If you follow me on Twitter you might have caught wind that we’re moving into a new building. Between traveling, we’ve started building out the new spot in deep SE Portland. It’s closer to my house, and we’re the only ones in the building, so we can make noise and use all the strong smelling solvents we want.

The deep SE part of Portland is affectionately known to long-time residents as “Felony Flats,” but it’s come a long way over the years, even in the short four year period I’ve been here. Shit, now there’s even a hip food cart pod called “Cartlandia” that sits along a bike path walking distance from our new shop. We’re hoping to take that progression one step further — we’ve been jokingly referring to the area as the “Flavel Arts District.” Portland’s prosperous “Alberta Arts District” was not so long ago a not so nice neighborhood. Some developers looking to make a few bucks added the “arts” and away things went. So we’ve taken the same approach and we made a logo (above). We also used the word “historic” which we feel also adds class. If nothing else, we found a cool building that works for us, and we think we should even have some skateable surfaces inside it.

I’m a day or two away from moving my desk and some of my stuff into the new place. We’ve still got a lot of work, and building, but my studio area is painted, and the trim is in, so hopefully tomorrow I can start loading into that section. We’ll slowly be moving everything over throughout the month, and should be in there on a full-time basis by the end of February (though likely before). More pictures to follow, but we’re excited to have more space. We are going to miss the Sweetpea coffee though (and Lisa).

Here’s the look book we started sending out last week to retailers for the fall 2011 / winter 2012 Yobeat line. This stuff should be available in select snowboard related shops around the country in the coming month or so, and it’s all available now on the Yobeat online store. In addition to the above Issue flipbook, it’s also downloadable as PDF here. All this stuff gets designed and printed in house. 25 different styles plus colorways… I didn’t realize it was that much stuff until we put it all together.

Future Sputnic team rider and current team manager Levi Hucke made a special appearance while I was trying to shoot some photos of Sputnic flow teamer Codie Larsen at Pier Park today. I think Levi was trying to poach my camera settings. Or he was trying to get background. There are a couple more shots after the jump, too, but Levi stayed out of those. And you can blow this one up by clicking on it.  Also, since people are sensitive, I can assure you that little Levi was far safer than any other baby in St. Johns. He’ll be dropping in soon.

I posted another photo of Codie recently, which you can see here.

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.

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.

Check out my previous four iPhone Photography Posts below:
iPhone-tography Part Four
iPhone-tography Part Three
iPhone-tography Part Two
iPhone-tography

Headed back to Portland tomorrow. Here’s Another shot of Roman Tencza from the same ramp back in Portland as the photo I posted the other day. I liked this one a lot, so rather than hold onto it for possible print, here it is. The web is a larger audience anyway, eh?

Shot with Kevin Robinson this morning at Woodward. I’ll post up that shot at some point soon.

Robbie Maddison w/ Mike Mason and Beau Bamburg — Inland Empire, CA, 2008

My good friend Brian Tunney wrote an interesting feature on his personal site about Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s outspoken past on Skateboarding, BMX and Inline Skating.

Years ago I got a ticket for riding my bike in a “posted no bicycling area” in Long Beach, California. For some reason said ticket qualified as a traffic ticket, and was posted on my driving record causing my insurance to increase. While I think her policies are likely more directed toward the destruction of public property, I still don’t agree with it. Does she ticket the kids playing softball in the neighborhood? They break windows. Kids playing street hockey? They hit cars with their puck/balls all the time. But skateboarders/BMXers are hooligans, right? The choice is yours. On the other hand, if this means they are going to start handing out tickets to rollerbladers on the beach, maybe I need to rethink my position.

The images above were part of the “No” Photo Series on jaredsouney.com in 1999.

I’ve posted before about how I’m a fan of Apple’s iPhone, and all its bells and whistles. However, after a little over a year of using the iPhone, I’m getting more and more frustrated with some of the basic things it lacks, most importantly integrated support for Multimedia Messaging (MMS as it’s more commonly known, or picture messaging if you will).

I’ve read some arguments that MMS is dead. No, it’s not. MMS accounts for some 70 percent of non-voice call revenue in European markets. And judging from the fact that I get at least two or three a week — which with my iPhone I can’t open without going to a cumbersome viewmymessage.com website requiring a complex username and password combination — there is definitely an existing user base for MMS. While email is just as easy to use for those of us with smartphones, there is still a chunk of the population with “old-school” devices.

There is a workaround for the iPhone user wanting to send an MMS message, though (and if you want to irritate your MMS-having friends, one to receive as well).


Nearly all the wireless providers assign their subscribers an email address based on their phone number. An email sent to that address will be delivered as a text message, thus if you attach a photo to that message using the iPhone’s built-in photo emailing tools, the photo will be received on the other end as a picture message. But then you need to know what the email address is for that recipients mobile network, and before you can know that, you’ll need to know what network they are on! Of course, once you have that email address you can just add it to your contacts, and you’re good to go in the future.

Below are the email addresses for a variety of providers:

Alltel = mobile#@message.alltel.com
AT&T = mobile#@mms.att.net
Boost Mobile = mobile#@myboostmobile.com
Cingular (AT&T) = mobile#@mms.mycingular.com
Einstein PCS = mobile#@einsteinmms.com
Sprint = mobile#@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile = mobile#@tmomail.net
US Cellular = mobile#@mms.uscc.net
Verizon Wireless = mobile#@vzwpix.com
Virgin Mobile = mobile#@vmobl.com

Another way to go at the moment is mobile#@teleflip.com, which automatically sends the picture number to the appropriate carrier. You can also use this service from a computer to send pictures to phones from Teleflip’s site.

Unfortunately if you want to receive picture messages (MMS) on your iPhone, it’s a little more of a hassle for your comrade sending the message. Almost all mobiles allow users to send messages to email addresses. To view the picture [somewhat] easily, the sender needs to deliver their picture to the email address you’ve got set up to receive on your iPhone. And there you go, you should receive a picture to your email. Certainly easier than the current “viewmymessage.com” message that I dread so much. I mean, come on, how many of those on-the-fly pictures are really worth all that effort?

Until there is Apple support for MMS, or some better third party apps, this is the route we must go as iPhone users. So be it.