I still can’t believe this one actually worked. Not from a photographic standpoint; aside from dodging the occasional flying bicycle, or flying Ben Hucke, my part wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. Rewind two and half years.

When I first moved out to Oregon, the Tigard Park had just been completed. One thing about the park jumps out immediately as a bit out of the ordinary: The concrete T-Rex head right in the middle of the park, atop a hip. Cool, but, what the? Then I saw a skateboarder handplant it. I can’t even remember who. Maybe Kevin Kowalski. Either way, I had just moved from State College where Chad Kagy, Morgan Wade, Anthony Napolitan, Jeremiah Smith, and a few others had been doing downside handplants on quarterpipes at Woodward, and when I saw the handplant done on a skateboard I immediately thought how amazing it would be to do that on a bike.

Over the next two years I brought a few people by the park and suggested the handplant, sort of jokingly, but also sort of serious. I wasn’t going to push anyone into it, but it just made sense to me. Last summer Ben Hucke came in and said he had something he wanted to shoot at Tigard, so I went down there with him, not knowing what he wanted to do. He wanted to handplant the T-Rex head, of course. After a number of tries over the course of a couple hours (more just feeling it out and getting up the balls to hang onto the bike) he stuck it perfectly. So we shot horizontal and vertical long lens versions and called it good. The photo was set aside to be a print ad for Haro bikes, and then Ben left the team. Rather than let it sit any longer, I posted the shot as a free Goods BMX screen background, because, well, Shad is cool, so why not.

I still like that angle, but I had really wanted to shoot it fisheye in the beginning. I didn’t want to mess with Ben’s head being that close at first though, and I wasn’t totally confident where he was going to end up. So I stood back and let it happen, shooting it long lens.

A couple months later Ben came into the office and said “He’d had a dream.” Not a Martin Luther King Jr. sort of dream, but similar. “I think I can do a can-can in that T-Rex handplant.” I didn’t think much of it, then realized he was serious. The thing about doing something new on a bicycle is, if you have it in your head, and you have the mechanics of it figured out, you’re more than half way there. It’s all mental. It’s not my job to argue with that, It’s my job to document it.

A few more weeks went by, and Ben hit me up about a Dig Magazine interview he’d been trying to get shot forever. I haven’t shot any print editorial for the last two years. I love magazines as a medium, but I’ve gotten into the mode of putting things on the internet for all to see after they happen. Holding onto great shots for anywhere from 2-5 months isn’t really in my vocabulary anymore. But I’ve always loved Dig, the guys who do it, and helping Ben get some coverage wouldn’t be a bad thing. He hadn’t had any magazine photos in a couple years other than ads, despite a banger of a web video coming out every couple weeks. So I was down for the project. Keeping the can-plant under wraps for two months wasn’t easy for me, though.

I knew if he did the can-can it had to be shot from the front, and I wanted to shoot it fisheye, which meant being right up in the line of fire. I’m good at jumping out of the way, and my gear is insured, so why not, right? I figured out where I could be (sort of) safely, then figured out where I could put lights out of the line of flying bikes. We went relatively early, so the skatepark was empty enough to where I could set up lighting where I needed it. The nice thing about being at a local spot that we can drive right up to is that I can bring bigger lights. Normally for BMX you can get lights close enough that you don’t need a ton of power, and smaller strobes suffice, but with an overcast day and the light changing constantly, I needed enough power that I could overpower the natural light to where I didn’t have to keep changing my exposure, and also pull out detail from the clouds when it went to full overcast. It was changing minute by minute, and without knowing when he might land it, I had to balance the light so it would look good across the board. I used two Elinchrom Ranger Speed packs, which are powerful enough to do the job, and fast enough to stop the action. One light was about 5 feet to camera left, at about 4-foot high, and pointed a bit upwards so that the fall off from the light was hitting him more than anything. The main light was down below, camera right, about 20 feet away, pointed at him. Pretty simple set up, but enough power to where I could keep my same settings as he was firing out attempt after attempt.

Look closely and the T-Rex has a cigarette in it's mouth. Not an accident.

The photo turned out to be a lot of work, more so for Ben than myself. It took us two days, several hours each. No exaggeration (my photo files prove it), he did well over 350 attempts, some just “regular” feeler handplants (shown in the photos here), some can-can attempts, and a few that turned pretty ugly. A couple hours in on the first day, I wasn’t real sure it was even possible. The bike kept flying away from him when he’d take his foot off. The clouds were coming in and out. It would start to drizzle here and there, so he’d have the pressure of getting it done before the rain, and before the skatepark got crowded. After hundreds of perfect feeler handplants (which two months prior probably would have been a cover) and some fairly committed attempts at the can-can, he crashed hard. A good hipper. That was the end of that. At this point the skatepark was filling up with people, my lights were in the way and loosing charge, and he was hurt enough to shut us down. He’d gotten close, but I still wasn’t confident it was possible, or if he’d try it again in the future.

A couple weeks of healing from the hipper, and rebuilding confidence, we went back to try again. I’d shown him the photos of the first attempts, which was enough to get him psyched up to try it again. We also had gotten some pretty good assurance from the magazine based on those samples that if he got it done, there was a good likelyhood it would be a cover. That was enough motivation for Ben. Another cloudy day, with showers creeping in. Turns out aside from a new pair of shoes he’s wearing the same outfit. I assume he changed his close in that couple weeks at some point, though. Another couple hours of attempts, and I was getting less and less confident. My lighting set-up was the same, since we were happy with the previous day’s outtakes, but as the attempts dragged on, my power packs were getting drained. Having your flashes die before the shot gets done is not a good thing.

Notice the difference in the sky over just a few minutes. This change was constant.

I didn’t actually realize how dangerous the trick was until he missed his hand on one attempt. He’d done so many handplants at this point it was starting to seem basic. But you’re flinging yourself into an upside down position, and when he missed his hand it sent him totally upside down. Despite the bike almost killing me, he landed in the transition perfectly enough that he didn’t really get hurt. He did just barely miss his shoulder on the coping which would have been ugly, and a few degrees more upside down it would have been even more ugly. Until that point, despite getting hurt on the previous day, what we were doing seemed relatively safe.

All of a sudden you could see the trick start to click in his head. He found the spot in the trick where it was starting to come together, and you could tell he was getting closer and closer. Then he landed one, but put his foot down and we were both in shock. I think he was also a little mad for letting himself put his foot down, but right there we knew it was possible. So he kept going. You could tell it was going to rain any minute. 20 or so tries later he rode away perfect. A guy walking out of the City building across the way in a suit yelled “That was awesome, man.” He really had no idea. Just as Ben was riding over to check out the shot on the back of my camera it started to rain. The timing couldn’t have been any better. As soon as we got all the gear packed up it started pouring.

When you’re shooting something no one has ever done before you don’t know what to expect, or how to give them advice on how to fix what they’re doing. Sometimes you can help people out by telling them if they’re going to fast, or they need to go faster, but with this one I really had no idea. We’d never seen it done, so we didn’t know what the position needed to be to get back on the bike. Fortunately the rain held, the flashes kept firing, and Ben walked away with a bit of limp, but a happy limp.

Check out Dig Magazine Issue 76 for Ben’s cover, interview, and photos by myself and Shad Johnson. You can also download a Dig iphone app from the Apple App Store and check out the mag there when the new issue is up. I think that one is $1.99.

Gear used:
Nikon d300
Nikon 10.5mm fisheye
3 Pocket Wizard Multimax Transceivers
2 Elinchrom Ranger AS-RX Speed Packs with A heads and reflectors