BMX riders are no stranger to injury. Just watch the documentary “Birth of Big Air” on Mat Hoffman to see the tests rider’s bodies are put to on a daily basis. In 2007, Stephen Murray became the first high-profile Professional to be paralyzed during competition. When Stephen crashed a double backflip at a Dew Tour in Baltimore, MD, his life changed forever.

Stephen wasn’t the first to sustain this sort of injury, many years back an influential New Jersey rider named Jeff Crawn crashed during a magazine shoot in Chicago, resulting in the loss of movement in his legs. At the time, BMX was in its lean years, and hadn’t yet gained the public attention of televised events like the Extreme Games. In comparison to Stephen’s injury, the incident remained under the radar.

Despite the television coverage and corporate sponsorships behind BMX in the last few years, until recently there was no sort of support system in place for this type of long term injury. As a result, the Athlete Recovery Fund was set up to provide help to some of these injured riders and families. USA Today posted a story online today about Stephen and the Athlete recovery fund, which you should check out here. I donated some photos of Stephen to ARF, one of which is featured in the story. It was shot a few months prior to his injury at his old house in California. Check out the feature here, and more photos of Stephen after the jump.

Dean Dickinson put together this short video interview/profile on my for ESPN.com. There’s some old BMX footage, some behind the scenes photoshoot footage, etc. The results from one of the shoots in the video, a shoot with Roman Tencza, can be seen here.

Our friends over at Woodward Camp just launched a new educational program — a boarding school of sorts — combining BMX, Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Music, and various art programs with traditional college-prep education. Above is the mark we designed for program a couple months back. A W/U combination with an ever so subtle nod to a spine ramp. You can read more about the program here.

I was at my studio earlier changing light bulbs and cleaning up the place, when a visitor with a British accent popped by  to do a somewhat irresistable trade for a Yobeat Sweatshirt. Dave Allen is the Director of Insights and Digital Media over at North, a creative agency here in Portland. Like many people in the creative field, Dave has an interesting background: amongst other things, he was the founding bassist in the highly influential British post-punk band Gang of Four. He was also a founding member of Shriekback, and currently runs the music blog Pampelmoose. Dave hooked up some awesome limited-edition Gang of Four releases. Much appreciated. And for the hip-hop fans, Dave’s son Dylan is following in the musical footsteps, and just posted up this track you should check out.

Before we all had websites and blogs, hand made zines were a popular creative outlet. One of the most influential BMX ‘zines of all time, Aggro Rag, came from a group of riders known as the Plywood Hoods from York, Pennsylvania. Mike Daily was the Aggro Rag ringleader. The Plywoods Hoods, with riders like Kevin Jones and Mark Eaton, ultimately changed BMX Freestyle, specifically flatland, dramatically. Daily went on to edit Go: The Riders Manual and later BMX Plus, and the “Dorkin in York” series became the most important BMX video series of all time. While Mat Hoffman ushered in a new era of ramp riding, and the Plywood Hoods were doing the same for flatland and video.

Daily has since written two books, and currently lives in Oregon. He recently restored a 1985 CW California Freestyle, and brought it by my studio to get some photos before he took it out to the streets. We got to talking about an Aggro Rag book he’s working on compiling, as well as his bike build, which I turned into an interview for ESPN. You can and should read that here. There are some additional photos of the CW after the jump, but be sure to check out the interview. And don’t forget to pick up a copy of the Aggro Rag book later this year. I also sort of blame Mike for inspiring my recent purchase of a 1985 Haro Master frame and fork. Seeing the CW gave me the vintage bug.

Don’t forget to read the ESPN interview here!

The guys over at Defgrip just posted up an Autophoto photo feature with some of my photos. I picked through the library and pulled out a little bit of everything going back about 10 years.

Also, just saw this post about me over on The Pedal Pusher. Thanks guys.

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.

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.

The first magazine job I got in 1996 was a real shocker. I quickly learned that content was diluted and often dictated by the advertisers. The appeasing of advertisers wasn’t a shock. The extent to which it happened was.

For years editorial and advertising relationships have been hidden, shunned and disputed. But they are there. The issue is in how those relationships are presented. Branded content is prevalent on the internet, but for some reason many still hold print in a higher regard when it comes to professional journalism. But now that branded content has been happening on the print front it’s causing quite a stir. ESPN magazine got their throats jumped down earlier this year just as Vogue did many years ago. But it’s all changing.

This month’s Transworld Snowboarding cover has caused one heck of a stir. Mike Berard’s site has a post on it (and you can see the cover in question there), where a discussion has begun (to which I left a comment). I will say this: I am not opposed to branded content. I’m opposed to advertiser directed journalism. I think at this point we’re at a societal point where these things aren’t going to exist unless they are branded. How much of that gets brand driven? Colors Magazine, funded by Benetton, was one of the most culturally aware publications ever produced. But few brands would agree to such subtle involvement. We are a “make the logo bigger” society.

My question in the whole mess regards photographers and writers. When they produce advertising content they are compensated very differently then with editorial because they are selling a product. While a Transworld cover may only pay several hundred dollars, an advertisement for a non-endemic brand can pay in excess of $10,000. Photographers make very little money off of editorial and writers are in the same boat. They depend on licensing for advertising. Without that licensing the photographer’s career is going to be a thing of the past. The question is, if your photo appears on the cover of a magazine with a logo super-imposed, is it editorial, or is it advertising? To me, in my opinion, it is advertising. The licensing fee should reflect that. Is the athlete compensated for their involvement in this advertisement? They’d better be. You can read more on Mike’s blog and chime in.

Edit Note: The biggest, and most important question I see (and one that no one seems to be asking) is this — If brand X can pay to insert its logo on any photo in a magazine, in the case of TWS a cover shot, what incentive do they have to sponsor athletes?

Maybe I’ll start adding the above “Consume” watermark to all my images that get used in print? Would that be a problem?

According to her current Wikipedia entry, Sarah Morrison is an American writer and internet personality.

Through Myspace and her YouTube videos Sarah became a bit of an Internet Celebrity/Personality. What is an Internet Celebrity? We might find out in the forthcoming video piece I started working on a little while back when she was in Portland. I’m finally getting around to putting it all together. I hesitate to call it a documentary. It’s more of a “short.” Sarah talking about Sarah. And clothes. And drugs.

In this little teaser, Sarah reads from her own Wikipedia entry on a day that it had been modified (or hacked) by an undisclosed “expert” on Sarah Morrison.