I mentioned this video a couple weeks ago, that’s been up over on LevelMag.com in their player. I had a bunch of great stuff left over from the Yobeat interviews I did with Draplin that I posted a little while back, and just couldn’t leave this stuff on the cutting room floor. Like the Yobeat videos, this one got featured over on the design site Notcot.org, and received a lot of good feedback. Aaron’s become a big name in the design world in recent years, and his work hold up to the image he’s built. Check out his workif you haven’t already.

I remember a few years ago as photographers we’d labor over strange ways and devices to get cool POV perspectives. In the last few years, GoPro and a few other manufacturers have made it incredibly easy and cheap. I’ve been itching to try some flatland stuff with it for a while, but kept forgetting. This time around, I remembered to bring it, but forgot to charge it, so I only got a few clips, but I thought it was neat. These suckers have become cliché in an “everyone’s doing it sort of way.” Nevertheless if gives a neat perspective that can be used well in moderation. Next time, with more planning and battery charging, I might try it with two of them, to splice different angles together.

We went up to the 2011 Holy Oly at the Summit at Snoqualmie near Seattle on Saturday. Holy Oly is a fun, mellow snowboard contest, which features a huge quarterpipe, and jib/rail set up. The winner for the day (as judged by a panel of notable snow industry veterans) wins a pallet of Olympia beer, and gets his (or her) name etched into the “Holiest of the Holy” trophy. This was the 8th annual event, and past winners include Peter Line, Austin Hironaka, and Wille Yli Luoma. This year, Manuel Diaz gets to lug a bunch of beer back to Chile. I put together the above video for Yobeat. Yes, the soundtrack is sarcastic.You can also check out the story and Brooke’s photo gallery on Yobeat.

I also put together a “Show and Tell” video for Level Magazine, with some cool footage I had of Aaron Draplin that wasn’t used in the Yobeat video series from a few weeks back. In this one, Draplin shows some of the neat old packaging he’s collected from estate sales over the years. Some would consider it junk, but as Aaron points out it has a “Fuckin’ Rad value of millions and millions of dollars.” Check it out here.

When I moved to California in 1999 I faded out of riding flatland and started riding more ramps and skatepark, mostly because that’s what the guys I liked riding with out there rode. The last full flatland video part I filmed for was Moronics in Action, a New England area video made by Mark Florek around 1997. While I was pulling together some old footage for the interview ESPN did a few weeks back, I came across this section, and figured I’d upload it so I’ve got it archived. The first link is over a minute long. At the time I was really into the whole linking shit forever thing. There were some other clips spread throughout the video, but this is my main part in the video. This video came out about two years before I stopped riding flat regularly, so I’m sure there’s some newer footage somewhere out there, but I haven’t come across more than a couple clips. A few months back I posted an older section from Wire’s “Live Wire” (1995), which you should check out here.

Back in the spring, I needed some filming rigs for my DSLR cameras to use while shooting video. If you’ve used DSLR’s for video, you know stability is a bitch, and the options out there are outrageously expensive. Price aside, I couldn’t even find exactly what I needed. Fortunately, I’ve got a shop in the garage, so I whipped up my own rigs out of steel. I’m no master welder, but I made it work. After I figured out what I wanted out of them, they were relatively easy to make, so I put them up for sale in the store on the snowboard site, YoBeat. The people who need them are finding them, which is nice.  We’ve not marketed them as stabilizers, but sold them as Back Scratchers and Coat Racks that happen to work as camera stabilizers, in order to avoid any sort of patent related drama with manufacturers of the really expensive shit. “Hey, I don’t know. It’s a damn coat rack, but it holds my camera just fine.” They’re easy to make and we can sell them to the skate/snow/BMX market cheap ($30 vs. hundreds of dollars) to those who need something affordable, and not lose money on our end. While they’re not as flexible as some of the really expensive systems, I made what I needed for my work, and made them available. Unfortunately, selling them means somebody has to make them, and I’ve been super busy, so I haven’t really pushed them, posted about them, or advertised them. But some filmers have caught onto them anyway.  People keep asking me about them, so here they are. You can see how I use them, with cameras mounted after the jump. I’ve added simple bicycle grips to mine, which is easy and cheap should you choose to do the same. If you want to buy a coat rack (works for normal up to the eye shooting) or a back scratcher (works for low angle, fisheye follow-filming), head over to the YoBeat store. Both are steel construction.

Back Scratcher shown mounted to a camera, with bicycle grip added.

Coat Rack shown mounted on camera, with bicycle grips added.

Yesterday afternoon I went up to the outskirts of Mt. Hood to film the skateboard portion of Bonfire Snowboarding’s annual Pipe to Pipe contest for YoBeat. The one-day event features a snowboard contest at the mountain followed by a skate contest at Windell’s Camp. This year, with the concrete park at Windell’s growing, and the weather as good as it can be, the contest was held outside (it’s been inside the park building for the last few years). The above video is some of what went down — mostly in the Pro division — during the skate contest. For full photos and coverage of both the snow and skate events check out YoBeat.

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 made my first trip to the Legendary Mt. Baker Banked Slalom (the 25th year) this past weekend to film this video for YoBeat. The event is amazing. It’s just how events like this should be: fun. Nothing more, nothing less. There’s no prize purse, yet the best snowboarders in the world (including some Olympians who still couldn’t resist despite the Games being just days away) make the trek to Baker to ride year after year. Some legends, like this year’s winner Temple Cummins, only surface for the Banked Slalom each year. As Mt. Baker manager Gwyn Howat put it, how many events do you know of that 10-year-olds, 60-year-olds, and Olympians compete on the same course on the same weekend? Not many, if there are any others out there.

The 2009 Oregon Trifecta was this past weekend. The Trifecta is (supposed to be) a three day skateboard contest at three different concrete skateparks in Oregon. Unfortunately, this year a mishap caused the first stop in Lincoln City to be cancelled, so the Trifecta was Bifecta. I made the above video for BFD.com, where you can also find coverage. Yobeat.com also has coverage from the event and a huge photo gallery.

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.