Summer on the Road

Between graduating from college in Chicago, moving out of my apartment there, and a day later hitting the road on a tour that has me in a new city nearly every day, this blog has had a bit of a dry spell. That said, my photos and I have been anything but absent from the internet.



If we are friends on Facebook then I am sure you have seen my Mobile Uploads blowing up the past few months, but if we're not then you can still keep up with all the day to day goings-ons of Hometown on its Twitter, which I am pretty much the only one to post to and is the destination for all my phone-photos seconds after I snap them. Follow @hhskate. If you're not into the Twitter thing you can see these same photos dished off to http://philsphone.tumblr.com



For the updates from Hometown Heroes contests check out http://hhskate.com/photos/. I shoot every contest that Hometown puts on and the photos are usually up within a couple of days.



In addition to Hometown I was also brought on as the photographer for the Zumiez Best Foot Forward Am Contests Series and the Zumiez Couch Tour. The Couch Tour consisted of 12 stops across the US where Zumiez would construct a small festival in a mall parking lot, have bands play, and put up a skate course for the BFF contest, as well as a pro demo. As crazy and hectic as those days were, (not to mention the sleepless nights of photo-editing that usually followed) I met a lot of cool folks and had a fun time being part of the tour.
All of my photos from Couch Tour are online now at http://couchtour.zumiez.com, just click any of the dates at the top, then click Photos, or for better quality check them out on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/zumiez/ where any of the 2010 Couch Tour or Best Foot Forward photos were shot by me.
All of the BFF photos are on its separate site at http://www.zumiezbestfootforward.com/photos



Aside from all the contests and events, Hometown is really about skateboarding, and I have been doing a ton of it, as well as shooting a ton of it. I have been lucky to meet, skate with, and share a smelly van with some really sick people this summer, and once I have time to actually go through them all, I have a ton of skate photos from across the country that I am hyped to share.
I am super psyched that Shak and everyone brought me on this trip, and it's not over yet, so be sure to keep up at the Hometown site and especially the Twitter @hhskate

2-for-1 at Ashland and Addison

Blue ledge, blue bank, ollie up to bank, Ashland bank to ledge...whatever you call this spot, it is blocks from my apartment. But as convenient as it would be for me to skate and shoot photos here regularly, I totally understand why it's not the most popular spot in the city. The sidewalk is littered with everything from gravel to broken glass, then you ollie up onto the chunky, slanted, narrow blue ledge, and then try to get your trick within the few feet that are actually waxed.
That said, there have been some pretty cool tricks done on it, and some people find it fun. So here are a couple photos of suburbanites Mike Kadar and Jim Farrell getting down on a back tail and back 5-0, respectively.

Dalba, BS Feeble

If you check my flickr with any regularity you might remember my post last fall that featured Dalba taking a bite out of Chicago Avenue. Here he is again with a land. Dalba has a unique bag of tricks that is always entertaining and unexpected. This bank-to-ledge in Chicago isn't the biggest spot ever, but a perfectly balanced back feeble with some warm sun backlight makes for a pretty solid photo opportunity.

Finishing College and Summer Plans

Today is April 15th, which for most people means it's Tax Day, but for me it means that I have exactly one month until I graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. I am realizing that the last semester of college is the antithesis to the last semester of high school. At this point of high school you've been accepted to college, finished the bulk of your coursework, and are just looking forward to a leisurely summer before going off to college, but where I am in school now is just about the most stressful time of college. I am putting everything I have learned and experienced over the past 4 years into the materials and projects I need to get started in the photography world, from a new website, print portfolio, personal projects, and everything else. So I have a lot to do in 30 days. But once the semester and my college career are over I am fortunate to have some big opportunities coming my way.

Beginning May 17th, just two days after graduation, I am hitting the road to shoot photos for another skateboard tour, Hometown Heroes. You can check that link out for more about the tour, but essentially I will be doing the same thing as last summer, traveling in a van with a bunch of skateboarders, shooting photos of local skate contests all over the country, and doing a lot of street skating. I am really thankful to Shak, Brian, and Molly, and everyone at Birdsong 3/Revolution for choosing me for this tour, as it will give me a chance to spend the summer doing what I love, as well as make my future plans of moving to California possible.

Here is the list of everywhere I will be this summer:

May 8th   Chicago, IL
May 9th   Indianapolis, IN
May 17th   Madison, WI
May 18th   Milwaukee, WI
May 20th   Indianapolis, IN
May 22nd   Tulsa, OK
May 24th   Phoenix, AZ
May 25th   Las Vegas, NV
May 28th   Seattle, WA
May 29th   Seattle, WA
May 30th   Portland, OR
May 31st   Portland, OR
June 5th   San Francisco, CA
June 6th   San Francisco, CA
June 9th   Salt Lake City, UT
June 12th   Denver, CO
June 14th   Denver, CO
June 17th   Dallas, TX
June 18th   Houston, TX
June 19th   Houston, TX
June 21st   New York, NY
June 23rd   Baltimore, MD
June 24th   Philadelphia, PA
June 25th   Philadelphia, PA
June 26th   Northern NJ
June 27th   Cincinnati, OH
June 29th   Chicago, IL
July 1st   Minneapolis, MN
July 2nd   Minneapolis, MN
July 3rd   Des Moines, IA
July 5th   Kansas City, MO
July 7th   Lincoln, NE
July 9th   Oklahoma City, OK
July 11th   Nashville, TN
July 13th   Atlanta, GA
July 18th   Phoenix, AZ
July 19th   Las Vegas, NV
July 20th   Los Angeles, CA
July 29th   Los Angeles, CA
July 30th   Los Angeles, CA
July 31st   Los Angeles, CA
August 1st   Los Angeles, CA


If anyone sees our paths crossing this summer, let me know! Everyone else, keep up with my adventures here on the blog, on the Hometown site, and for the social media junkies, follow me on twitter and tumblr. See you on the road!

Tim Johnson, Wallride

In addition to the lifestyle stuff on the side, I've been shooting skating more than I have in years, not to mention skating myself like I did in high school. I'm sitting on some of those photos, but here is one from a few weeks ago.



Tim said that he had been eyeing up this thin piece of curved plywood on a Fulton Market fence for months, and as soon as the snow melted enough for him to do so, Tim got the wallride he had wanted all winter. Here's to spring!

Jay Reilly's Lifestyle Work and Why I'm Making Cheesy Photos

While trying to shoot more lifestyle stuff for my book (which needs to be completed before my rapidly approaching graduation date!) I have been looking at a lot of lifestyle work from skate photographers, whether they would label it lifestyle or not, as well as photographers who specialize in that type of work outside of skateboarding. One who I recently came across is Jay Reilly, a lifestyle and editorial photographer based out of Oceanside, California.




Jay has a really solid portfolio and his images illustrate the strength of a good lifestyle/editorial image, which is its ability to tell a story. I love shooting skate photos. The technical and creative aspects that come together in a great skate photo are the best thing for me. But sometimes that one image can't illustrate all the other things that really make the trick as crazy as it is, like the rocks that had to be swept away, the sign you had to put over the big crack in the run up, the four times you came previously but got kicked out, not being able to get the tightness of your truck just right, or the hour of tries that chipped your board and skinned your hands before finally sticking it.

I know that to put the label of "lifestyle" on the photos I'm making right now would strike a lot of skaters, myself included, as kind of corny. But at the risk of looking like a Gatorade ad, I think it's rad seeing everything that went into getting a trick, because we all know that as awesome as the split second that a skate photo shows is, it is only a tiny part of what we really do as skateboarders.

Lifestyle?

It didn't take too many portrait shoots to realize that I'm really awkward taking pictures of people who aren't doing something, and that that awkwardness translates into the picture. So instead of straight portraits I am slightly redirecting myself to shooting "lifestyle" photos. If this image of Adam Mills filming Dalba is any indication, I think I am going to like making these pictures a lot more and I think they will look a lot better in my portfolio as well. Now Chicago just needs to warm up so I can get people out skating again!