A Few ESPN Posts
I went out to NYC a few weeks back to meet with Brian Tunney and the rest of the ESPN Action Sports staff about doing some BMX content for them. I’ve been notoriously critical of television produced BMX/Skate events like X Games, but I think from a online content perspective ESPN have done a great job putting together original content, and hiring the right people to do it. The first feature I did was an extended version of an earlier post I did on here about the legendary Boston BMX and Skate spot known as Turtles. When I originally wrote the post on here I hadn’t found my old photos from the final session, the day before they bulldozed the place. After digging through some filing cabinets I found a folder of old New England stuff, and there it all was. So check out ESPN for that.
I also have a photo of the day on the Freestyle Motocross blog over there on ESPN.
From the Archives: Ruben Castillo, 2002
Ruben Castillo is a BMX Legend. In the late 80s and early 90s he rode for Dyno Bikes and later started the legendary Homeless Bikes along with James Shepard. Ruben’s frame was fittingly called the Soul Bro. This images is from a BBQ at the Terrible One ramp in Austin, TX in 2002. And about the suit… I really have no idea. With Ruben you just go with it.
From the Archives: Van Homan, 1999
Back in 1999 I took a trip down to New Jersey to ride and shoot some photos at the skatepark in Tom’s River. I think I’d driven down to Brian Tunney’s house for a couple days or something. I feel old for not being able to remember the details. But I did come across these photos I completely forgot even existed.
These days Van Homan is known more for what he did on the streets, but in those days he was sponsored by Schwinn, mostly for his dirt jumping skills. Here’s Van Homan on the box jump at Tom’s River. You can see them larger, along with another photo and a bonus shot of Pat Juliff, who was also part of the Schwinn team at the time. Read more…
ZT Maximus Skatepark 1995-1996
Above: Sean Rudzinsky, Nac-nac.
ZT Maximus. It was dark. It was dirty. It was awesome. It was also the first place I ever had a gun pulled on me (outside: the park was next to a housing project).
In the mid-90s there were very few skateparks, especially in the Northeast. Ratz, an amazing skatepark in Maine, had closed down. Fred Smith’s Skate Hut in Providence, where Kevin Robinson honed his vert skills, had also closed. There was next to nothing left (aside from the small and distant CT Bike Exchange in Connecticut which might even still be there). There was no money in BMX or skateboarding — especially BMX. The Extreme Games had just gotten going, and professional riders were making a few hundred dollars a year. It was awesome.
ZT Maximus in Cambridge, MA was, for a period of several years, the only real indoor skate or BMX option for those of us in New England. While I was going to school in Boston it became a second home during the cold winter months. Don’t get me wrong, it was still cold inside. They barely had money to keep the lights on most of the time, but at least it was dry and free of road salt. Read more…
Slashing Gravity: FMX in PDX
Over the last few years I’ve dragged a lot of heavy gear to a lot of different places to photograph BMX, Skate, and Motocross events. It’s not always a photographically ideal scenario: Shitty arena lighting, limited access, distracting signage everywhere, fast pace, etc., etc. I’m actually not planning to shoot many events this year for those reasons amongst others, but I got a call to shoot a Freestyle Motocross event that was coming to town. Since it was only a few blocks from my office, Gravity Slashers would fill my Saturday evening. Flips, whips, Hart Attacks, exhaust fumes… you know the drill. Drake McElroy, Greg Hartman and a crew of others made it out for the event, and kept the Portlanders entertained and out of the rain. Here a couple shots from the event at the Rose Garden in Portland. Read more…
Signage Failure or Invitation?
I pass this building nearly every day on my way home from my studio. They have “No Graffiti” signs all the way around it, yet there is always graffiti, especially next to the signs, no matter how often the repaint and try to thwart it. While I’m not a graffiti person, and I actually think graffiti like this is a total asshole move, I always drive by these signs and see an invitation more than a deterrent. Without the signs they’d still have graffiti. Unfortunately it’s inevitable, but it’s almost as if they’re setting themselves up here. Short of a 24/7 guard with a 12 gauge, they’ve got a long term problem, unfortunately. Anyway, it makes for an ironic photo.
New Years 2010 / Panasonic Lumix LX3
I bought myself a new point and shoot a week or so ago, and New Years Eve was a good chance to play with it in low light. For the last four years my [digital] pocket camera of choice (I still use a Contax T2 and Yashica T4 film cameras as well) has been a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX07 which I bought for its wide (24mm) Leica lens. I love that camera, but it lacked some of the manual features I found myself wanting. Most of the time I want my point and shoot to, well, just point and shoot, but sometimes you need more control.
I wanted to stay Panasonic as I’ve been really happy with previous models, and wanted to stay as small as I could. All I needed to see was that the Lumix DMC-LX3 featured a 24mm 2.0 lens with full manual features and Raw files, and I was sold. So far so good. It’s a bit larger than my FX07, but it has a shoulder strap, and will fit in my pocket as well. The addition of a hot shoe, as well as manual focus as well as exposure is enough to warrant the extra size in my opinion. And it’s still smaller than my film point and shoots of choice. I also added the accessory eyepiece for both sunny days and because I like looking through a viewfinder (LCD’s can be difficult to see in bright sun). Read more…
From the Archives: Joe Johnson, 1998
Joe Johnson. If Joe still rode today, doing the same tricks he did in the early 1990s, he would still be considered one of the top BMX riders. He was that good. Joe was way ahead of his time, and during that era was the only person capable of beating Mat Hoffman in a vert contest, and he did. He was the first rider to do tailwhip airs, and double tailwhip airs (he also came insanely close to a triple nearly 20 years before anyone else would do it). Joe is a legend. One of the best who ever rode a bicycle. Still.
I grew up a few miles from Joe, and began riding his backyard halfpipe around 1985, a couple of years before he became “The Joe Johnson.” I was 9 or 10, and to this day Joe calls me “Kid Jared.” Joe’s younger brother Phil was a year or two older than me, and we rode together quite a bit at the time. In 1986 Joe got sponsored by Haro (THE team at the time), and before you knew it the magazines and big name pros were rolling through Stoughton, Massachusetts. Josh White, Brian Blyther, Spike Jonze, Dennis McCoy, Dino Deluca, and countless other legends passed through Joe’s backyard during the late 80s. Without Joe’s ramp and the crew of guys that rode there, it’s safe to say I wouldn’t be still doing “this BMX stuff” 25 years later. Read more…
From the Archives: Jason Enns, 1998
I dug out some folders of some old BMX slides from when I still lived in New England. Most of the stuff was shot during the late 1990s. I’ve got a lot of stuff from Kevin Robinson’s old skatepark, Impact which was in Providence, and I’ll post that in the near future. But this stuff of Jason Enns is what I was looking for in the digging process. I remembered we’d shot some stuff at Impact for the second issue of Nine-ninety Magazine (which was never published), and I was curious if it had disappeared. Sure enough, it was sitting unused in an Impact Skatepark folder in my slide archives. Jason had some of the most original mini-ramp style tricks at the time, and we had shot an X-up Canadian nosepick on the six foot quarterpipe, which really stuck out in my mind. 12 years later it’s still a bad ass trick. I was really hoping I still had this negative, and sure enough I did (In those days I didn’t really file stuff away properly). Check it out after the jump. Pusher sticker on his helmet, Iron Maiden patches on his ProDesign elbow pads. Kink Revision B frame. That bike is probably about 45 pounds. Read more…
iPhone-tography Part Five
The iPhone camera has become one of my favorite tools. Beginning early in 2009 I started doing round-up posts of some of my favorite recent iPhone camera photos, and this is Part Five of that series. In addition to these posts I regularly post photos on my Twitter feed, so you can follow along there as well. Many of these, if not all of these were at one point posted on Twitter.
Check out a heap of photos after the jump. As usual, all photos are straight out of the iPhone, processed using Camera Bag, Old Camera, Best Camera, and Photo Gene. You can also find links to all four previous posts at the bottom of this post. Read more…
From the Archives: Ryan Sher, 2001-2002
While I was living in California in the early 2000’s, Ryan Sher moved to San Diego from New England. Ryan was riding for Kink Bikes, and moved in with fellow Kink rider Jimmy Buchans. We’d gone on a few Kink road trips together (I was working at Ride Magazine and doing a lot of photo work for Kink as well), and I was making regular trips down to San Diego already to shoot with the guys down that, so I began shooting with Ryan quite a bit. I also posted a few old photos of Ryan here from a Kink trip a few months ago. There are also some newer shots of Ryan here and here.
The photo above was almost the cover of Ride BMX Issue 62, also known as the July 2001 issue. The scan I had of it was labeled Cov-2, meaning we had two or three images picked out for that cover, this being the second of them. It’s not that epic photographically, though it’s a darn good X-up seatgrab. On the mock up the art directors cropped it into a vertical shot I think. Ultimately, Allan Cooke ended up on that cover, and this photo sat unused. It’s interesting how that happens. One minute it’s mocked up for a cover, the next it’s collecting dust. Another note-worthy thing about this photo is that Ryan is wearing a jaredsouney.com t-shirt. At the time not a lot of photographers had web sites. I made shirts as a bit of a joke and gave them to some friends. It was just a nautical star (a cliché tattoo) and the type underneath it “www.jaredsouney.com.” Read more…
Happy Festivus 2010
In Honor of Festivus, a holiday dedicated to and created by the prophet Frank Costanza, a donation has been made in your name to the Human Fund.
Click to see larger. It’s a Festivus Miracle!
Aloha. Mahalo. Hawaii.
Made a trip to Hawaii recently, first to Oahu, then to the Big Island, then back to Oahu, to do some shooting and roaming around amongst Hawaiian things like lava, trees, and coffee beans. It just so happened that the trip overlapped some of the largest waves in recent history, so Pipeline and Waimea were lined with tourists watching some of the best surfers in the world try to catch “the big one.” I don’t surf at all, but it was crazy to watch. That water was serious. I feel much safer on concrete.
We paid a visit (two actually) to my good friend Big Island’s (Mike Castillo) tattoo shop, which is not on the Big Island at all, it’s in Waikiki Beach. BMXers might know Big from his days working at Hoffman Bikes or for his tattoo work on guys like Nate Wessel, Kevin Robinson, Rick Thorne, etc. Mike gave us some suggestions on where to go, and where not to. No tattoos for me though. These are some outtakes from the journey. Read more…
Filling a Void – Zoetrope: All-Story
I miss the era when magazines pushed the limits. In general, that time is gone. A newsstand (albeit a very thin newsstand) full of grid driven formulaic publications. No fluidity. No experimentation. All based on formulas. Maybe it’s a bit of nostalgia, but the print publications of today just don’t push the boundaries on the visual and editorial concept end.
There are magazine formulas. Countless meetings on sales driving cover-lines, theories about placing numbers on the cover to draw female buyers, logo placement for newsstand position. The result is a see of the same. Gone are the days of Raygun, Bikini, Speak, The Face, Plazm, Emigre, and others.
There are some great, clean designs on the newstand. Magazines doing nice things. But there is no wonder going into the next spread. The grid throughout is forced, and typography is predictable. We need a new breed to push the limits. I’m not hoping for another grunge era, or another David Carson. I’m hoping for something that creates an edge. There are still a (very small) handful that fill that void. Read more…
Mt. Baldy Pipe on a T-shirt
Mt. Baldy. If you’re a skateboarder, BMXer, even a rollerblader you’re familiar with the Mt. Baldy fullpipe. The drainage tube, located in the hills of Southern California, behind barbed wire fences and across a menacing chasm, has been shredded by several generations. I grew up looking at pictures of Salba and Blyther carving the pipe, so when I moved to California in 1999 it was one of the first places I went.
To this day, Baldy continues to be a spot that just about every serious skater or BMXer has on their hit list. It’s been in every magazine and countless videos. The graffiti is ever-changing, but the pipe remains the same after all these years.
I found this image I shot back in 2000 while digging through some photos and thought I’d make some shirts out of it. Hafltone images can be tricky, especially on dark shirts, but my friends Jamie and Jenn at Ink Brigade (you old school BMXers will know Jamie McParland’s name) said they could get it done. And they did. Turned out better than I thought they would.
I planned to just use these merely as holiday studio mailers to some industry types and friends. After all, skaters and BMXers alike can appreciate this one. Baldy is an icon. I posted a picture on Twitter and a lot of people expressed interest in them, so I’m making a limited number available for purchase. YoBeat has done me a favor and put them on its web store, and you can buy them there if you like $15. Printed on a nice, soft, ringspun t-shirt. They are a small style cut, so you may want to go up a size, especially if you’re of a portly stature. No logos or brand name bullshit on this one. Just a picture of god damn icon.
Anyway, if you would like, here you have them. Baldy. Concrete to Cotton. Icon. Get it.
Beggar. Italy. 2004.
Shot this photo of a bearded beggar somewhere in Northern Italy with a Yashica T4 sometime in 2004.
New Portfolio Site
My studio site (souneymedia.com) has been horribly outdated for the last couple years. Old work, old functionality etc. I think the last time I rebuilt it was 2005. I added a bit of work since, but otherwise, it was dated. I got a BETA invitation to try out the Cargo Collective CMS platform recently, and used this as an experiment to see how the platform worked. So I spent the last few weeks digging through work, shooting images of it, and getting things together. I’ll be adding more stuff as time goes on — Cargo makes it really easy to do so. But for now there’s a lot of old and new stuff up there to look at. You can click the commercial portfolio link on the right to get there, or just click here.
My regular updates will continue to be on this site, and the commercial stuff will continue to live over there.
Ben Hucke x Jared Souney x Goods BMX
How about a free screen wallpaper of Ben Hucke for your computer or iPhone? I waited two years for someone to handplant this damn T-Rex face on a BMX bike. T-Rex face? Yes, T-Rex face. There’s one at the Tigard, Oregon skatepark, complete with metal teeth. Since the built the park two years ago, it’s been handplanted on skateboards, and fastplanted on bikes. I brought a few people there that had vert handplants dialed to check it out, thinking they might be into handplanting it for a photo, but it hadn’t panned out. I think I almost got Kagy to try it, but the set up didn’t really work for the way he does them.
When Ben called me to shoot at Tigard a couple months back I didn’t see this one coming at all. He wasn’t sure he could do it as he’d never even tried it, but he got it done several times over, and now fires them out at will. At the time we’d planned to use this for a two page spread Haro ad. Haro hit me up and said they wanted to use it, so I sent it down and held off posting it. In the meantime, Ben and Haro parted ways. At first they said they were still going to run it, but then we Ben hit them up last week, they told him they weren’t.
The long and short of it is, it’s a bummer that it’s been sat on for two or three months. In this day and age, that’s an eternity. So instead of holding onto it even longer, I talked to Ben and Shad from Goods BMX, about making it a free downloadable Goods Wallpaper. Ben rides for Goods, Goods is awesome. So why not. So here it is in all its T-Rex face glory. There’s even an iPhone size for nerds like me.
Download 1680×1050 Screen Size
Download 1920 x 1080 Screen Size
Download 1280 x 960 Screen Size
From the Archives: Joe Rich, 1999
Joe Rich. Joe-God-Damn-Rich. I’d just moved to California in 1999 and Joe Rich was filling in for a few weeks on the Vans Warped Tour riding the vert ramp. Terrible One, the brand he was doing with Taj Mihelich was taking over the BMX World. Joe (as well as Taj) are more known for changing the face of park and street riding, but the two can also hang with the best of them on a vert ramp. Another shot from this day ran as an Etnies ad and postcard (a moto whip style air). Cab in the background looking on. Even rollerbladers on the ramp. Remember them? Joe Rich: One of the best on a BMX bike, hands down.
Magazine Design Stuff | ‘96-’98
In early 1996, while I was in design school in Boston, I took a Graphic Design internship at a magazine called Stuff. This wasn’t the macho/meathead Stuff that arose later, this was a Boston-based culture/fashion/music/literary monthly that got distributed (for free) at hip Northeast locations, including boutiques, galleries, record stores, book stores, etc. It was an over-sized, predominantly black and white magazine, printed on paper that was a couple steps above newsprint.
A few months later my internship was up, and they hired me as a freelance designer. A few months after that the art director left. As the only one involved who knew the production process, and nuts and bolts of the magazine, I ended up filling the position temporarily… which came to mean about two years. I had some sense of what I was doing. Some. Read more…
More Bike Portraits. Argonaut. DeSalvo. Hufnagel
A lot of custom bikes rolling through here lately. If you dig these you can check out some previous bikes I shot here and here. If you missed it, you can also check out the video I did on Jordan Hufnagel for Level Magazine here.
Hufnagel and Argonaut are both Portland builders I shoot regularly. DeSalvo is a well-known builder from Ashland who I’m told cranks out a ton of high-quality builds, many of them (the below bike as well) in Titanium. Nice, very different bikes from all the guys. Check them out after the jump. Read more…
We’re Gonna Mesh You
Mesh Skatepark became a Florida icon, and like anyone else who’s been there, I’m going to mesh miss it. In other words, Chad is closing the park, after giving it all he’s got trying to keep it on its feet. You can read more about it here in an interview with Chad.
It’s been a while since I’ve been there, two years actually, but fortunately I shot a few photos while I was there. I think they ended up getting sat on at a couple magazines, and never used, so this may be the first time you’ve seen them (although I also posted one or two of them on the site in the past). The shot above of Mike Cottle and Joey Juaristi took us a few tries to get, as the timing of Joey’s turndown while Mike was in a foot-jam toothpick wasn’t the easiest thing to make happen. I could be wrong, but I don’t think it ever ran in print. BMX Plus was going to use it, and then pulled some pages that month, pushed it back to the next, and so on and so on… I think it just sat there. Again, these shots are from 2007. I particularly like the fisheye shot of Mark Mulville after the jump. Read more…
Grease Not Gas
Mike Parziale started Grease Not Gas along with Aaron Stuart of the band Piebald. They convert diesel motors to run on waste vegetable oil from restaurants, and Grease Not Gas was started to educate people and assist in conversions. When you consider the cost of fuel, a free product is an incredibly appealing solution.
Grease Not Gas have also converted buses used on nationwide tours for Snowboarder Magazine, Clif Bar, and a number of bands, Piebald included. Last winter Mike started the Grease Bus, which shuttles people from Portland, OR to Mt. Hood Meadows, for a mere $10 round trip (a 1.5 hour drive each way). A steal by all accounts.
Given his ties to the snowboard community, YoBeat.com gave me a platform for the above short video interview with Mike, in which you’ll see a bit of how the process works, and find out where discarded restaurant waste has taken him.
SOMA Magazine
I recently photographed my friend, bicycle builder Jordan Hufnagel, for SOMA magazine. SOMA is a great Fashion/Art/Photography/Culture magazine from the Bay Area. It’s great when publications you already look at contact you for work, unsolicited. Clean design, modern content, and a little something for everyone. One thing I think SOMA are doing right from a print publishing perspective, is that they immediately put a digital edition of the new issue on the magazine’s web site. The whole thing. For free. A great service to the advertiser, and the reader. If a reader enjoys the magazine, and wants the further “tactile” experience, and printed piece for the shelf, seeing it online first is not going to stop them from buying it. I only see this as a media benefit. For those that would like to purchase a copy, you should be able to find it on any major newsstand. Thanks SOMA, both for the photos, and being on top of it. You can see the whole digital issue here, and view the cover after the jump. Read more…
iPhone-tography Part Four
If you you’ve been following my work, this site, or my Twitter feed, you’re already aware that I shoot photos with my iPhone on a daily basis (in fact if you follow me on Twitter you’ve seen at least a few of these already). You can view my iPhone-tography Part Three post of photos here and access the older ones from there. UK Mac site Cult of Mac also did an interview with me a while ago on how to shoot action photos with the iPhone which you can check out on Cult of Mac here.
Check out some newer iPhone photos you may not have seen yet after the jump. As usual, all photos are straight out of the iPhone, processed using Camera Bag, Old Camera, and Photo Gene. Read more…
