A week of tents and skateboards..

March 13, 2008

So its only taken me about 8 months but I thought I’d finally share some photographs that I took last summer on the Howies Skate Tour ‘08.
I got a phonecall from Howies, who are a UK based outdoor clothing company that have gotten pretty big and trendy as of late (they recently opened a shop in Carnaby Street),
saying that they were going to put some skaterboarders, clothes, food, beer, models, staff, things in a big van painted in blackboard paint, send it round the country and whilst stopping
to skate, also ask people what they thought of nuclear power. Sounds a bit crazy? It was a crazy week. In 7 days we drove to, skated, questioned, camped and hung out in cardiff, bristol, stoke, manchester, leeds, sheffield and london. We camped out under the stars (and rain) each night and in general it was a complete adventure. Some of the shots got used in their catalog but otherwise not much has been done with them, and I only recently had time to start doing a story of them on my new website.

So these are small because I am lazy and am taking them straight from my site! Shot all on a Canon 30D and 28mm F1.8 lens. (I shot some film too but just for personal enjoyment really.):

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This was the flyer.
On the back of the van it said Nuclear Power (with those cool radiation signs) and on one side “is it green?”, on the other “or is it dumb?”
The idea was that members of the public could write their opinions on the van in chalk. Was pretty cool.
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The van itself ran on Biodiesel (Howies are very green) and looked pretty rad.
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All in all there was four skaters (one of which filmed), one dude who drove the van/cooked/saved our lives, one lady from howies running it all,
and one model with two other girls joining us to mode in london. Ill save those shots for another post…
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Lots of skatboarding over the week. Please with the 30D when it comes to not blowing highlights. Just underexpose by 2/3 stop.
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Here you can see people writing on the van. Niiiiiice.
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More skating. Was constantly amazing by the dude Tom on the right,
how he could skate really fast whilst filiming and not looking where he was going.
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Soon we had our first bout of camping. Tents were a nightmare and beer did nay help.
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Still - it was awesome eating/sleeping/hanging out in the great outdoors. Really enjoyed it.
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Kudos to whoever thought to bring retro striped deckchairs. A photographers ultimate pleasure!
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Camping generally lead to more skating. And thus the cycle repeated.
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And when we weren’t skating or camping (or talking photos…
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We were asking people to write on our van!
For example:
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As you can see before long the van was pretty covered…
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This guy was awesome. He said it means DANGER.
(each day the rain would wash away the chalk, so it was a new city and new peeps to write on the van)
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The last day we camped in this amazing valley (although it was pissing it down)
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Lydia and Alison - model and the person who pretty much organised/ran the entire tour.
Shown mixing scrambled eggs - nice.
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The last proper stop was Sheffield..
(We ended up in London where I mainly took photos of 3 girls for the catalog but
there is sorta differentthan these shots so I will save it for another post/story)
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I was really pleased with this last shot.
It seems to sum up nicely what Howies was aiming to do with the tour, i.e. promote thought to all ages
about nuclear power and its future (its being used more now in the UK now)
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All in all the week was awesome. Took lots of photos, had a complete laugh, traveled all over the country and met some amazing people.

One word of advice to any photographers reading: Be Careful when shooting digital, because its so damned easy to overshoot,
I shot far too many photos during this week and it left me with a complete nightmare when it came to the editing stage.
After a week’s shooting and the first edit, I still had about 1500 shots that I considered to be pretty decent, to and to cut these down to 30 images for my website was pretty brutal.
Sure digital allows you to shoot around your subjects, and get lots of nice shots, but just dont get too trigger happy.

In other news just awaiting a new lens for my leica and then I am gonna have a few weeks of shooting lots and lots of film. And I’m off skiing with mates in 2 weeks, should be a nice combination of skiing all day in the fresh air and getting totally mashed at night.
Have a good weekend all!
J.

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