For my Image Editing project, I returned to my roots of skateboard documentation. For about a ten year period during and after high school, about 1998-2008, I did a lot of skateboard photography, and was very serious about it. My ex-wife and I self-published a small skateboard magazine, and I still have a lot of equipment for shooting good skateboard photographs on 35mm: a long lens, a 15mm fisheye, and two flashes with radio slaves and tripods.

So, for this project, I decided to see what I could get at Washington-Jefferson skatepark. I worked at Tactics Boardshop 2007-2009, so the first things I did were shoot some of my friend Scott Garrettson and contact a couple people who helped me get into contact with Caleb Grant, who is sponsored by Tactics. Once I was shooting with Caleb, a few other people who were there asked me if I wanted to shoot with them too. I also ran into AJ Liu, who had worked at Tactics with me when I was there. I shot for 4-5 hours between two days, and had a lot of fun.

So, then I had to edit all the footage I shot, which took several hours, well over the 4-5 hours I took to shoot the footage. First I had to get to know the software a bit, which took a long time because of the computer problems we were having. Then, I really wanted to try to imitate some of the techniques I’ve seen in other skate videos, because I’ve really enjoyed a lot of the editing I’ve seen in skate videos over the years, like having all or most of the tricks land right on beat and having quick clips of B-roll edited well to the music between the tricks and in the spots where it says the skater’s names. I was able to accomplish some of what I wanted to do, but I definitely did not have the time to get it anywhere close to perfect.

Besides the editing, a lot of the shots are not framed exactly how I would want them, a few of them are shakier than I would like, and there were a few problems with the audio track. The song is “The Station” by Richie Cunning, from the album Night Train. I got permission from him to use his music for non-commercial purposes.