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

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Download iPhone Size

A 4th of July (3rd actually) gathering/jam of sorts went down at Shad Johnson’s house in Portland earlier today. Actually, it’s probably still going on… I had to leave after about an hour to spend the day sitting in an aiport on my way to Vegas for Lavin’s jam. I didn’t expect there to be much of anything set up, so I figured it would be more of a BBQ, but the boys had built two 8-foot wide 8-foot tall quarterpipes, one on each side of Shad’s front stairs. Awesome set up. Really awesome. By the time they got it all built I had about a half hour to shoot a couple pictures before cruising to the airport. Not much time, considering nobody had even touched the ramps yet at that point. But even still we managed to get a few shots. Roman Tencza (above) was killing it. Flair over the channel, tailwhip over the channel… he didn’t even need a shirt.

Just as I was leaving one of the local street dudes, Tony, ate shit messing around on the long jump they had set up, and smacked the back of his head on the road. Blood everywhere. Ambulance. No good. From what I hear Tony got some staples in his skull, but was otherwise okay from a head injury standpoint. Hopefully that’s true. Check out a few shots after the jump, and keep your eye on the Goods BMX blog for videos which will likely surface shortly from some of the locals.

Roman Tencza, flair over the channel.

Boyd.

John Ivers.

Roman Tencza.

Conversation: Shad Johnson, Owner Goods BMX from Souney Media on Vimeo.

I watch a lot of documentaries and I love interviews. Studs Terkel’s book of interviews, “Working,” is among one of my favorites. Sometimes hearing people talk about their work is more interesting the work itself. There’s always something interesting in there. Terkel’s book “Working” is a collection of interviews with people from all walks of life, from a grocery bagger to a piano tuner. They’re all interesting in their own right.

Bike shops, especially BMX specific shops, are by no means a gold mine. Opening one is never a get-rich-quick scheme, and if that’s your motivation you’re in for a suprise. It’s a labor of love that can quickly turn into a financial headache and a babysitting service. But it can work, and it can work well.

At the core of every good BMX scene through the years has been a shop holding things together. Would Austin, TX have become the BMX Mecca that it did without Trend Bike Source, and later Empire BMX? Goods BMX, started four years ago, is that shop for the Portland BMX scene.

I wanted to find out what goes through the head of someone starting a BMX shop… what’s the motivation. I’ve known Shad for a long time, well before I moved up to Portland. He’s shot photos and made videos of the BMX scene up here for years, and his video Blueprint in the late 90s pretty much put the Northwest BMX scene on the map. We talked about the shop, as well as his collection of old magazines and bikes from the 80s and 90s.