; this very idea is perhaps founded in my habit of defining borders in my timeline as moments of change.  Sure there are defining moments in life but we’re all a sum of previous instances combined and to assume that one can develop and mature by simply placing an imaginary border between two moments is pretty ludicrous. I recall my 5th birthday and how I was bummed that I didn't wake up taller, so really, I learnt this lesson 24 years ago...

Brisbane Sunset, looks like winter. Ektachrome 100vs 135

A desire to avoid specificity is implicating this rant with incompletion but to summarise, for the sake of my diary-esque desires for this journal, what’s been going on since my last post has been extremely transformative. I became reclusive and struggled with a feeling of isolation from self and the people who were close, probably resulting from the travel - which I’m now thinking might be an unconsidered/unspoken downside to travelling over a number of years.  Travelling, perhaps not just for me, is a hyper-cultural experience whereby you’re saturated with intrigue and bombarded by the unknown and I’m not sure one can experience these extreme learning environments at home. As a result, it created distance between my home pals who were on their own epic trajectory and seemingly more so than ever as I was unaware of their own blissful progressions and I didn’t realise this at the time, but was probably why I didn’t like talking about trips I went on.  In my own experience this was happening in both worlds, as I was on the road with a relatively consistent bunch of dudes, meaning I felt separation from my home pals and my away pals, living in a state of perpetual catch up.  I guess the difference was the guys who I was roading with were living in a similar relational state of separation, so perhaps there was more solace for this struggle on the road than at home.  In 2017, when I was last here (this blog), I was probably in the thick of the my doldrums and defining my life by how much time I spent thinking/doing work.  Escapism probably.  I was learning and growing etc etc but I didn’t feel it, I felt the opposite.  I struggled with contentedness, perhaps another curse of my travelling and began resigning from the chase.

Stormy Sunset in the Lost World Valley

I definitely wasn’t prepared for the next stage of lamb life, something I didn’t realise until I was coming back up for air. I put all my eggs in other peoples baskets and only very recently realised the best basket was Mary Lou and that the best place for my eggs were in her and I feel like those eggs are hatching right now. We’re on the verge of a new epoch and it’s the most excited I’ve felt for a number of years now and this epoch will be defined by a return to simplicity, a rejection of happiness as a thing that occurs, instead it’s something that results from effort. But that kinda sounds weird, kinda sounds like work, which makes sense as I’ve spent the last 3 years totally driven by and to work.  As I felt more work = more maturity (not experience or wisdom, only maturity) and managed to work alongside some very accomplished people however I didn’t realise accomplishment was resulting more from experience, than it was from the actual work, let alone capacity or capability.

Lorenzo Borri, from Italy, surveying the Flatrock Green Zone

One thing I’ve just now noted is that my time entrenched in diving fell basically within my text-based-introspective-hiatus, and as much as I found comfort in hanging with the fish, I think they weren’t the best sounding board.  I’m excited by the idea of journalling some diving, and I think I need to approach this thing more lightheartedly, and less like a therapy session.  As much as it helps, I think I enjoy the act of expression and writing more than I do therapy, I figure bliss is somewhere in the middle.

Fraser Island vortices.

Clouds of Solace

In a restless world influenced by an seemingly infinite number of external factors, we humans strive to resist the entropy that defines living existence, a futile battle against certainty but one which motivates our existence..   If we, as a species, were happy sitting around watching the clouds float by than I doubt existential notions would have never came to be a thing and i'd most certainly not be sitting here worrying about self-imposed irrelevance and the desire to spend more time thinking than doing, which is currently my biggest concern, being concerned....  

I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about how to translate my historical desires and passions to become relevant to current day Lamb all the while feeling restless and unsure of where I want to be heading so really it's a bit of a concentric nightmare..  Over these awols i've noticed my ability to write suffers the most, but not due to actually writing ability but concerning myself with portrayal and not the content, the stuff that actually matters and the reason I want to be on here again- analysis paralysis sucks.    Through professionalism I exchanged love for dollars and I eventually realised that in the long run [outside of lucking into fads] was never going to be worth it.   

Now that I've moved away from photography as my main job all I want from it is the unbridled desire to explore that which used to come during early days in my freedom [getting a driver's licence] and with that I've realised I need to bring context back into this bessbee, not just jargon and jargon photos and ill-considered everythings..   I either tackle this with series or extendo captions, i feel introspective ranting usually just ends up in circles.. I think im also going to stop reading over what I've written.. it's my standard at the end of the day haa

mowers

Karla ponder's her impending physio session.  She was born with hip-dysplasia and has since about the age of one required weekly physiotherapy to maintain her mobility, she's stoked.

Willow was the height of rad kitty, if only her restlessness had never got the better of her.

....

this Pigeon was not only endowed with both legs but also cunning...

Sit down with Henry Brydon from 'We Are Explorers'

Last week I sat down with Henry Brydon from 'We Are Explorers' to chat about downhill and it's inherently exploratory nature.  I've included a transcript below but I suggest reading it on the site, it's all dolled up and has a bunch of pictures.

http://www.weareexplorers.co/this-is-why-you-should-try-longboarding/

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Jacob Lambert travels at 100kmph on a small piece of wood down very long, very steep roads in some of the most beautiful locations around the world. At 26 years old, this Brisbanite is cut from a very different cloth to most of us, and we caught up with him to find out why we should all try (and probably love) longboarding.

So firstly, how did you get into longboarding?

I’ve spent most of my life skating a traditional skateboard but it wasn’t until mid 2008 that I first started noticing the downhill stuff. At the time I worked at a rad surf/skate shop in the Gabba and we started seeing some interest in the gear and by the time we were getting in stock I was totally hooked.

Billy, Troy and Dillon drop into the most technical of Transalpina's plethora of run.

What do you love so much about this hobby?

There’s a lot of intense feelings involved with riding a board down a mountain and I feel the adrenaline was what got me initially, but as i started to ride more and in different locations my joy shifted towards faster lines, better style and a mentality that is best said as ‘skate to skate tomorrow’ and it was then that I truly began to love it.

The notion that you’re battling gravity and if you can control it, you win, gives me a very holistic sense of reward, contentedness and stoke.  Here you’ve got gravity and a skateboard without a brake and if you send yourself down a hill without the ability to control your speed you will maybe die in the first corner, but getting to the point where you know (even without seeing the hill) you can roll down it and, short of unforeseeable disaster you’re going to make it down safely is an incredibly empowering feeling. It took skating a 33 hairpin, 20 minute run in the Italian Alps to first really understand that feeling. However, I definitely do not recommend blind runs, you never know if there’s gonna be a wet patch in a corner that’ll send you off a cliff, or a pack of tree loppers felling logs on the road, like in Korea one time D:

Where are some of the best spots you’ve skated in Australia?

That’s a tough one. The most memorable spots are generally so because of the scenario, not just the road itself, but if i had to say it’d be Kangaroo Valley south of Sydney.  The Snowy Mountains [both NSW and VIC] have some epic roads but they pale in comparison to the surrounding scenery!!  Brisbane city and it’s surrounding coasts have some of the gnarlier roads around but it’s situational, lots of driveways and blind corners. It’s danger riding so the adrenaline runs thick.

And internationally?

I can narrow down it to 2 roads.  The first is a road deep in the wild wild west- about 4 hrs from Seattle or 2 from Portland- along the Columbia river in Washington State called Maryhill Loops Road.  Most of us may recognise the road through car adverts but this road is so much more than a picturesque piece of bitumen.  The road was built in 1912, it was the first road built west of the Mississippi and an experiment into construction mountain passes.  The road has 3 brief straights but apart from that it’s seemingly infinite corners, with perfect camber and apices, it’s gradient varies barely +/- 1º and there’s not a downhill skater that could’ve dreamt something radder. It’s truly special, and it’s a museum so it’s shut to the public!

Although Maryhill may be the perfect downhill road i was lucky to travel through Romania last year and there we found the Transalpina, not to be mistaken with Top Gear’s favourite road [the Transfăgărășan]. The Transalpina is essentially 6 different runs on the one road, it winds up from forested valley until well above the tree-line in the depths of Carapathian Mountains.  Picture lunar like landscapes, endless peaks, wolf packs and a road so perfect I’d be happy to skate nothing else.

Any dream locations on the hit list?

There’s a road in Japan, it prompted myself and 3 others to go hunting for it in 2013 but we were hoaxed due to residual winter but it’s the most novelty looking stretch of switchbacks ever (it’s got about 40 repeating switchbacks and a Shinto Shrine on top). Although we didn’t get to ride that one,  we did get to skate the Initial-D road, Irohazaka, but it was wet and the potential to slide under a guard rail and off the cliff was pretty real. We ended up waiting 3 days for the rain to pass, but it never did.

So what’s the fastest you’ve travelled on a longboard?

It’s hard to tell and generally it feels like you’re doing about 30kms more than you actually are but i’ve skated some hills in the states with reported speeds of over 100kms/h.  There’s a couple around Brisbane and the GC too.

Which leads me to my next question: wipeouts. You must have had a fair few over the years?

Oh yeah, it’s the nature of the beast really. Of course none of us actually wanna crash but it’s this thought that sits in the back of your head which makes bombing hills on skateboards produce such crazy elation. Narrowly avoiding a crash is kinda the best bit because at the end of the day we’re all adrenaline junkies.

I’ve been exceptionally lucky in my time; i’ve stacked a bunch, fractured a few fingers, maybe an ankle and i’ve hit a few cars but never gone under them or had a serious injury. I started riding in 2008 and it was between then and 2013 that i bricked myself most regularly. In 2013 I began to take the photo side seriously and since then i’ve regained notions of self-preservation. Moving into the photo side of things was a major power play because I realised that being the photographer meant I got to go on all the trips! Instead of having to battle with riders that are better than me, plus it meant i got paid!!

Yatedawg on the Bruneau Dunes

Any standouts?!

I used to live on a hectically steep street, about 30% and the 4th steepest street in Brisbane – it was were I started to really get into doing skids and began to understand the stopping component.

Living on it and skating it every day lead me to get pretty complacent, perhaps too comfortable and on one occasion I tried to do just one skid, normally I took 3 or 4, and upon kicking it out [about 55-65kms] I high-sided and flew forward.  I managed to get a foot on the ground before hitting the road which helped me position myself to fall properly (we wear gloves with chopping board on the palms so if you manage to fall in a ‘push-up’position you can take most of the friction on your shoes and gloves, not your skin). I managed to get in that pushup position but the camber of the road pushed me over to the gutter, as my hand entered the gutter it was ripped from underneath me and I flipped onto my back, in the gutter.

This is were it got nasty. The gutter was heavily leaf littered so there was no friction, which was great for my back but the lateral force of the camber pushed my side against the gutter and I slide down the gutter for about 25 meters, with the coarse concrete gutter taking the skin off most of my side, about 12% of my total skin (your palm equals roughly 1%).  My leg, arms and chest were all torched but the worst part was the internal bruising from getting that foot on the ground before I fell over. I was bed ridden for a week and for the next year, maybe more, I couldn’t jump onto it.

Bloody hell, that sounds horrific. If someone still wants to get into this as a hobby, do you have 3 tips!?

get a helmet

get gloves

learn to stop!!!

Any recommended gear and brands?

I ride for landyachtz longboards, bear trucks and hawgs wheels so I’m biased but there are some rad new brands popping up too. Perhaps I’m cynical but this is how i consider componentary.  The board doesn’t really matter so long as your feet feel good, i’ve ridden boards from over a meter to bombing hills on a 35cm piece of wood but i only managed to do so because of the trucks.  The trucks are the entirety of the setup IMO, they define stability and agility, the two factors which actually matter.  As for wheels personal preference!  There are good wheels and bad wheels, most wheels are good and in order to love them you just gotta learn how they ride, for about 2 years i didn’t ride the same wheel twice and each new wheel was better than the last, but i realised it had nothing to do with the wheels themselves.  I’m happy to answer anyones questions if they want some real tech info, i’ve worked in downhill at all levels, from retail to operations and I’m stoked to pass on the knowledge