The Vander Photo

At some point during my short stint at Wizard Publications, Windy Osborn told me the basics of how to shoot panning shots.  In an effort to learn, I took my Pentax ME Super to the Hermosa Pier one Saturday and shot a whole roll of film of people riding by on bikes and even a few seagulls flying.  I was trying to get the panning shot idea down.  Windy made a contact sheet of all my photos, and they all sucked.  The bike rider or sea gulls were all blurry, as well as the backgrounds.  Windy gave me some more pointers.  I did learn that a shutter speed of about 1/15 or 1/30 of a second was about right, though.  I didn't try any more panning shots.  The year of 1986 ended, and with it, my job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. 

I moved on to edit the AFA newsletter, and I shot all the photos for that, as well.  My Pentax let me cheat as a photographer.  I didn't have to learn how to use a light meter.  By changing the f/stop setting ring, I got a look inside the viewfinder of the shutter speed.  So I would just twist it until I got the shutter speed I wanted.  So I never learned about f/stops either.  Gravity Powered Bikes, or GPV's were a little side hobby that many BMXers got into in either '85 or '86.  The initial idea was to take spare bike parts, build them into a low slung bike without pedals or a chain, and ride down big hills powered by gravity alone. 

Gork, the editor of BMX Action got into GPV's early on, as did a bunch of other racers and some freestylers.  After all, who doesn't like to go bombing down a big hill at breakneck speed?  There were a couple of magazine articles about GPV's, but no organized races.  At some point that year, 1987, someone, I can't remember exactly who, decided it was time for an organized race.  Abunch of guys showed up, and had a good ol' time.  Another race was promoted.  Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, became part of the deal, and I think they did most of the organization of it, as well as shot video of the event.  The road chosen was one never used for a GPV race before, it was the Palm Springs Tramway Road, way out in the desert of SoCal.  Unlike most of the roads GPVers normally rode, there weren't a lot of turns.  It was a big, steep drag race for the most part. 

My friend John Ficarra, co-editor of my zine in NorCal, was one of the guys who came down for the race.  He stayed at my apartment for a night, and we drove out to Palm Springs in his old BMW, it was either a Bavaria or a 2002.  Anyhow, the crazy GPV crew took over a motel in Palm Springs for a couple of days, and there was a lot of craziness going on.  At one point I wandered into a motel room where Dave Vanderspek and a few other guys were hanging out.  We were all joking around, and around midnight or so, Dave headed out to try the hill in the dark.  He left with another rider, their two GPV's, and a twelve pack of beer under his arm.  I wasn't sure they'd even make it back.  But that was the spirit of GPVing.

I wasn't riding in the GPV race, I was basically just snapping some photos for the AFA newsletter, and possibly to sell to one of the magazines as a freelancer.  The event included a halfpipe contest in the parking lot up top, and the GPV race.  The GPV's themselves came in a multitude of different styles.  Gork had a homemade pointy fairing and sixteen inch wheels, which were better for cornering.  Most guys had 20 inch wheels, a few rode 24 inch.  Every GPV looked different and no one knew who would win.  Dan Hannebrink, an aeronautical engineer (or something like that) got into GPV racing when someone asked him to make them a fairing.  Several riders were using Hannebrink made front fairings on their bikes.  Dan himself, though, had a full fairing, which proved to be a huge advantage on that particular hill. 

Here's my big confession.  I decided to dedicate a full roll of film to trying panning shots, which I hadn't tried since the day at the Hermosa pier months before.  But I knew about what shutter speed to use.  So I walked about 150 or 200 yards down from the starting line and started shooting panning shots.  As you old guys know, this was back in the film days, when we didn't know how our photos looked for days, until the film was developed.  I focused on the yellow lines in the middle of the road, and shot photos as the riders rolled by.  Here's what I mean by a confession.  While it looks like Dave Vanderspek in the photo above is going about 90 miles an hour.  He's actually only going about 20 mph, because I shot the photo so close to the starting line. 

It was a fun day... except for John Ficarra, who crashed his brains out in a turn.  He did end up getting a great crash photo in the Orange County Register newspaper, though, and he was stoked on that.  I can't remember who won the vert contest, but the newly sponsored Mathew Hoffman blew our minds, and Josh White blasted his hyper extended and super smooth airs, along with several others. 

After the event, I called Gork and told him I shot a bunch of photos.  He told me to bring my black and white film by, and Windy would develop it and print a contact sheet, to see if I had any magazine quality photos.  I dropped the film off, then drove back up to Wizard a few days later.  As it turned out, my panning shots turned out much better than my first try at them.  Most were fairly clear with the blurry background.  But there were about four that were nice and sharp, with a well blurred background.  Gork, Lew, Andy Jenkins, Windy and me all looked at them through our loops.  Instantly, the guys gravitated to the photo of Dave Vanderspek.  Dave was a favorite rider of all of them, and his weird, non-fairing, supertuck just looked badass.  A couple other photos were actually a tad better in quality, but this photo of Vander was their favorite.  Gork said he wanted to run it in BMX Action, and I was totally stoked.  Andy J. and Lew also loved the pic. 

This photo of Dave Vanderspek is still the best photo I've ever taken, and it wound up being used in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and the one shot magazine Homeboy.  I think Gork actually paid me $100 for the pic, and the other two times they just used it.  All in all, I'm really stoked on that photo.  Besides being a great GPV shot, it just seems to sum up Dave Vanderspek's FULL SPEED AHEAD attitude towards living life, at least to me.

So now, as I'm working on turning my writing and art into a business, I've been looking for a photo to make a poster of.  Obviously, it needs to be a photo I have the rights to.  I've been thinking about taking a still out of one of my videos.  But I just kept thinking about trying to draw the Vander photo.  So over this weekend, I did.  Here's the color drawing of the black and white photo that's become a bit legendary.

If you'd like to get a poster of it (or two), message me on Facebook or email me at stevenemig13@gmail.com.  RIP Vander.

You can watch the Unreel edited footage of the Palm Springs Tramway in this clip at 5:09, and there's a quick shot of Vander at speed at 7:25.

The End of Pipeline Skatepark

There's a documentary out, and a damn good one, about Mat Hoffman called The Birth of Big Air.  I imagine most of you reading this have seen it.  But it's about the birth of mega airs off mega ramps.  The real birth of big air started at Pipeline Skatepark with Eddie Fiola.  In the clip above we see Eddie in his heyday, rockin' a sticker Mohawk and 1 3/8" rims just to add a little flair to the whole thing.  Eddie wasn't the first guy to do airs.  Bob Haro did airs in early skateparks and later on the first quarterpipes.  R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff did airs.  But Eddie Fiola, in the incredibly gnarly Pipe Bowl at Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, took the aerial to a whole new level.  From three or foot airs on a quarterpipe, Eddie pushed it to the seven and eight foot out range.  And it wasn't on a six foot QP.  The Pipe Bowl had eight foot transition and four solid feet of vert.  How many of the guys doing insanely high airs today can get eight foot out of a transition with four feet of vert?  Soon after Brian Blyther and Mike Dominguez were blasting that high too.  NorCal crazy man Hugo Gonzales, local Jeff Carroll and upstart Steve McCloud got up in that range as well.

There were other contests at other skateparks in the early 80's put on by Bob Morales, but the biggest air always seemed to be at Pipeline.  I first saw magazine photos of the skatepark and riders in BMX Plus! in '82 or '83 as a high school kid in Idaho.  I thought those guys were completely nuts.  I couldn't even imagine riding those huge pools, let alone airing out of them.  Somehow, in a course of events that still amazes me, I wound up part of the BMX/freestyle industry in the late 1980's.  Even crazier, my boss in 1988 and '89 was Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline.  I bought Mike Sarrail's old truck a couple weeks before Pipeline closed, and made it up there five or six times in those last couple weeks.  That was enough to learn one line in the Pipe bowl and one line in the insane Combi Pool.  I couldn't even come close to airing out, but I could carve tile in the round half of the combi and where tile would be in the Pipe Bowl, as well as get a bit over vert in the full pipe.

But the real fun for me came after the park closed.  Don was the head producer at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  I was The Dub Guy at Unreel, meaning I spent most of my time making copies of different videos for people throughout the Vision empire.  But I was also the lowest guy on the totem pole, and I got asked whenever someone needed a little help.  Don had all kinds of video ideas he wanted to try before Pipeline got bulldozed.  At the same time, several skaters in the Vision woodshop were Pipeline locals; Chuck Hultz, Kelly Belmar, and Chris Robinson, too, I think.  So Don and I would head up to Pipeline nearly every weekend to shoot video of those guys and Steve and Micke Alba, Eric Nash and a few others.

I wasn't getting paid for helping out, but I was allowed to bring my bike in and ride.  So I'd shoot a little video of the skaters, help Don trying different ideas, and then I'd be able to go ride Pipeline... all alone most of the time for a half hour or so.  Then I'd go back to shooting video of the skaters again.  It was epic all the way around.

I also got to call a couple of riders, mainly Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther, to see if they wanted to session a while.  So at times I would be inside the Pipe Bowl, a 35 pound, $50,000 betacam on my shoulder, while Eddie and Brian swooped by me at speed and did their lines and airs around the pool.  Then I'd ride a little on my own.  Then I'd get the SVHS camera, and shoot wide shots of the skaters in the Combi.  Meanwhile, Don was trying to get some "point of view" or P.O.V. footage of the skaters.  At one point we literally bolted an SVHS-C camera to the top of a skate helmet.  But the camera weighed 3 or 4 pounds, which messed with the skaters' balance.  We also quickly learned that skaters don't look where they're skating half the time.  So that footage sucked.  Then Don got Micke and Steve Alba to do their old doubles lines, with the guy in back holding the camera in his hand, pointing at the guy in front, and that looked really cool.  This was decades before ultra-light GoPro cameras that make this kind of video so easy to shoot today.  And Unreel couldn't afford the expensive "lipstick" camera set-ups that were the smallest video cameras out back then.

During this time that we were having these weekend sessions, Don's parents, Stan and Jean, were starting the process of cleaning out the pro shop, and getting the park ready for its demolition.  That included taking down the fences around and in between the bowls.  On one hand, this allowed for some lines and transfers that head never been possible before.  On the other hand, it messed up some lines.  One weekend Eddie showed up, put his helmet on, and rolled into the Pipe bowl like he always had.  If you watch the video above, you'll see that doing a footplant on the fence behind the full pipe was part of Eddie's line.  What he didn't realize when he rolled in was that Stan had taken down that fence that week.  I was sitting on my bike in by the front of the bowl, and I heard this "AAAAAaaaaaaauuggh!" from Eddie. I couldn't figure out what had happened.  Eddie flew out for his typical footplant on the five foot high fence, only to find there was no fence.  So he did an awkward kickstand landing on the concrete from over five feet out.  He tried riding a bit more, but finally said that he relied so much on that fence being there, that it totally messed up his lines.  He didn't come back after that.

I think Brian was trying 720 flyouts out of the Pipe bowl, possible because a fence had been taken down.  As crazy as it sounds, I wasn't watching.  I think I was busy shooting video of the skaters, and saw him out of the corner of my eye.  I think he pulled a few, but I can't remember for sure.  720's, even on a flyout jump, were amazing in 1989.  As for myself, I found a cool line out of one of the small bowls in the back.  It was either the 4 foot or 6 foot deep bowl.  I would get some speed, roll through it, flyout and land in a short nosewheelie then go into the ditch.  It was a ten or twelve foot gap, not huge by any means, but I'd never seen anyone jump a few feet, do a short nosewheelie, and then go straight to landing in the ditch.  So it felt really good.  I kept tagging my back wheel on the edge of the ditch, but it was still cool.

Eddie and Brian came by to ride a few times, but then they took off on their tours or something.  So the last few weekends it was Don, me, and 6 or 8 pool skaters.  Don got to try a whole bunch of new videos ideas, and got some really cool footage out of it.  I got to ride Pipeline all by myself several times, and with Eddie and Brian a few times.  And the OG pool skaters got their last epic sessions in the most legendary skatepark bowl ever.

One time after everyone was pretty tired, we all just sat on the edge of the square part of the Combi pool, feet dangling into it.  Steve Alba.  Micke Alba.  The wood shop guys I mentioned earlier.  We were all drinking Gatorade or something, and the skaters were looking for lines they'd never tried before.  And they found a bunch.  I just watched as one would point, "what if I did a grind over there... then carved this way, then hit that wall..."  It was a fly on the wall moment for me, one of those times when it's just a magical moment... and you actually realize at the time it is, so you just let it happen.  Then they got up and actually tried a few of those new lines as Don and I shot video.  One my last day there, several of the skaters pulled blue tiles from the shallow end as a keepsake.  Once they walked away, I pried off 6 or 8 blue tiles for myself.  Those tiles sat in my nightstand drawer for more than a decade, before finally getting lost in a move.

Then it ended.  I didn't go up to the skatepark for the final session.  The Pipe bowl was already gone at that point, and we'd shot all the video we would ever use... and then some.  Then it was gone.

Here's video of the last skate session in Pipeline's Combi Pool, followed by a clip of Jeff Grosso and Steve Alba talking about those days.

Last session at Pipeline

Jeff Grosso 's Loveletters to skateboarding: Badlands part 1

Random Stories From a Weird Life

I went out to lunch with a friend today who I've known for about three years.  Somehow we got on the subject of TV shows, and I started telling him a few random stories about my days working on the crew of American Gladiators and a couple other shows in the early 1990's.  After one story he said something like "I've never heard you talk about that before."  My response was something along the lines of, "Yeah, I've got tons of weird stories.  One of my old skate friends keeps telling me I should write a book about my taxi driving days, but I never get around to it."  I've joked now and then about having hardly any money but tons of stories.  I know, everyone has stories.  But not stories of people having sex in their taxi for an hour, or moving Harry Potter's castle (twice) or seeing a mountain lion up close while being homeless.  Oh yeah... and the taxi driver stories, the TV crew guy stories, the furniture mover stories (seriously, there needs to be a furniture mover "reality" show), and homelessness stories, not to mention stories from my BMX and skate industry days.  I've written over 700 BMX stories in previous blogs, and only made it from 1982 to 1987.  In this blog I'll just wander through the memory banks and see what pops up.  Anything to keep you entertained in your cubicle when you're supposed to be working.  We'll see how it goes...