I posted a teaser shot from this shoot a week or two ago, but recently I shot a bike check feature with Ryan Barrett for ESPN BMX that went up today. In addition to some photos of his set up and the customization process, we shot a couple photos at Nemo Design where he works, and took a trip down south to Myrtle Creek, OR for some action. Check out the whole thing here. The action shot above is a fastplant over a railing that sits atop a pipe at the Myrtle Creek park. It’s nuts in itself, but it was nearly dark when we got to the park. Neither of us had been there, but as soon as we pulled up he said “you can go over that rail.” Ryan got out of the car, and immediately figured out the speed line so we could shoot it. No warm up, he just got it done.

Brian Tunney over at ESPN put together an interview with Dennis McCoy regarding his 25th year as a Professional BMX rider. When I was a kid starting out in the early ’80s, Dennis was already one of the best amateurs, and had just gotten picked up by Haro — a full-factory sponsorship. A factory sponsorship for kid for the midwest, at the time, was a pretty big deal. All the big name pros lived in California. Shortly thereafter, Dennis turned pro, and has been on top of his game since. Whether it’s flatland, street, or ramps, Dennis has been on top at some point in his career. The guy has never slowed down. He’s ridden the X Games since they started, he was a pioneer in street riding, he’s ridden shows at county fairs for months on end during the lean years, and he once won a car as the rider of the year during the height of freestyle’s popularity in the ’80s.

There are a bunch of my photos in the gallery over on ESPN, including the one above, from the 2005 Gravity Games at Woodward Camp. Dennis got 2nd place at that contest. Check out the gallery and interview here.

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.

The above photo of Brian Blyther from 2003 is used in ESPN BMX’s Elements of Style photo gallery today on its site. Blyther essentially pioneered good style on a freestyle BMX bike, and continues to flow smoothly to this day (when he’s off Police duty of course). You can see some more shots from this shoot with Blyther here. And you should also check out the full Style gallery over on ESPN. Some legends in there.

A couple weeks back I hit the Hillsboro, OR skatepark with a crew of guys including Tony Neyer, Johnny Devlin, Ben Hucke, Codie Larsen, and Caleb Quanbeck. This video is the result. I’ve placed it on my Vimeo page for my own HD archive purposes, so embedding is turned off, but you can get it on the ESPN site here.

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!

I shot a bunch of photos of Roman Tencza last month (and over the course of the last year really) that turned out to be some of my favorite things I’ve shot recently. Those shots evolved into a bio for the ESPN site, which evolved into a video to go with it. This feature is a good example of why I like producing content for the internet: I can melt together all the aspects of content that I like into one piece (photo, video, etc). Roman shreds the skateparks up here in the Northwest. Don’t be surprised if you see him on the contest scene this year too. He’s got the big tricks, but the style and flow to go with it. Very Rob Darden, Brian Foster, and Brian Hunt inspired style. Awesome. Check out the video above, and click here to go through the photo gallery and interview. It’s worth it.

I did a quick little edit of Quincy Dean on my recent trip to Woodward West. You can read the story here and watch the video. I had planned to shoot something a bit more in depth, but he hurt his foot pretty badly when he took a quick break from filming to ride the high jump with the campers. The high jump takes people out.

There are also a few of my photos in the John Bristol feature (Bristol is shown above) on ESPN as well, which also went up on Friday.

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.

The October 5 issue of ESPN the Magazine has some of my work in it. The subscriber copies contain the EXPN supplement (not available on newsstands) which features two of my shots as shown above (Dean Dickinson as a two-pager). You can see the photo of Dean in my original post from the day after the shoot here as well. That’s one of my favorite photos I’ve shot in a while, so I’m glad it’s getting around. The other photo is of Chet Blacksmith, on the green rails on Burnside in Portland. Thanks to Brian Tunney for sending these out.