Last weekend at the Red Bull Rich Ditches contest, George Marshall shot some photos of and caught up with Bas Keep to reflect on his experience in South Africa. Despite the contest’s ironic name, he talks about the “huge divide between the rich and the poor”, why he couldn’t even give his bike away and the general vibe of Cape Town. Check out the full gallery here.
“This is a personal project that I wanted to do for quite some time. Single location in order to get some directed filming, one rider (Panos Manaras) and an edit to combine regular, slow & fast motion. Four cameras and three filmers participated in this in order to cover the angles we thought were the most interesting. Personally I have been riding this ramp since day one when its was more ghetto than ghetto and now after years of reshaping and getting done better I find it very absolutely fun and beautiful. So we used Canon 5D MK2 for details (at 1080p 30p) with a 50mm, Canon 60D for action (at 720p 60fps) with Tamron 24-70mm, Canon 550D with a Samyang 8mm at 720p 60fps on a ProAim crane and I also used a Sony FS700 as main camera & for the slow motion footage (1080p at 240fps) with Sigma 70-200 2.8 and Canon 17-35mm lens. We also used a dolly called Eazy Dolly which is an amazing tool and very smooth for the majority of our shots. I used a ProAim crane in order to get some shots of the whole ramp from above and some action on the spine (icepick over to over, and some flow riding). Quite a lot of things where also filmed on hand in order to give an edgier look on action. A note from my experience with FS700 is, its unique picture quality, dynamic field and colour depth. We didn’t use any external recorders in order to get even higher quality (through HDMI uncompressed 100MBPs 4:2:2 footage) but even with an SD card 28Mbps and 4:2:0 chroma the footage from that camera is superb. I realized it even more while colour correcting the footage. Everything was shot on neutral-flat picture style (sharpness to -4, saturation -4, contrast -2 and colour tone to 0). I use Adobe Premiere CS5 to edit and this video was edited at 720p and 30fps. I feel that 1080p footage downscaled to 720p is somehow nicer and crisper but this is an unscientific point of view. Although in europe we use PAL system I also wanted those NTSC extra 10 frames to help on slow motion and since its uploaded on the web it doesnt even matter. Editing wise having footage from 4 cameras can get tiring in order to decide the clips to use. Also its quite difficult to make the picture match as all these cameras have different sensors and the lenses were also different, but in the end its a nice experience and you can learn a lot of new stuff to add to your workflow.”
Rider: Panagiotis Manaras
Direction – Photography – Editing by Tasos Kosmatopoulos
Photography by Leonidas Germanopoulos
Photography – Crane operation by Dimitris Katranidis
No riding here, but a masterfully produced commercial for the AveBMX Shop in Poland. Reminds me of an Oceans Eleven type montage- keeps the viewer intrigued and watching closely. A good mix of panning and glidecam shots, a variety of lenses and a good story line. All-in-all, the best advertisement for a BMX shop I’ve seen in a long time.
I chose this photo because of the lighting, composition and colors. The hidden flash behind the wall adds a nice contrast to the scene, the frame is filled but not cluttered and the colors are pleasing and not too loud. Although it’s a digi crop, there are far worse things going on in the digital photography world.
“It was a very cold day but we still decided to venture out to the streets. I’ve been told that one shouldn’t go in this neighborhood unless with a large crew. But the temptation was great as I just got my pocket wizards and the spots had a lot of character. It was windy,wet, it was getting dark and flashes were flying to the floor. This was the last spot for the day and Sve was a little reluctant to ride it as the bank is way steeper then it seems. I shot a few direct ones as I felt a simple composition will work but at the moment I decided to try out to include the other wall I realized that it makes for a very dramatic composition with an interesting intersecting shapes. Big thanks to Stephen for being my intelligent tripod as the light that be was holding was the one that made the picture. Canon430 and metz48 each side, diffused. With them being the main light it must have been some fast speed and slow aperture. EF35,2 on 5d MK2. 1/200th @ f/2.5, ISO 400″
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Back in January we posted a really awesome edit of Adrien Lecomte riding a portable quarter pipe at some pretty wild locations around Lyon, France, so I was stoked to see this gallery pop up today. There are some amazing photos in here that are definitely worth checking out. See the full gallery here.
If you saw that crazy Wave Rock video a couple weeks ago, you could see from the jump that the production value was through the roof. Take a look at this little behind the scenes edit of how Danny Campbell made the place rideable and how the production team achieved some of those incredible shots. I was really stoked on the final product from a visual standpoint, but I really just wanted to see him carve the shit out of that thing a bunch of times.
I like this photo especially because of the perspective- people don’t usually see things from a vantage point above the subject. It really takes the action out of context and abstracts it. The lighting is great and it’s a nice looking whip.
“Is particularly crazy because a friend was taking this photo with a telephoto lens from the front, when performing his work ended, I put a Pocket Wizard on my camera and take this angle with its setting of flashes. Really just wanted to try that angle because it looks at the difficulty of the trick, I did not bring my equipment with me, just the camera. Matias Aristimuño is a very good friend and stylish rider, is always ready to try one more when the photo was not perfect. Argentina has many spots to ride and take good photos, but always has the same problem, you’re always thinking about the possibility of being robbed more than the picture you will get! It’s a picture acceptable for conditions in which it was taken.
Canon fisheye 15mm, Canon 1Dmk2n, 2 Vivitar 285 HV of my friend and Pocket Wizard-”
More of Laureano’s work can be seen here.
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Judging by this short documentary put together by Will Evans, Greg Illingworth’s RideUK interview didn’t come easy. From numerous trips on four continents over two years to it coming down to the last spot of the last day on the last trip to get the cover shot, you can tell he and photographer Nathan Beddows really wanted to insure the piece felt totally complete. I’m really into the way Will put this together; mixing up the footage up with the tear sheets from the mag and including a lot of behind the scenes footage.
For this week’s photo, I decided to take it back to the basics- no fancy lenses, no external lighting, just a great composition and a timeless trick. The colors and the symmetry is what really does it for me.
“This is a photo I shot of my brother Dan at Imigrantes park. He was practicing this tabletop so he asked to me to take a picture. Well I took this picture about 5:18pm. It has been a lovely day with good light and beautiful sky! I tried to show everything ramps momentum sky the tabletop. I wanted to show the tabletop on top of the grid. The picture was shot with a Canon 60D with a 50mm. Shutter speed was 1/250th and the aperture was F14 with no flashes.”
Check out more from Marcelo on Flickr, and join the Push It A Stop group to be next week’s photo.
This photograph by Derek Riggs hits a few chords for me- at first I was reminded of the square format B&W work of Robert Adams, and with flash, the work of Larry Fink. This photo has a timeless feel to it, at least in my eyes, for those reasons. All varying tones of black and white are present, the composition is clean and the onlooking kids add an element of location and emotion. It’s a pretty stylish invert as well.
“This is a photo I shot of my good friend Joey Calderone, was taken about a good 2 years ago at Chandler bike park out here in AZ. This photo all came together easy, I had just got a Hasselblad 500c and was eager to but it to use and Joey has always been one of my go to guys about shooting anything, mainly cause he’s a dialed as hell rider. Ok so, it all started as just a regular night at the park, then I asked Joey about shooting a lil something, and on this particular hip, from the 8 foot transition to the 6 foot roller hip, he was doing awesome tables. And since I was still getting use to the shutter on the Hasselblad, and it was easy cause he was holding the tables for a split second. No