Past Mistakes

2008 was definitely, by many fold, the year I’ve taken the most skateboarding photos. In fact, it hurts my feelings to think of tricks I’ve filmed in the past and how I should have taken photos of them instead. Something about photos is just a little more timeless, or maybe even makes tricks seem more “official”. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s how footage these days gets reduced into a pixelated, compressed, valueless mess for kids on youtube to watch for 12 seconds and then leave a comment calling it gay. Kind of a crappy analogy, because the same thing happens with photos and the internet, but just pretend it works.

Here, after many seconds of deliberation, are my five favorite photos I’ve taken in 2008:

I believe this was the first street photo I took in the year. You can see some snow piled in the background from that horrible, endless winter we had. I made Tim do this a million times and he got really bummed out, but it was worth it in the end.

I love this one because it basically sums up the awesome trip Russ and I took to San Diego. I barely took any skate photos on this adventure, but I’m glad this was one of them.

Another reminder of a great trip, and hey, this spot is really rad and it’s a great trick too. James always tells me that it reminds him of Russia, but it just mostly reminds me of cinnamon. Max was nice enough to do this trick a bunch of times because my flash radio was being real stoops and misfiring. Remember to carry an extra battery, my friends. The funny thing is, the right flash fired out of sync in this frame and got cut off some, but I like it much better than the others where technology worked as intended. Happy mistakes forever.

Sometimes simple tricks that wouldn’t be super exciting on video make for interesting photos. I love this one of Matt’s lipslide, check how much his board is bending.

One of the last outside photos of the year, which I didn’t even take that long ago. After all this snow and cold weather it somehow already seems like it was forever ago. My pockets on my sweatshirt are still filled with sticks from laying awkwardly in the bushes, so I guess it couldn’t have been that long ago.

In 2008 I also filmed the most since I made my video many moon ago. Instead of sitting on the footage forever and wasting 75% of it when better tricks were filmed in the nondescript future, I instead made a bunch of short video clips and posted them on the site. Would it be clever if here I made some sort of argument that’s the exact opposite of what I wrote above about photos being better than video? I’ll spare you all from that sort of ham-fisted embarrassment.

After several more moments of deliberation, I’m going to have to go with Mini Video 44 – Wouldn’t You as my favorite non stationary creation I made in 2008. I mostly feel it has some of the best skating, a great song, and of course Jeffry the horny troll. He adds so much to the experience.

Finally on a sadder note…a great friend to many people around these parts, Pat Alberts, recently passed away. Erik made a post about him on Mke which you can view here.