I’ve had the good fortune and opportunity to make one of the most beautiful drives in the country two times—the first was about seven years ago, but I didn’t have a camera with me. The second time was just a few days ago, and this time I made sure to bring some gear to get a handful of photos of along the way.

The drive I’m talking about is along California’s Highway 1 (Pacific Coast Highway) traveling north from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The 14 photos here were taken on the 165 mile stretch of coastline between Morro Bay and Santa Cruz on May 10, 2012.

I would encourage everyone to make it a point to do a similar drive at some point in their life. Just look at a map for HWY 1 between San Francisco and Morro Bay, plan for a full day, prepare yourself to make a lot of stops, and hit the road!

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It’s starting to get pretty tough to keep up with posting all of my recent work, but I guess that’s a good problem to have!

Here are the latest videos I produced for Alli Sports and ESPN:

A few weeks ago I helped organize and run the annual JoMoPro flatland contest in Joplin, Missouri. In addition to writing the sponsorship proposal, building the Web site, laying out the flyer, editing promo videos, and announcing the contest, I did an article for ESPN about the contest and edited an official highlights video from the pro finals. After all was said and done, Flatmatters Online did an interview with me about it all. Check it!

Official JoMoPro Web Site

ESPN JoMoPro Coverage

Flatmatters JoMoPro Interview

Official Highlights Video

For whatever reason I’ve never really made this public, but each year for the past three years, after going on end-of-the-year vacations I’ve put together travel photography books from my trips—first from Ecuador, then East Africa, and most recently from Southeast Asia. The books have always been personal projects of mine and just good keepsakes from memorable trips. But after placing the order for my most recent on, I figured I’d share this on my blog…

I use a Web site called Blurb.com to print the books and lay them out in Adobe InDesign. It’s a really great system that’s easy to use, the books come out amazing, and it’s actually cheaper to print an entire book than it is if you were to have all the images printed on their own. I only print one copy of each book for myself, and right now, all of them are on my coffee table in my apartment. However, if you want to check out the the books online or buy one for yourself, you can do so from my page on the Blurb Web site. If nothing else, maybe you’ll be inspired to make a book of your own.

Who knows, perhaps later this year I’ll put together a book with some of my best BMX photos from over the years?

Click here to start turning the digital pages in all three of my travel photography books!

Over the past few months I’ve posted more than 15 photo galleries from my travels in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. However, even when I broke down hundreds of images into all those themes and galleries I still had more than 20 photos left over that I wanted to share, so here is the final set of the ones that didn’t fit anywhere else.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia

After having a quick interview in the very first issue, I now have another small feature in the seventh issue of Yasu “Green-G” Takeo‘s BMX/lifestyle magazine out of Tokyo, Japan, Encounter. This time around Green-G asked a handful of industry insiders and pros, “When did you realize you could make a living from BMX?”

If you ever get the chance to check out a copy of Encounter, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

(Click on the second page of this post to read my full response!)

Click here to see the feature I had in Encounter issue #1.

Wildlife, waterfalls, forests, flowers, landscapes, and more… Here are 33 nature photos I shot in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia

While traveling throughout Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia last year I was able to see more beautiful sunrises and sunsets than I could count, so of course I took every opportunity I could to shoot photos of them. From beaches to rivers and from mountains to temples, here are nine of my favorite sunrise and sunset photos I shot in South East Asia.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia

Here are five new videos I recently produced…

This one for Skin Industries features Lance Mosley shredding some dope So Cal spots…

The next few were made for Alli Sports…

Aaron Ross vs Dakota Roche – Head 2 Head

Under The Gun with Patrick “Big Daddy” Laughlin

How-To Super Whip with Rob Armour

Brett Banasiewicz Bike Check

If you’ve been following my blog at all over the past several months then you know I’ve posted a ton of photos from my trip to South East Asia. Well, today I’m extremely excited to post this gallery because it has some of my favorite photos from the trip of some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. Click through and enjoy these 10 incredible images of waterfalls I shot in various parts of Thailand.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia

You can’t begin to understand a new culture without meeting people from all walks of life within it. While traveling around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia last year I got the privilege to meet and shoot photos of people everywhere I went, and this gallery contains 23 of my favorites.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia

Long-tail boats are extremely common throughout South East Asia, especially around the islands and beach towns in Southern Thailand. The combination of the vessels and amazing waterscapes make for incredible photo opportunities. Here are 14 beautiful photos I shot of various boats in while traveling in Thailand last December.

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Eating, playing, cooking, working, sleeping…living. Here are 35 photos I shot in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia of people going about their daily life.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia.

When traveling in South East Asia, the biggest tourist attractions are always temples (locally called wats), so naturally while I was venturing throughout Thailand and Cambodia I visited more than a few and shot hundreds of photos along the way. Here are 21 of my favorites including images from the Grand Palace, Wat Pho, White Temple, Angkor Wat, and more.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia.

Here’s a video I filmed and edited of James Foster for MADD Gear and KHE. I’ve known James for several years now, but this was the first time I worked on a specific project with him. He’s super consistent, really easy to shoot with, and an all-around genuine good dude. We are both pretty excited about how the edit turned out!

Up next is a house check I did with Terry Adams for the ESPN site…

Markets are a way of life in many places around the world, and when traveling to foreign countries I love to wonder through them to get a glimpse of a culture’s daily life that is so different from my own. Here are 10 interesting photos I shot in various markets throughout Thailand and Cambodia.

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Click here to check out other photo galleries and blog posts from my five week journey throughout South East Asia.

I’m super pumped that two magazines recently did interviews with me—Ehwey out of Argentina, and ART out of France. I haven’t seen the inside of either one yet, but here are both covers that feature my name on them. Gracias and merci to Rob and Alain for these opportunities!

Here are the three most recent videos I produced for Alli Sports that dropped this past week.

Make sure to subscribe to the Alli Sports BMX YouTube channel to see more of my work throughout the year.

The beaches surrounding the islands in the south of Thailand are some of the most amazing landscapes you can ever hope to see. I shot most of these photos on the island of Koh Phi Phi, but some were taken near Tonsai Bay and Railay. Grab a coconut, sit back in a hammock, and click through these 14 beautiful beach scenes. Kob kun krab!

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Along with announcing at the event, I’m helping organize this year’s JoMoPro contest, so here’s the official flyer and promo video I made for it. Check out all the details at jomoproflatland.com.

Entering a new major city on the other side of the planet is always exciting, and when I arrived in Thailand on my five-week trip last December I had my camera on me every second of the way. Here are 11 random photos from the streets of Bangkok.

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Here’s some more recent work I did for ESPN and Alli Sports.

James Foster house check on ESPN.

Glenn Salyers “Under The Gun” video for Alli Sports.

While traveling through Southeast Asia last December I had the chance to shoot photos of monkeys on a few different occasions. If you’ve ever had any up close and personal time of your own with these fascinating creatures, then you know what a treat it is to see them in their natural settings.

Here are 17 photos of various monkeys spotted in different parts of Thailand and Cambodia.

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The power of the Internet and online social media never, and I mean never, cease to amaze me. From a video of a triple backflip on a BMX bike going viral to a clip of a panda bear sneezing getting more than 130 million views (and making someone a ton of money), the way information spreads nowadays is just incredible.

Last night as I was scrolling through Twitter feeds I saw a handful of posts that mentioned the word Kony. On Instagram I saw red, white, and blue photos that looked like political posters that included the word Kony. Then on Facebook I saw numerous links to YouTube and Vimeo to some kind of video that had to do with Kony as well. But what was Kony, and why was I one of the last ones to know? I figured it was probably the name of a politician that people were getting behind this election year, and if important enough I’d find out what the hype was sooner or later.

This morning I finally decided to get to the bottom of this Kony phenomenon and watched what is probably one of the most well done and strategically thought out mini-documentaries and viral campaigns ever produced. I’ve been fascinated and captivated by other online marketing efforts before, but this one was a new kind for me—this was one for a greater cause, and something that hit really close to home.

If you aren’t familiar with the details behind the name yet, in short, Joseph Kony is a rebel leader in Uganda that has been committing himself and forcing young, innocent children to commit unspeakable crimes for nearly three decades. He is an evil man and one of the worst criminals in world history.

Filmmaker Jason Russell and the Invisible Children organization created the Kony 2012 documentary as a way to educate the world through online interactions—and it worked. Millions and millions of people over the course of the past few days have been educating themselves by watching the video and giving back to the cause through the simple call to actions the video recommends. It is clear that millions more will follow suit, and the Kony 2012 campaign has only just begun. I can’t help but think that I am watching a completely new kind of history unfold right before my eyes.

Even though there are valid points on the opposition, I support the Kony 2012 campaign and encourage everyone to watch the video below to educate yourself. If you feel moved to do, I would also encourage you to share the video and donate to the cause any way you can.

As many of you may know, I spent some time in East Africa in December 2010 visiting refugees and survivors of genocide, and I came home a changed man with a great feeling of helplessness towards the situations I was exposed to and educated on. I made a few mini-documentaries of my own as a way to help educate people in my circle, so seeing an organization like Invisible Children and a campaign like Kony 2012 is nothing short inspiring.

Here are the videos I made after traveling in Rwanda and Burundi, then through Uganda to Kenya.

Here’s some recent work I did for ESPN and Alli Sports…

The ESPN photo feature was a house check with flatland rider Matt Wilhelm. Click the photo below to see the gallery…

These are the two latest videos I produced for Alli Sports…

Bike check with Brian Hunt:

Interview with Zack Warden:

Make sure to subscribe to the Alli Sports YouTube channel to see more of my work on a weekly basis!

I’ve been to a handful of third world countries on four different continents over the past few years, and during my recent travels to South East Asia I decided to write down some universal tips that seem to be true no matter where you are. Here are a eight easy things you can do to save yourself time, money, and headaches while backpacking in third world countries.

1. Pack light and buy things as needed.
It is usually cheaper for things like clothes, sandals, and medicines. More often than not you would pack things (and in turn have to lug them around) that you won’t need. If you find yourself in need of some cold medicine, a new pair of flip flops, or some extra t-shirts, head to a local market and you’ll be surprised at how cheap you can get basic items.

I bought these flip-flops for about $2 at a market in Thailand and threw them away at the end of the trip.

2. If someone walks up to you with a smile on their face and offers to help you, turn it down.
Ask for help from someone who doesn’t have anything to gain from you. In nearly every third world country that thrives on tourism you will find people who want to take advantage of you, and they are very good at their own games. Don’t give them the chance to play! Just say no thank you and walk away.

In Bangkok, Thailand, there are hundreds of tuk-tuk drivers that will offer to drive you around all day for about a dollar. However, instead of taking you where you want to go, they make stops at jewelry and tailor shops where they earn commission for bringing you there.

3. Everything has a price, and everything that has a price is negotiable.
If you want something that isn’t offered, the right amount of money can still make it available to you, and anything that is already offered can always be bargained for a cheaper price. Get good at negotiating and haggling. Start at half the price they initially tell you.

We I were told by four different travel agencies that the city we were in did not offer bamboo raft rides down the river, but after offering one of the agencies more money than they were asking for, we got our ride. Shooting a sunset while relaxing on the Mekong River was well worth it.

4. Explore the city how the locals travel.
You will see more and have a much better experience than if you attempt to travel in a way that you are typically “comfortable” with. Just like in Los Angeles where you drive a car, and in New York where you take subways, follow this trend abroad as well.

In certain parts of Cambodia, renting a car would be a nightmare and taking a taxi would be insanely impractical. Even though I've never really driven motorcycles before, we rented one a few times, and it made our visit much easier.

5. Learn a few words of the local language.
This goes much farther than you would think! By showing the natives you are not a “typical arrogant tourist,” they will be much more friendly and helpful.

6. Bring your own toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
Other countries and cultures simply don’t live the way we do, and trust me, you’ll be glad you have this stuff.

Very few places will have the option of buying toilet paper from a vending machine, so do yourself a favor and be prepared.

7. Plan for delays in travel.
In East Africa I heard a man say “American’s count time like they count money.” In other countries staying on schedule is never a guarantee, so don’t ever expect to be on time.

Not every journey will have a five hour delay due to a bus crash mid-route, but it's still not uncommon to be tied up for several hours for some reason or another just about every time you try to get to a new destination.

8. Eat where the locals eat.
If there is a long line of local people waiting for food, it’s probably a good place. You can’t truly experience a culture without sampling their cuisine.

Don't let street vendors like this slip through the cracks. They may have some of the best food you'll eat on your entire trip.

*Bonus Tip: In Thailand, no matter how much it may like a doughnut, unless it says “Dunkin’” on the box, it is NOT a doughnut.

Yes, I know those two round pieces of dough look exactly like what you would call doughnuts. So did the other 14 round pieces of dough that I bought all over South East Asia. I promise you though…they are not doughnuts.

Here are a few helpful sites for planning international travel:
- travelfish.org
- lonelyplanet.com

Part of what I enjoy about traveling is getting to try out new foods that a culture has to offer, and as my luck would have it, South East Asia had a ton of crazy new delicacies for me to sink my teeth into. Here’s a quick list of some of the weird things I ate on my trip to Thailand and Cambodia last December along with a bunch of photos to help your eyes digest it all…

- A variety of insects including crickets, various sized grasshoppers, a mealworm, a grub, and a cockroach.
- Fried chicken tendons.
- Grilled chicken intestines, feet, hearts, and head.
- Boiled duck egg fetus.
- Shark fin soup.
- Fried and soft boiled quail egg.
- Grilled snake, frog, and squid.
- Dog curry and grilled dog.
(Plus tons of other traditional local dishes, soups, and desserts.)

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Just like the title says, these 14 photos are funny signs I came across during my trip throughout South East Asia at the end of 2011.

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One of Bangkok’s most popular tourist attractions is the Grand Palace, home of the famous “Emerald Buddha.” The 18th century temple complex sprawls across more than 50 acres, so trying to do the architecture justice in photographs is nearly impossible without a helicopter. While I was walking around the grounds at the beginning of my five-week South East Asia trip last December I decided to focus on some of the smaller elements instead of trying to capture how massive the place was. The result of my attention to detail is this gallery of 15 patterns and textures from Thailand’s Grand Palace.

Grand Palace - Bangkok, Thailand

If you like this, check out some of my other galleries of patterns and textures….

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25 photos of various colored patterns and textures from different markets in Thailand and Cambodia.

Click to enlarge for full effect, or use the thumbnails below to view each image individually.

Check out these other galleries of patterns and textures….

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One of the coolest things Lindsay and I did on our trip to Asia last December was called The Gibbon Experience. It’s a great project that was started as a way to help preserve the forest and wildlife in Northern Laos, but when you are actually in the forest, it’s very easy to forget that you are helping the environment.

In a nutshell, you visit a remote village, hike through the forest and rice fields, and then zip line your way around the forest for a few hours before zip lining right into a treehouse that you sleep in about a hundred feet in the air. (The only way into or out of the treehouse is via zip line.) Some of the zip lines are nearly a half mile long and several hundred feed above the ground—and all of them are fun as hell! It was definitely a highlight of the trip, and as cliche as it sounds, the photos don’t really do it justice. Nonetheless, here are 10 photos from The Gibbon Experience so you can get a taste of what it was like.

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Thanks to my old college buddy Rebecca Beacham for telling us we had to do this!

Here’s a video I recently filmed and edited for Fox Racing of three of their MX riders signing autographs at the Valley Fair mall in San Jose, California. I’m pretty stoked on how this came out!

Click here to see the photos I shot at this event.

Also, I’ve started to do some projects with Alli Sports, and I’m really excited about working with them this year. Here’s the first video I produced for their site and YouTube channel featuring Brett Banasiewicz and Pat Casey going “Head 2 Head” on some BMX trivia questions.

Make sure to subscribe to the Alli Sports BMX YouTube channel to catch more of my videos throughout the year.

While on my trip to Thailand and Cambodia last December I found myself fascinated by all the different uses for bamboo and how the native people wove together the stalks and leaves. Along the course of my journey I ended up photographing these nine textures and patterns of some of the bamboo thatching I came across.

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Check out these other galleries of patterns and textures….

Life has been full speed ahead since I started my full-time freelance career earlier this month, and I couldn’t be more stoked!

This past week Fox Racing flew me to Nor Cal to shoot some photos and a video of an in-store autograph signing with some of their sponsored motocross riders including Ricky Carmichael, Jeff Emig, Ryan Dungey, and Ken Roczen. You can check out the photos from the afternoon on the Fox site or on their Facebook page. While you are there, go ahead and click the “LIKE” button on their page and check out some of their apparel. You won’t be disappointed. Hopefully they will release the video soon—I’m really pumped on how it turned out!

While I was in South Bend, Indiana, a few weeks ago I shot a house check with Brett Banasiewicz that is now featured on the ESPN site. Check that out by clicking here…

Lastly, for a bit of randomness… Mexican Flatland rider and artist Niko Del Real recently drew a caricature of me that he posted on the boombmx.com site. Niko has been creating BMX artwork for quite some time now, and while I was working for ridebmx.com I posted several galleries of his work featuring caricatures of various pro riders. Thanks to Niko for doing this! It looks sick!

Just six hours after landing back in the U.S. from my recent trip to South East Asia I jumped back on another plane from Los Angeles to the Midwest where I got the chance to visit Brett Banasiewicz’s new skatepark in South Bend, Indiana. While I was over there I made a video for the ESPN Web site from the contest that Brett hosted at The Kitchen and also sent over a few clips to Fuel TV for their weekly news show Action Sports Plus. I did some other work while I was out there for ESPN and Alli Sports that I’m sure I’ll post up sooner or later, but for now here’s the ESPN edit along with a quick Web clip from AS+.

In December, just before heading off to Asia for five weeks, I went to the Netherlands to cover the 2011 Vans Rebeljam for ridebmx.com, and while I was there I spent a few extra days wondering around Eindhoven and Amsterdam. Since I had already shot a bunch of travel photos around Amsterdam a few years ago I decided to just use my iPhone to document my aimless meandering this time. Here are 10 photos from the two cities shot on iPhone 4′s Pro HDR app, and one bonus panoramic picture, too.

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As I sit in the back of a tuk-tuk weaving my way through the disorderly and chaotic streets of Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh I’m finally starting to truly reflect on the life I’ve lived in South East Asia for the last five weeks. I’m also getting to enjoy one of my favorite parts of traveling. The kayaking, scuba diving, hiking, and trying weird foods are all great, but there’s something about watching the daily life of a culture and a people that is so different than your own that just can’t be beat. The sounds of motorbike engines, horns, and bumpy roads, the smells of food stalls and fresh meat and produce at the local market mixed with the exhaust from the crowded streets, and the sights of ordinary people doing ordinary things. A guard helping a young boy cross the hectic street. A woman making sugar cane juice. Men working on machinery. And entire families of five on a single motorbike saddle going who knows where. In my own city, or even country, everyday norms are all too often overlooked, but on the other side of Planet Earth these distinctly different norms have a whole new meaning and give me a new perspective on things. And that is something beautiful that comes along with traveling.

This has been the longest stretch of time I’ve ever traveled, and my first time in this part of the world. The experience as a whole has been completely surreal and unbelievably exciting, and each mini-experience, adventure, and excursion along the way is a story worth remembering and telling on its own. I’m grateful I’ve had each and every one of these experiences and I’m just as grateful to have been able to go through them all with a close friend who I hold so dearly.

I’ve learned a lot while I’ve been on this trip. I’ve learned about traveling, about friendship and relationships, about cultures and people, and I’ve learned about myself. I feel a great sense of peace as I begin this 26-hour journey back to the United States. I am refreshed, recharged, and rejuvenated, and ready to get back to a life that’s a bit more familiar.

However, even the life I’m going back to isn’t completely familiar anymore. For the past five and a half years I’ve worked for Ride BMX Magazine, and when I get back home I will begin my new career as a full-on freelance photographer and videographer in the BMX industry. I’m eager to see what’s behind all these new open doors and to see where the paths behind them will lead me.

As I leave Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia I want to show my gratitude to Lindsay Matush for planning and researching the trip and being the best travel buddy I could ever ask for. I also want to thank all the other people we encountered an met along the way for giving us a glimpse into their fascinating lives and culture.

Thank you very much!
Kob kun krab! (Thai)
Khop chai lai lai! (Lao)
Awkunh ch’ran! (Khmer)

To see my other travel updates from this trip to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, click my “Travel Update” tag page.

I have a ton of great travel photos to post over the next several months that I’m really excited to share. Be on the lookout!

*Written and photographed on my iPhone while in a tuk-tuk at 7:45am on January 13, 2012.

It’s been about five days since my last travel update from this trip, and as of right now I only have two more nights left in South East Asia before I fly back to the U.S., leaving Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia behind and ending this five week mega-adventure/mini-retirement. Since m last post Lindsay and I have made our way from Battambang to Siem Reap, and from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. I feel like we’ve been packing as much into each and every day as I usually squeeze into a month, so to give a play by play of the past five days would be impossible, but I’ll quickly list some of the highlights and a bit of reflection as I relax in this hammock on the third floor balcony here at our final guesthouse in Phnom Penh.

Battambang
- We rented a motorbike and drove it through some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen.
- We rode a bamboo train with our motorbike on the cart. The bamboo train is a simple two-axle cart with a sheet of bamboo and a motor on the axles. The tracks are antiquated and dilapidated. Since there are only one set of tracks, if two carts are approaching each other from opposite directions the one with the least cargo/passengers must stop, disassemble their cart, remove it from the tracks, and let the other pass. Since our cart had our motorbike on it, we never had to stop and disassemble.
- We visited some temple ruins at the top of a hill with a fantastic panoramic view of the farmland around us.
- We visited the ruins of a second temple at the top of another hill. There were wild monkeys all over the place that were really fun to watch and photograph.
- On the same hill we visited some caves where men, women, and children’s bodies were dumped during the Cambodian Genocide during the late 1970’s.
- We watched several million fruit bats fly out of a cave at sundown for about a half hour as they streaked across the sky like a scarf waving in the wind.
- We ate boiled duck eggs with developed fetuses in them.
- We took an eight-hour slow boat ride from Battambang to Siem Reap, navigating through floating and stilted villages and getting an extremely interesting glimpse at life along the river for so many Khmer people.

Siem Reap
- We went shopping and got massages in the night market.
- We visited a place where local women make baskets, soaps, oils, spices, and other things.
- We visited a silk farm where caterpillars are bread for their silk cocoons. We got to see the process of a caterpillar’s life cycle and how the cocoon is turned into silk for fabrics.
- We saw both the sunrise and sunset at the temple ruins of Angkor Wat, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
- We ate grilled snake.

Phnom Penh
- We pedaled bikes around the city and river front and drove a motorbike through some of the most insane traffic in the entire world. In Phnom Penh they do not have any regard whatsoever for stop signs, traffic lights, lanes, dividers, or any other rules or laws of the road. It is an absolute free for all a perfect example of controlled chaos.
- We visited the biggest “Killing Field” in the country where thousands of Khmer people were tortured, killed, and mass buried during the Cambodian Genocide.
- We visited a prison where thousands of Khmer people were held captive, tortured, and killed during the Cambodian Genocide.
- We ate grilled chicken feet and head as well as grilled dog and dog curry.

Be on the look out for one final update with some reflection on the trip as a whole pretty soon. Then, over the course of the next few months I’ll post some photo galleries and videos…stay tuned!

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As I’m sure you could tell from my last few travel updates, our time spent on the islands off the southern coast of Thailand was incredible!

It's almost too easy to get good photos of long tail boats… Here's one that I'd normally hold on to for a photo gallery of some sort, but I have enough from this trip that I can let one slide.

Now we have made our way on another whirlwind journey to Battambang, Cambodia, and will finish out the last nine days of our trip here and in two other cities in Cambodia before flying home. Once again the means of getting from point A (Tonsai Bay, Thailand) to point B (Battambang, Cambodia) was pretty wild. Here’s the synopsis…

We spent the morning and afternoon rock climbing and kayaking at Tonsai Bay, then got a long tail boat to the mainland around 3pm. From there we boarded a mini van for a seemingly pointless one-kilometer ride to our double-decker bus. That bus ride started at about 4:30pm and was supposed to be 13 hours long, ending in Bangkok. However, about 12 hours in, after rain and flooding delayed us a few hours, our bus diver crashed into another bus, shattering the windshield and busting the driver side mirror and headlight. No one was injured, but plenty of first world tourists were pissed. Half the bus got off there and found other modes of transportation—in the middle of the night, on the side of the road, around who knows where. Lindsay and I didn’t have a schedule or anywhere important to be so we opted to stay on as it was the most convenient and cheapest option for us. Around 9:30am (already five hours late), we stopped on the side of the highway and switched over to a new double-decker bus that wasn’t wrecked. Another two hours later we were finally dropped off at a random bus stop somewhere in Bangkok.

Our busted bus.

Lindsay pulled out her trusty Lonely Planet guide and found that a certain bus station across town had busses that went to the boarder town near Cambodia we were tying to get to, so we hopped in a cab for about 20 minutes and made our way to the bus station. It worked out great and we were just in time for the next bus out of Bangkok.

After another three-hour bus ride we were finally at the border crossing and walked through immigration into Cambodia. Once inside the new country we hitched a free five-minute bus ride to a taxi and bus station where we got a “share taxi” (a beat up old Toyota Camry). We were in that car with another random guy for more than an hour, then he got dropped and a different random guy got in. Then the driver stopped at his house and his teenage daughter got in (sitting on Lindsay’s lap in the front).

Finally, around 9pm (30 hours after our journey began) we were at a hotel and ready to settle down for the night. The hotel (that we are still in it for another night) is the nicest place we’ve stayed at so far on this trip and is only $3 a night per person!

Entering into my 21st country…Cambodia.

Today was our first full day in Cambodia, and it was super relaxing and slow paced, but we still packed in a ton of super fun activities.

Here’s what we did today…
We took our time getting up this morning and dropped off some laundry to be washed at the hotel’s front desk, then went for a walk at the local market where we ate some soup and I got my face shaved and hair cut for $4. I haven’t had a close shave with a legit razor in nearly six years (I always just use a beard and mustache trimmer), so having my face shaved with a straight razor and talcum powder (no water or shaving cream) was a pretty wild experience for me. The haircut was deece considering the sheers were about as dull as you could get and still be able to cut hair. As the razor burn was setting in on my face I got a full head wash and massage that was worth the price alone.

Nope, not hamburger patties and tomatoes. Congealed blood with chicken innards that somehow look a lot like testicles. These are just some of the many colorful goodies you can find at the market. (I haven't tried either yet, and probably won't.)

The nice lady that served us soup in the market.

This was not very pleasant, but long overdue.

After we left the market we made a quick stop at the bank to exchange some money, then rented a motorbike ($5 a day). We took off on the chaotic streets on the motorbike and made our way to some temple ruins, stopping off first at a random roadside house to watch local people make rice paper in their front yard. After walking around the temple we kicked back in some hammocks, drank a coconut, and chowed down on some papaya salad. I ended up taking a quick but amazing nap in the hammock before we cruised on back towards town. On the way back we made a pit stop at a crocodile farm where we got to hold baby crocs for a bit. The night ended with some more soup at a roadside stand and a circus performance from a local school of aspiring artists. They were really talented and extremely entertaining—a perfect way to end a perfect day in a new country!

Moped cruisin'.

If you've ever wondered what the marks on rice paper are from, here's your answer… Bamboo drying racks.

What a croc.

Not quite Cirque de Soleil, but still pretty awesome.

I mentioned in my last travel update from this five week excursion through South East Asia that I recently did one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life, so this post is dedicated to that…

Along the southern coast of Thailand there are several inhibited islands and pseudo-islands (that are actually bays only accessible by boat), and all around these islands are massive limestone rock formations—some that have to be upwards of 600ft tall. When you are on a boat passing by them, they are some of the prettiest things in nature you could imagine. They make interesting silhouettes in the distance, and reveal an incredible depth of colors and richness when the sun hits them just right.

However, seeing them from a distance in a passing boat, no matter how many times I passed them, could not have prepared me for how majestic and breathtaking they are when I was directly underneath them in a kayak.

My point of view as we approached two of the formations.

There has only been one other time in my life I legitimately got teary eyed and choked up just by looking at something Mother Nature created (the other being when I was sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon), but that’s exactly what happened while paddling the small blue kayak through coves, bays, and inlets cut in the rock, under stalactites, and around tiny islands of solid rock protruding up from the ocean floor. Looking up and seeing how giant the formations were, and feeling so small in comparison was a powerful experience that I’ll never forget.

Lindsay under a massive overhang on a perfect natural diving board.

My best attempt at a Michael Phelps impersonation.

We paddled around aimlessly for hours, and constantly stopped just to take deep breaths and let our surroundings soak in, appreciating the fact that we were exactly where we were at that very moment in time.

Going into a cove.

Exploring an inlet.

Paddling under a giant stalactites.

Lindsay shooting the gap.

I remember feeling a similar way while white water rafting through a jungle in Ecuador, which I also put very high on the top of my list of my most memorable travel experiences. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a water proof camera with me on the white water rafting trip, and this time, while I did have a camera in the kayak, I almost felt like no photo I could ever take would do the experience justice, so I opted to keep my camera in the dry bag for most of the trip. Lindsay shot a handful of digicam pics, and I did shoot a few photos with my DSLR, but I didn’t get any images that I feel truly capture how magnificent and meaningful the experience was for me.

I think part of the power in experiences like watching the sunset while sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon, white water rafting through a jungle in Ecuador, and kayaking around tropical islands in Thailand comes from the fact that the journey of getting to that place and moment in time has been built up so much. After all the research and planning, flights, buses and car rides, and everything else that comes with the logistics of traveling, finally being in exactly that moment and mindset that you’ve been after all along is just a great feeling that can never be matched. For me, those moments are exactly why I chose to travel the world the way I do and are what make me feel so alive. In those moments I sit back and tell myself, “THIS is why I travel…”

Looking out from under a cut.

A view from the beach where you can see some of the formations we paddled around off in the distance.

Wow, the past few days since my last travel update have been insane! As we rang in the New Year last night we hit the three week mark on the five week long trip. We spent the last five nights on the small, beautiful island of Koh Phi Phi. The whole place is basically like a non-stop Spring Break party with fewer boobs, more scuba diving, and much prettier scenery.

This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for since the first day I decided I was going to Thailand… Ahhh… Living!

Cheesing it up for the camera on top of Koh Phi Phi’s lookout point. The bay on the left is the more chill side of the island, and a mere kilometer and a half or so away, the bay on the right is the party beach.

Part of my time there was spent relaxing on the beach, laying back in hammocks drinking coconuts, and going to various beaches and view points on photo missions, and the other part of my time was spent getting my open water certification for scuba diving. This was my first time ever diving, and it was an incredible experience to say the least—it truly is a whole different world under the water. The highlight for me was a black tip reef shark and a few sea turtles on my very first dive! Swimming with great white sharks is really high on my bucket list right now, and with this certification I’m one step closer to making that dream a reality—hopefully 2012 will be the year for that!

Here is Lindsay feeding a monkey on Koh Phi Phi’s “Monkey Beach” while completely freaking out the whole time. The island we are currently on has tons of monkeys, so I’m looking forward to photographing them over the next few days!

It’s hard to tell in the photo but, there’s 6ft leopard shark just a few feet behind me. Thanks to Lindsay for snapping the GoPro underwater photo!

Jumping off the boat to enjoy a quick swim in between scuba dives near the bay where “The Beach” (with Leonardo Dicaprio) was filmed.

The New Year’s Eve party on the island was one of epic proportions. One side of the entire island was a massive party for about 48 hours straight. Of course, I was only there for about two of those hours, but that was plenty enough for me. It was a really cool and unique scene…all the bars and parties are on the beach, and during the night when the tide is low you can walk about a half-mile into the bay and still only be waist deep, so the music and dancing had a beautiful backdrop of long tail boats stuck in the sand and people wading in the water.

Celebrating the start of 2012 with Lindsay.

Happy New Year!

After a few short hours of sleep I woke up this morning at 5:15am and walked for a solid hour to a beach on the other side of the island hoping to catch a nice sunrise and to shoot photos on an empty beach. However, it was overcast all morning, so things didn’t quite go as planned.

This was my view while waiting for a sunrise that didn’t happen this morning on Koh Phi Phi’s Long Beach.

Lindsay and I hopped on the 9:00am boat off the island and got back onto mainland Thailand where we taxied to another port to catch a long tail boat to the new “island” we are on now called Tonsai Bay. It is called an island even thought it is still part of the mainland because you can only access it by boat. It’s way more relaxed and laid back than Koh Phi Phi, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for sun the next few days (it’s raining as I type this on the porch of our bamboo bungalow) so we can go kayaking around the limestone formations and explore some new terrain. Lindsay plans to do some rock climbing as well since the island has world-class walls to scale, but my wrist is still jacked from a slip and fall at a waterfall early on in the trip, so I’ll have to sit out during the climbing sessions.

Relaxing on the long tail boat ride from Krabi to Tonsai Bay. The rock formations all around this place are sick!

After a few more days of enjoying this majestic tropical paradise we’ll be off to cross the border into Cambodia and spend our final week there before heading home. Hopefully I’ll have time to squeeze in another update or two before we head back to the U.S. on January 13th.

Here’s a quick peek at the island we are on now. Incredible!

Have a healthy, happy, and lucrative New Year, and good luck on all the goals you set for yourself! I can’t wait to work on writing down my new personal goals when I get back home!

NOTE / UPDATE: I had this blog post ready to go up early on the evening of the first (Thailand time), but couldn’t get Internet access until tonight (evening of the second). Since writing this post we sat through a super gnarly 15 hour rain storm. Our bungalow got soaked and we were about to leave the island to head to somewhere with nicer weather. Then as we were working on our exit strategy the it got sunny and beautiful and we proceeded to have one of the best days of the trip! More photos and explanation on that in the next update, but I’ll say this…What I did and saw today is in the top three most incredible things I’ve ever done/seen/experienced in my life!

A few months ago I went to North Carolina with one of my best friends, Terry Adams, to announce some Red Bull demos for him. Terry had just picked up his newest sponsor, Freegun Underwear, so we wanted to squeeze in a video and photo shoot while we were together. However, by the time we spent the entire day traveling across the country and got to our hotel it was late at night, we were in the middle of nowhere with no car, and it was raining and very cold.

Luckily for us there was a Lowe’s next to the hotel that had a large overhang we could shoot under, and even though it wasn’t the best looking backdrop, the plain grey brick wall would prove to work out in the end. The elements and conditions were definitely working against us, but Terry is a true professional in every sense of the word and came through he always does.

Check out the video below along with the photo that was used in a press release, then hit up Freegun’s Web site to check out what they are all about.

Freegun Underwear press release image.

Original, untreated photo.

When traveling abroad, a lot of time is spent getting from place to place, and provided you have the free time to travel this way, the various mini-journeys and experiences along the way are often part of the fun and excitement of the overall trip. Over the past few days Lindsay and I have made our way from one tip of this beautiful country to the other. We started at sunrise in a treehouse in Laos, just north of the Thai border, and around 36 hours later we found ourselves on a small island off the southern coast of Thailand. Here’s how we got there…

We woke up with the morning sun in a treehouse around 100 feet above the forest floor somewhere deep in a Laos forest. We harnessed up for several thousand feet of cables on seven different zip lines and hiked through thick brush and rice fields for about three hours before we arrived at a small village where we waited for a truck.

The only way into and out of the treehouse we stayed in for two nights was by zip line.

Getting to the zip lines required a bit of work, too.

We sat in the back of the pickup as it made its way through dirt roads and a small stream for about 45 minutes before making it to the paved road for another hour and a half jaunt through various villages. Once at the Laos border town of Houay Xai we took a long tail boat across the Mekong river to the Thailand border, then walked about a mile to the bus stop, running the last 100 yards as the bus was just pulling away as we were walking up. We boarded the dilapidated school bus and cruised another two and a half hours to Chiang Rai where we had enough time to stop at the local night bazaar for some of our favorite Thai cuisine. From there it was a 15 minute tuk-tuk ride across town to the airport to catch our 9:30pm 90-minute flight to Thailand’s capital city of Bangkok

Foreign snacks and lots of laughs in the tuk-tuk.

We arrived in Bangkok close to midnight and found a few comfortable couches to sleep on for about four and a half hours until security woke us up. By that time our airline was open so we checked in, proceeded to our gate, and slept on some chairs for another two hours or so before the 7:30am flight.

Bed time. Actually one of the most comfortable beds I've slept on all trip.

Once aboard our next plane it was again a quick hour and some change flight to small town of Trang. From the tiny local airport we hopped in a passenger van with a grip of other tourists and drove for an hour to a pier and waited a few more hours for a ferry to pick is up and start hopping from island to island.

We made two mid-water stops at various islands to let others off onto long tail boats, then around 5:30pm the evening after our mini-journey across the country started we finally made it to the pier at Koh Phi Phi. With our packs full and heavy, we wondered the island for another hour before finding a guest house to settle down in for the next few days where I’m posting this now…

Getting on the ferry.

What’s next on the agenda? Enjoying the sun, beach, and ocean, getting Scuba certified and diving some of the best waters in the world, and ringing in the New Year with a giant beach party. More updates to come!

Have a safe and happy New Year!

I have now been away from home for 13 days on this five-week excursion throughout South East Asia, and as I’m slipping into the nomad mindset more and more, things continue to get better and better. This afternoon we crossed the Mekong river from Northern Thailand into Laos, getting another stamp on the ol’ passport. Starting tomorrow Lindsay and I will spend a few nights in a tree house 450-feet above the forest floor. During the daylight hours while in the forest we will explore the unfamiliar terrain via cable zip lines and long hikes through the mountains. This is one of our most anticipated adventures of the trip, and we can’t wait to see how it pans out!

So many things have happened on this trip since my last post that keeping the blog updated with all the details could easily be a full-time job, and would no doubt take away from the incredible experiences I’m having.

I do, however, like to keep a record of some of these things for my family and friends to (and anyone else inquisitive enough to have a look), and for me to have as a personal reminder.

So…a few of the highlights from the past few days include:
- Sleeping in an open-air hut in a hill tribe village.
- Riding an elephant through the back roads of a small mountain community.
- Relaxing in a Jacuzzi filled with water from a natural hot spring.
- Hiking through various forests to a few amazing waterfalls.
- Learning to carve basic household items out of bamboo.
- Floating down a river at sunset on a bamboo raft.
- Watching the sunrise over a Chinese tea farm in the mountains.
- Visiting the most bizarre temple we’ve seen thus far.
- Checking out a gallery of paintings inside an artist’s house.
- Becoming more comfortable driving motorbikes on the chaotic streets of Asia.
- Eating more local cuisine, including fried and soft boiled quail eggs and fried chicken tendons.

Carving something cool.

Dumbo ain't got nothin' on this guy!

Fried quail egg with pepper and mystery sauce? Why not...

One of the many waterfalls we've swam at.

City shuffle...motorbike style.

Getting the shot.

The White Temple in Chiang Rai...crazy!

HDR iPhone photo of sunrise in the mountains.

Happy holidays to everyone! Wherever you are in this incredible world of ours, and whatever you are doing, I hope you have a great one filled with fun, laughter, and people you love!

Justin Hoey and Anthony Buglio over at FlatWebTV did a cool little Skype interview with me for their 11th episode of the show where they talked to me about the 2012 Flatland Calendar. In the interview I discuss the business side of the calendar a bit as well as some of the photos in the calendar, so if you want an inside look at the project, go ahead and click play.

*Fast forward to the 12 minute mark if you want to go straight to the segment I’m featured in.

Check out what FlatWebTV has going on and watch some more episodes on their Web site.

The calendars are still available for free from Flatland Fuel with each order you place, so you still have a few days to squeeze one in before Christmas if you are quick about it!

If you missed it or just need a refresh, click here to see a full preview of the 2012 Flatland BMX Calendar.

While I’m at it… I also have a quick clip in this episode of FlatWebTV where I say why I love flatland. (FFWD to 13:05)

A lot can happen in a week, and over the past seven days Lindsay and I did and saw more things than I would have ever dreamed was possible. We have had one adventure after another, and we still have so many more experiences ahead of us over the next four weeks. I’ve already taken a lot of incredible travel photos, but I’m holding on to those for now, so until I post the epic shots, here are 15 of the cool things we did during this first week in Thailand accompanied by a handful of photos and snapshots we took along the way.

If you like this post, make sure you click on my “21 Great Adventure & Experiences Worth Writing Home About” post that went up a few days ago…

Also, here is a page with some more updates from Thailand.

15 Cool Things We Did In Thailand In 1 Week
- Walked around some of the most iconic wats (Buddhist temples) in Asia.

- Got an hour-long Thai massage.

- Used just about every mode of transportation there is; including river taxi, tuk-tuk, cab, bus, mini van, bicycle, motorbike, and train.

- Stumbled upon some old people having a party where I was given the shirt off someone’s back and a handful of sticky rice with curry paste.
- Drove motorbikes to the highest point in Thailand.

- Watched a traditional Muay Thai kickboxing match.

- Learned to make typical Thai dishes in a cooking class.

- Snuck into a dorm at a national park and slept for the night.
- Swam in emerald green pools of beautiful waterfalls and climbed the surrounding rocks.

- Ate strange street vendor foods including a variety of insects, shark fin, and chicken intestines.

- Played with tigers—babies and adults.

- Had hundreds of tiny fish nibble at our feet and legs in a fish spa.
- Visited and bargained with vendors at several markets, including a flower market along the riverfront.
- Ran out of fuel in a rented motorbike at the top of a mountain, coasted down the mountain, and had an ice cream vendor siphon gas for us to get back into town.

- Slept in an overnight train for 15 hours.

After Lindsay read my short, generic notes about this trip she felt that they didn’t quite do it justice so she wanted to elaborate on the 15 points made to help paint a clearer picture. A little dramatic and long-winded if you ask me, but here’s our first week in her words…

- Explored the most ornate and legendary temples in Thailand including Grand Palace, home of the Emerald Buddha, Wat Pho, home of the 140-foot reclining Buddha, and Wat Doi Suthep, which is perched atop one of the tallest mountains in Thailand.
- Had our bodies pummeled, stretched, popped, and rejuvenated in an hour-long Thai massage at one of the plethora of roadside stands for about $5 USD.
- Took advantage of just about every mode of transportation Thailand has to offer; including river taxi, tuk-tuk, cab, bus, mini van, bicycle, motorbike, moto-taxi, songtheaw, and train.
- Stumbled upon a local roadside political party, quite off the beaten path, where we were welcomed like celebrities and given the shirts off their backs to support their (hopefully worthwhile) political cause, drank whisky with the locals (me), and were fed some sort of interesting concoction of chili paste, sticky rice, and raw cauliflower while they took pictures and cheered us on.
- Drove motorbikes to the highest point in Thailand, and coasted 15 kilometers down the steepest part of the summit to avoid running out of gas.
- Hooted, hollered, and cheered “Oo-iy!” with the locals at a Muay Thai boxing match while Lindsay drank the local brew and Fat snuck into the ringside section to take photos.
- Learned to make traditional Thai dishes like pad Thai, green curry, spring rolls, and hot and sour soup in a cooking class in Chiang Mai, the Northern Capital of Thailand.
- Snuck into a set of beautiful dorms at Erawan National Park to crash for the night when we couldn’t find our rundown bamboo hut in the dark. We did spot it on the way out the next morning and were glad we opted for not-breaking and entering the much cleaner and nicer dorms.
- Swam in ethereal pools of blue-green water at each of the seven tiers of beautiful waterfalls, rock slides, and swimming holes at Erawan Falls.
- Experienced Thailand by taste bud at the many-wonderful and many-bizarre street vendor stalls, including our favorites of pad Thai, fried rice, curries, and noodle soup, as well as the more adventurous options like insects, shark fin soup, blocks of congealed chicken blood, intestines, and an assortment of mystery meats.
- Played with tigers at a park in the tiny town of Mae Rim. The big cats as well as the babies. We have mixed reviews—a neat experience, but we’re positive the tigers were drugged, and they were kept in cages akin to animal prison.
- Ran out of gas in our motorbike at the summit of Doi Suthep north of Chiang Mai, coasted at 60 km/hour down the curvy, mountainous, hairpin turns, and slowed to a stop just in time for an ice cream vendor to siphon gas for us from a couple of different bikes and then give us free ice cream when we tried to pay him.
- Experienced the incredibly odd feeling that comes only when hundreds of tiny fish nibble at your feet, legs, and hands while you soak in a roadside “fish spa” and people watch at a Bangkok night bazaar.
- Shopped ‘til we dropped at markets all over Thailand—from Bangkok’s Chinatown, to Patpong Market (night market and red light district—home of the ping pong show…we’ll leave that to the imagination), legendary backpacker mecca of Khao San Road, the Flower Market along Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river, Chiang Mai’s night market and Sunday walking street, and the stalls selling everything you can imagine and could never need that seem to line every inch of marketable space and sidewalk in all of Thailand.
- Slept(ish) in the overnight sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai…a mere 12 hour journey that somehow took 17.

I’ve been in Thailand now for about a week and decided to do a gear bag check with everything in my backpack that I took on this five-week trip. On most of my BMX trips I usually bring a huge bike bag, an enormous suitcase, a heavy camera bag, and a full backpack, so traveling abroad for more than a month with just a handful of items is a big change for me, but it’s working out great so far. Here’s what I’m working with…

The gear bag in action.

(*Click on any image to enlarge.)

The bag that everything goes into… An all-purpose backpack from Fox that I’ve taken on every trip for more than a year now. This thing has seen more than a handful of countries and has been through hell and back, but it’s still going strong!

The clothes… Not much there, but enough to get the job done!

1. Nike running shoes. Most comfortable and versatile shoes I’ve ever put on my feet. Light enough to swim in, good enough to run in. Easy to wash, and quick to dry.
2. Jacket. Bought this for $7 at Goodwill before my trip. Water and resistant. Again, easy to wash, and quick to dry.
3. Bandana. Because you never know when you’ll need to wipe something.
4. Two pairs of long socks.
5. Long sleeve thermal shirt.
1. Travel pants. These are water resistant, and once again easy to wash and quick to dry. They also zip off into shorts. They are huge on me like MC Hammer pants and look absolutely ridiculous. But they are much easier to travel with than denim jeans. Oh, and yes, I screwed up the numbers. D’oh!
1. Tank top. Yep, screwed up two numbers already. Not off to a good start. Deal with it.
6. Three pairs of boxer briefs.
7. Two cotton v-neck t-shirts.
8. Two pairs of short socks.
9. Pair of nylon board shorts with pockets.

Miscellaneous items. A little of this, and a little of that…

10. Queen sized bed sheet.
11. Travel towel.
12. Mosquito net.
13. Ballpoint pin and permanent marker pen.
14. U.S. and local currency.
15. Important documents sealed inside two Ziploc bags; including: passport, credit cards, driver license, international driver license, copies of all my documents and copies of all of my travel partner’s documents.
16. Journal that my girlfriend gave me before the trip with little notes from her written throughout it.
17. Water bottle and carabineer.
18. Sunglasses with case.
19. House keys.
20. Ear buds with case.
21. Nylon shopping bag.
22. Flashlight with two key chains and carabineer.
24. Pocket knife. (Yes, it slips past airport security every time.)
25. Shoe lace. Just in case I have to do some MacGyver type stuff.
26. Sleeping mask.
27. Foam earplugs.
28. Toilet paper in Ziploc bag with the cardboard roll pulled out.
29. Large rubber band.
30. Jump rope. For some reason I thought I’d want to do some cardio on this trip. Yeah, hindsight really is 20/20.
31. Various sized Ziploc bags and plastic trash bags.
32. Nylon zipper bag. This comes in handy for dirty clothes and packing souvenirs to bring home.

I may not keep up with my personal hygiene on the road like I do when I’m at home, but all the toiletries are here when and if I need them…

33. Toiletries bag.
34. Matches.
35. Baby wipes. When you only shower every few days, these can come in handy.
36. Deodorant.
37. Sunscreen.
38. Hand sanitizer.
39. Toothpaste.
40. Daily nasal spray for allergies.
41. Nasal spray for when my allergies get really bad.
42. Eye drops.
43. Razor
44. Daily allergy pill and daily multi-vitamins.
45. Dental floss.
46. Bar of soap.
47. Body wash.
48. Shampoo.
49. Conditioner.
50. Shampoo.
51. Conditioner.
53. Malaria pills.
54. Emergen-C.
55. Toothbrush.
56. Wash cloth.
57. Bug repellant.
58. Cotton swabs.
59. Ziploc bag full of various medicines and a few bandages.
60. Tweezers.
61. Fingernail clippser.
62. Lip balm.

This is the stuff that makes my bag weigh in at 35.5lbs, but also the stuff that helps make a trip like this all worth it. Without being able to creatively document what I’m doing, it just wouldn’t be the same…

63. 17” Apple Macbook Pro
64. 32GB memory card.
65. Canon 5D Mark II. I took the battery grip off for this trip to save space and weight.
66. Lens case.
67. Extra camera battery.
68. 2GB USB flash drive.
69. Digital camera case.
70. Canon 15mm lens.
71. Cheap tripod (around $19). If I need to save weight and room I can throw this away and not feel bad about it.
72. iPhone charger.
73. Canon 24-70mm lens.
74. Computer charger.
75. Camera battery charger.
76. Digi-cam battery charger.
77. Canon 70-200mm lens.
78. Apple iPhone 4.
79. Universal memory card reader. It’s slow, but it will read both of my cameras’ memory cards and the USB cable can also charge the GoPro camera.
80. GoPro Hero II HD camera with various mounting accessories.
81. 1TB USB portable hard drive.
(Not Shown: Canon PowerShot SD780 IS point and shoot digi-cam.)

I rigged up an extra strap on my backpack that goes around my waist. Instead of sewing it on I just used a bunch of safety pins. It doesn’t really help take the weight off my shoulders much, but it helps keep the bag in place.

I keep my digi-cam on the shoulder of my backpack so I can reach it quickly.

Here’s the whole bag packed up, complete with flip-flops I picked up at a local market in a random town here in Thailand.

A view of the beast from the side.

These extra bits are some things that my travel partner Lindsay Matush brought with her that I’ve been using.

A. Lock.
B. SteriPEN. This dope little gadget will purify water so it is safe to drink. It works off batteries and doesn’t add any chemicals to the water, so it never leaves a weird taste.
C. Power adapter.
D. Ace wrap. I hurt my wrist after falling on a rock while playing around a waterfall. I should learn to be more careful when there are a dozen signs that say things like, “Danger,” “No Entry,” “Slippery,” etc.
D. Universal surge protector and power converter with multiple outlets. Of course I screwed up one more time. I suck.

I spent another day in Bangkok today. Most of the day (and night) was spent walking around the enormous city in disbelief at all the crazy crap you can buy in markets, in awe at some of the incredible Buddhist temples, and searching for a taxi that wouldn’t rip us off.

Of course there were lots of great moments from the day, but for the sake of a quick blog post before I head to bed and get an early start tomorrow venturing off to a new city, I’ll stick to some basics, mostly revolving around food…

With no tour guide and no signs to read, I don’t know much about this teakwood mansion, but I know we couldn’t wear shoes or take photos inside. And supposedly the entire thing was made with wooden pegs—no nails. Typical Asian tourist pose!

At one of the temples we visited (the best one of the day) there was the famous “reclining” Buddah. That thing was huge!

There’s a million and one weird things you can buy in markets all around the world. And as much goofy Fox knock off stuff as i’ve seen over the years, this knife probably takes the cake.

Now we get to the knitty gritty…I said in my last post that we had only scratched the surface of bizarre foods, and tonight I proved that statement correct. On the menu? Cricket, grub, bigger cricket, mealworm, small grasshopper, frog, large grasshopper, and giant cockroach.

All of them went down with no barfing and no water. The most challenging to conquer, as you may have guessed, was definitely the cockroach. If you want to know what it was like? Hit me up on Facebook and I’ll tell you the street where you can buy them so you can try for yourself…

Part of what’s so fun about traveling is creating incredible memories that will no doubt last a lifetime. I’m always on the lookout for new, unique things I can do or situations I can get myself into, and over the past five years or so of traveling I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of really amazing things that I’ll never forget.

In this photo gallery you’ll find images of 21 of my favorite adventures and experiences that are worth writing home about…

[View As Slideshow]

Some of the things I plan to add to this list are:
- Scuba diving, hiking, and rock climbing in Thailand.
- Staying in a jungle tree hours in Laos.
- Cage diving with great white sharks around me.
- Swimming with dolphins.

This blog was never intended to be a personal journal, but I figured I may as well post a few updates from this five week journey through South East Asia whileI I’m here… This will be the longest trip I’ve ever been on, and we have some really wild things planned, and if this first day is any indication of what’s in store, then it may be even crazier than I even anticipated!

After more than 30 hours of travel time from L.A. through London I arrived in Bangkok earlier today where I met up with my good friend and travel partner Lindsay Matush. We got settled into a hostel, then hit the town, starting off with a traditional tuk tuk ride through the city—an experience in and of itself.

Photo by Lindsay Matush.

We both wanted to dive right into the street food scene, so we snagged some freshly grilled squid and a plate full of muscles.

We also ended up eating shark fin soup, which may be up there with Guinea pig as one of the strangest things I’ve ever eaten. But I’m sure it will pale in comparison to what’s still to come from this trip…

After walking through some markets we ended the night with a fish spa—one of the most bizarre feelings ever! You basically sit there with your feet and lower legs dipped in cold water as a few hundred tiny fish nibble on your skin. After about seven or eight minutes I got used to it, but the initial shock was super funny.

Hopefully I’ll have Internet here and there along the way, so keep checking back for more updates from Asia…

]]> http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/travel-update-thailand-trip-day-1-bangkok/feed/ 2 http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/stepping-down-from-working-at-ride-bmx-magazine/ http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/stepping-down-from-working-at-ride-bmx-magazine/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:30:01 +0000 Fat Tony http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/?p=1065 Continue reading →]]>

After living out my childhood dream of working at TransWorld’s Ride BMX Magazine for an incredible five and a half years I have decided to step down from my position as Associate Online Editor to pursue other life and career goals.

Congratulating my friend Matthias Dandois on his winning flatland run at Vans Rebeljam in Eindhoven, Netherlands—the last contest I covered for ride on my final days with the company. Photo by Elodie Jumelin.

During my senior year of high school, at the age of 17, I made it my mission to work at the world’s leading BMX magazine. I didn’t know anything about the magazine business or the BMX industry, and I had no clue how I’d make my dream a reality. However, by the time I graduated college some five years later I had figured it all out and there was a job at Ride waiting for me on the other side of the country.

Since the Online Editor position was new to the company I got the opportunity to take a barely-breathing Web site, and over the course of the years, nurture it and help it grow into one of the most visited BMX sites in the world; and I will forever be thankful for that experience. During my time with Ride I’ve had the privilege of riding, shooting, traveling, and becoming friends with some of the people I looked up to the most as a kid. I’ve also had the chance to travel to more than a dozen countries experiencing the BMX culture and lifestyle on a global scale. None of this will ever be forgotten or taken for granted.

I have to give a huge thank you to Keith Mulligan, Jeff Zielinski, and Ryan Fudger for giving me the opportunity to work and grow with them and the Ride brand.

As I move on to the next chapter of my life and enter the world of freelance work and self-employment I am looking forward to continuing to work with some of the best brands in BMX in the form of photography, videography, writing, announcing, and more. I’m excited about the future that lies ahead and can’t wait to see where the wind will take me when I stretch my wings and begin to fly.

In just two days I am embarking on a five-week journey with one of my best friends Lindsay Matush to backpack throughout Southeast Asia for five weeks. When I return I plan to revamp and expand on my online portfolio, so be on the lookout for updates! Until then, keep up with me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and keep checking my blog—hopefully I’ll be able to post some things while I’m trekking through rain forests, exploring jungle canopies, and diving off of remote beaches.

Thanks so much to everyone for your continued support. All the words of encouragement I’ve already received truly means the world to me!

Click here to read an interview that ESPN did with me about my decision to leave my position at Ride BMX.

10 random photos taken and processed with my iPhone 4…

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Most were created using the Pro HDR app.

Check out my favorite iPhone photo apps here.

The guys over at FlatWebTV (a monthly online TV show) recently interviewed me via Skype about the new 2012 Flatland Calendar. Big thanks to Justin Hoey and Anthony Buglio for the opportunity, and keep up the good work on your show!

Fast forward to the 12:00 minute mark to see my segment.

Remember, the 2012 Flatland Calendar is now available through Flatland Fuel and is free with all orders. Get them while they last…

Here are the outtake photos of Bo Wade I talk about in the interview…

The first attempt at the sunset photo shoot.

The alternate shot we took in case the planned sunset image didn't work out.

The final shot that was used in the calendar.

]]> http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/interview-on-flatwebtv-about-the-2012-flatland-bmx-calendar/feed/ 0 http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/10-photos-from-puerto-rico/ http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/10-photos-from-puerto-rico/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:00:12 +0000 Fat Tony http://fattonyenterprise.com/blog/?p=1037 Continue reading →]]>

Last November I went to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the Fox BMX team to shoot photos and video for their Web site. One morning before the crew woke up I went out to get some scenic b-roll shots for the video, and while pedaling around I snapped a handful of nice travel photos for myself.

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I spend quite a bit of time in front of the computer, and over the years I’ve stumbled upon a handful of blogs that ended up in my bookmark toolbar that I visit on a daily basis. I know it’s really easy to spend TOO much time online looking at useless content, but these sites are all great for ideas, inspiration, motivation, education, and of course…entertainment. I typically only spend a few minutes on each site, and if a post looks like something I may want to dig deeper into later I put it into a folder on my toolbar I have labeled “TEMP.”

Here are my top 10 favorite blogs in the order that I look at them ever day…

TwistedSifer
Random images and photo galleries of anything and everything including interesting artwork, travel destinations and nature, architecture, humor, and technology.

The 99%
Ideas and inspiration for people who work in technology, run personal businesses, and seek to better themselves.

Tynan
The personal blog of a guy about my age who lives outside the box. The similarities I see in myself and this guy are unreal—I often feel like I’m reading my own thoughts when I read his posts. When I started my personal blog, this is almost exactly what I pictured it to be like. He also happens to be the brother of another BMX photographer, Devon Hutchins.

Mashable
The latest news in digital technology, computers, phones, social media, and business…

Tim Ferriss
Author of the incredible book 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss is an extremely inspirational and motivational guy. A lot of his posts don’t particularly interest me, but the ones that do are great, and the ones that don’t still inspire me because I see a man following his dreams, making them reality, and marching to the beat of his own drum.

T. Harv Eker
Another author; this one of a book that changed my life, Secretes Of The Millionaire Mind. T. Harv writes about success, finance, business, and personal development.

Hongkiat
Random photo and image galleries along with information and tutorials for designers, bloggers, tech users, and people who are self-employeed or run businesses.

Top Design Magazine
Examples, inspiration, and ideas for graphic designers along with resources for people who work on, design, or develop Web sites.

The Big Picture
Amazing collections of photo journalistic images of current events.

Terry Adams
My best friend is a professional flatland BMX rider and always has plenty going on. Even though I talk to him on a daily basis I like to keep up with what he posts on his blog, too.

Here are 13 random sunset photos from my archives from seven different countries that all have silhouettes in them…

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Effraim Catlow over at flatmattersonline.com did a little interview with me about the new 2012 Flatland Calendar that dropped yesterday, so head on over there and check that out…

For four years in a row now I’ve teamed up with Flatland Fuel and a bunch of other BMX brands to bring a really cool project to life—the Flatland Calendar. The new 2012 calendar just got in at Flatland Fuel yesterday, so they are now shipping out  with all orders, and yes, they are still free.

Click here to see a full preview of the 2012 Flatland Calendar.

Check out the official info from the press release on page two of this post…

A while back I got a random email from an editor at a magazine called Hometown Contender. It’s a free local publication out of the South Bend, Indiana, area, and they were looking for a photo to go with a story about Brett Banasiewicz and his new skatepark The Kitchen.

Brett is a great dude and an insanely talented rider, so I was happy to help him out and get him some local coverage by giving the magazine a photo. However, it wasn’t until I got an issue sent to my house that I realized they were using my photo for the cover! Haha, pretty cool…

The photo is of a footjam tailwhip on a qurterpipe from the 2011 Ocean City, Maryland, stop of the Dew Tour.

Last month the BMX world flocked to Las Vegas for the 2011 Interbike trade show. While walking the floor I snapped a few digicam pics of some booths that used my photos to promote their riders and products.

Maxxis Tires. Photo sequence of Austin Coleman.

Haro Bikes. Photo of Seth Klinger.

Diamondback BMX. Photos of Rob Armour, Nate Berkheimer, and Nicholi Rogatkin.

Stolen BMX. Photo of Morgan Long.

It’s a great feeling to be able to help BMX companies by providing them with photos; and of course, it’s really cool to see the images blown up larger than life. I’m really grateful to all the brands that chose to use photos I shot in their booths this year. Thanks!

If you like this post, be sure to check out my other Behind The Photo posts.

THE SPOT
In mid-August of this year I went to Portland, Oregon, for the Dew Tour, and after the contest was over I had a little extra time to meet up with Brian Hunt and a few other guys for a quick skatepark session and photo shoot. We headed north on I-5 and crossed the state line into Vancouver, Washington, to hit up the city’s concrete park. The place has a massive bowl with endless lines along with a smaller, tighter bowl, and a small street section, too.

Panoramic photo of the Vancouver, Washington, skatepark made with AutoStitch on iPhone 4.

SETTING UP THE SHOT
After shooting a few photos with Brian in the deeper bowl we moved to the smaller bowl to shoot a few tricks on a quarter to bubble hip. For this photo, a few thoughts went into picking a composition—I wanted the rider to be large in the frame and to be facing me, I needed to show the lip of the hip he was coming off of, I wanted to show some of the trees in the background, and finally I didn’t want the rider to get lost in the trees. In order to make all these factors come together I had to get into the bowl and crouch down to make the rider higher in the frame than the tops of the trees. My position in the bowl was critical; not only for the composition I wanted, but also because Brian had to carve around me in order to hit the hip with the right amount of speed, then he had to buzz right by me after he landed.

After picking a composition I liked, the next obstacle was to politely ask a dozen scooter kids to move out of the background so their brightly colored shark fin helmets didn’t obstruct the beauty of the Northwest evergreens. Once the kids were out of the shot it was time to set up the lights.

Here is an early test shot I did of the location before I got down into the bowl.

The sun was just setting to my right, so while there was still some nice, natural light on the trees in the background, the entire bowl was already a dark shadow, and very little ambient light was hitting the rider. In order to light up the bowl I put my largest, most powerful flash (Quantum Q Flash) at full power on the deck of the bowl to my left. The flash was pointing down at the bowl, and wasn’t intended to hit the rider at all. Because of the nature of the obstacle, I didn’t have many options of where I could put another flash to light up the rider and stop the action, so I put a smaller flash (Vivitar 285) to my right as close to the rider as I could get. The light stand was positioned on top of the deck of the bowl next to the hip. I raised the stand as high as it could go and pointed it towards where the rider would be when he was at the peak of his height and action. The flash was set to 1/4 power and the hood of the flash was pulled out into the “zoom” setting.

With the composition and lighting in place, it was time to focus on the rider and get the shot. To focus, I had Brian stand on the lip of the hip. We shot three other tricks before snapping this no-footed can-can, but one of the other tricks may end up getting used for something else, so I am not going to show all of them here. We shot the no-footed can-can three times, but the first frame actually came out the best, so that’s the one you see here. With a few keepers from the session on my memory card, we called it a day and headed back to Portland for a night of burritos and doughnuts before I flew home early the next morning.

Here's an overview of the scene when I was focusing on the rider. Notice the position of the two flashes and where they are pointing. (Click to enlarge.)

PHOTO INFORMATION
Date: August 14, 2011
Location: Vancouver, Washington
Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Camera Settings: ISO 200, 1/250, f/5.6
Lens: Canon 70-200mm IS USM @70mm
Flashes: Quantum Q Flash with Turbo 400w/s battery pack (1/1 power), and Vivitar 285 (1/4 power)
Transmitter: Pocket Wizard MiniTT1
Receivers: Pocket Wizard Receivers

PROCESSING THE IMAGE
Like most of my photos, the processing on this image was pretty straightforward. And again, like most of my photos, I started out in the Photoshop CS4 RAW editor with my “personal stock settings,” as I call them. For that I set the Clarity to 25, the Saturation to 10, the Sharpening to 125, and the Masking and Luminance to 50.

Here you can see the original image, completely un-edited. (Click to enlarge.)

Click the image to see the a 100% zoom of the image before and after adjusting the sharpness in the RAW editor.

Next, I cropped in a bit from the right side of the frame. I intentionally shot the photo a little loose with some extra space on the right side, knowing I would crop in on that side in postproduction. The Canon 5D Mark II only fully syncs with flashes at 1/200, and I shot at 1/250, so I knew there would be some flash fall off to the right of my image. This didn’t affect the light on my subject at all, but it did leave a dark shadow band that was visible on the landing of the hip.
(*For more information and technical specs about this concept, I recommend looking at Rob Galbraith’s article about HyperSyncing flashes with the Canon 5D Mark II.)

Here is a screen shot showing how much I cropped in on the photo. When shooting with a camera like Canon's 5D Mark II that has such a large sensor the image will reproduce just fine when printed even after cropping it this much—and it will certainly look fine when sized for on-screen Web viewing.

Once I started to work on the look of the image, the first thing I did was bump up the contrast to 70 to give it some pop. The rider seemed a bit too bright, so I moved the Brightness slider down from the default position of 50 to 35. To bring out the trees and some detail in the rider’s bike and jeans I moved the Fill Light slider up to 15. The last few changes I made while processing the image were in the Lens Corrections tab of the RAW editor. I moved the Fix Red/Cyan Fringe slider to -15 and the Fix Blue/Yellow Fringe slider to +15. This got rid of some chromatic aberrations around certain areas like the logos on the rider’s helmet.

Notice how the chromatic aberrations changed. (Click to enlarge.)

Camera RAW settings.

Once I opened the image in Photoshop I used the clone stamp tool to remove some graffiti on the landing of the hip just to give the photo a slightly cleaner look.

The final image with and without the graffiti on the hip landing.

This photo was only processed for the purpose of this blog post, so I sized it to 72dpi at 1200px tall, and then saved it as a JPEG.

Here's the final image.

Please to leave your thoughts, comments, and questions below.

If you liked this post, be sure to check out my other Behind The Photo posts.

I am honestly at a loss for words on this one…

Last week the BMX world was crushed with the horrible news that one of our own had been taken away from us in a car crash. Today my heart goes out to Rickey’s friends and family as they mourn his death, celebrate his life, and say goodbye to him one final time.

Just a few days prior to his accident I saw Rickey in Las Vegas at the Interbike  where I briefly caught up with him on the hectic trade show floor. For me, and for many people in the BMX community, that would be the last time we saw him.

I wasn’t close to Rickey, but in May of 2009 I had the privilege of spending a week with him while on a Shadow road trip in Florida. During that week I gained a huge amount of respect and appreciation for Rickey’s character. I already knew he had tons of skills on a bike, and that was reconfirmed on our journey, but part of the beauty of going on a road trip with new people is getting to learn who they really are off their bike. Within a few days of hanging out with Rickey I drew the conclusion that he was a very genuine human with a great heart, and I could tell that he was the type of person that many would consider a true friend.

In remembering the great times shared with Rickey, here are 20 photos I shot of him while we were on the road together…

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Here is the video Chris Mahaffey made from that same trip.

RIP Rickey Bates – #BANNED

This was one of those moments that I was truly glad I had a camera in my pocket. While in Salt Lake City, Utah, recently I saw these guys moving a piano with a bicycle. One was towing, and two were helping push while pedaling. Such a wild scene…

Click to enlarge.

A few weeks ago I posted a couple of photos giving a sneak peek into the 2012 Flatland Calendar I’m working on, and today I have a few more teasers for you…

Thanks to all the companies that have already stepped up to be a sponsor. This is shaping up to be another good one!

It’s September, and the country’s biggest bicycle trade show is right around the corner. In light of the busy product season surrounding Interbike I thought I’d throw up some more of my recent work that’s featured in the new 2012 Redline and Supercross BMX catalogs.

You can see some spreads below that have my photos on them (click to enlarge), and under that you can flip through the entire catalog.

For the past seven years or so I’ve traveled the world shooting photos. I’ve been fortunate enough to nearly every state in the U.S. and more than 15 different countries on five continents. However, no matter how much I travel or where I go I can never get enough of my own town—Long Beach, California.

One night not too long ago I decided to do a quick personal project and shoot 10 long exposure photos of the sights I see on a nightly basis while cruising around.

The following 10 photographs were shot on August 28, 2011 within a mile and a half of my house between 8:15pm and 9:30pm in and around Downtown Long Beach’s Rainbow Harbor.

Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Lenses: Canon 24-70mm USM & Canon 15mm

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Chase Gouin is one of the few BMX riders that has made a mark in BMX so enormous that his style and tricks are so commonplace in this generation’s riding that they have been all but overlooked. His influence is an absolute staple in modern day flatland riding. However, since I didn’t grow up following the flatland scene, I wasn’t hugely familiar with Chase and his riding until he had been out of the spotlight for quite some time and I started my career in the industry.

On a trip to Costa Rica in February of 2008 I got the chance to meet, spend time with, and get to know Chase on a personal level. Then later that year I spent a week with him exploring a remote region of Panama where I got to know him even deeper. Chase is truly a one of a kind individual, and a perfect example of how a connection through BMX can bring together two very different people that would otherwise probably never meet.

After getting to know Chase, creating some amazing lifelong experiences alongside him, building up an understanding and appreciation for his unique ways, and growing to have a huge amount of respect for him, I was extremely disheartened when I read a letter he recently sent me describing his current health complications. In a nutshell, Chase has some very rare conditions and is desperately searching for life-saving answers and cures.

On the second page of this article I have posted the letter that flatland rider Brandon Fenton sent me about Chases’ health problems along with a note from Chase verifying the authenticity and severity of the situation. At the end of the letter they have given instructions of how you can donate through Paypal to help Chase find the doctors and cures he is looking for.

As a tribute to Chase’s living legacy in BMX and a way to bring awareness to his situation, I have dug and posted up 13 photos of Chase that I shot on our various adventures together over the course of two weeks in Costa Rica and Panama.

[View As Slideshow]

In my last post I showed you a quick sneak peek of this photo, and now I’m ready to show you the banger that is featured in Stolen BMX’s 2012 product catalog.

About a month ago Morgan Long and I met up in Downtown Long Beach just a few blocks from my house to film a trick tip video for ridebmx.com. When we were finished Morgan decided he wanted to shoot a photo of a gap that countless people have eyed up, but no one has committed to. He was fresh off a long injury hiatus and hadn’t shot any photos or really pushed himself in several months, but he felt up to the task.

Morgan eyeing up the gap. Trying to convey how big this setup was along with all the intricacies that made it so gnarly to jump in a single still image was my real challenge of creating this image.

Morgan cleared the gap on his first go, but didn’t tuck it properly, so he opted to do it again to get the photo to look exactly how he wanted. Unfortunately on the second attempt things didn’t work out in his favor. He got a weird pop off the bunnyhop that sent him nose heavy into the landing. He crashed and got pretty banged up so he had to call it a day.

This is the first photo that we shot that Morgan wasn't happy with.

A look at Morgan's hand after he crashed.

Several weeks went by and Morgan’s team manager at Stolen hit him up with a last minute request for a photo for their catalog. Luckily Morgan and I were both in between trips and were able to line up our busy schedules to reshoot the gap.

This time around Morgan nailed it, and within a few minutes of showing up at the spot we had the photo that Stolen needed for their catalog.

The final image. Click to enlarge.

Notice the difference in body language on this split screen view of both photos. The original photo on the left may look fine to some people, but that's part of what separates professional BMX photographers and riders from amateurs. What makes the photo on the right so much better is the fact that Morgan's arms are pushed straight out and his legs are tucked underneath him, which also makes him higher over the ledge. This kind of peaked position is what you always look for when shooting action photos.

Photo Information:
Lighting: Ambient / No Flashes
Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon 70-200mm IS USM @ 75mm
Settings: ISO 200, 1/800, f/6.3

Since I didn’t use any off-camera lighting for this shot, it was very straightforward to shoot and to edit. Below is a screen shot of the minor changes I made in Photoshop’s RAW editing window.

Here is the treatment that Stolen put on the photo in their catalog.

You can click through the entire Stolen catalog below.

If you liked this, be sure to check out my other Behind The Photo posts that go into detail about how I set up, shot, and edited specific BMX photos.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to shoot some dope photos that I’m really stoked on, but unfortunately I can’t show them to you yet… I can give you a sneak peek though, so here you go!

This setup is one that I shot twice with Morgan Long just a few blocks from my house in Downtown Long Beach. The first time we went there he crashed, but the second time he nailed it perfectly. The photo (a completely different angle than this) will be a spread in the new Stolen catalog. I’ll post that up once it’s out.

Chad Johnston

Pete Brandt

These next two images are a glimpse into two of the photos I shot for the 2012 Flatland Calendar. This will be the fourth year in a row I put together a flatland calendar and it’s going to be another good one! Can’t wait to show everyone once it’s done…

This past weekend I took a trip to Portland, Oregon (a city I love and never seem to spend enough time in) for the second stop of this year’s Dew Tour. Unlike most trips I take and events I go to, this one wasn’t for Ride. While Jeff Z. was handling all the coverage for ridebmx.com I took the opportunity to help out some other brands I work with in the photo and video department. Check out a bit of what I did over the weekend at the links below…

Monster Energy Event Recap Photo Gallery

Monster Energy Event Facebook Photo Gallery

Fox’s Event Photo Gallery

Redline’s Event Recap & Photos

I also meet up with Brian Hunt and went to the Vancouver, Washington skatepark to shoot some photos for potential DK and TSG ads. After we figure out where the photos are going and what will be used I’ll post a Behind The Photo article about one of the shots. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek—an overview of the entire scene.

And finally, here are two videos I filmed and edited for Alli Sports / Gatorade…

A busy, productive, and fun weekend!

Over the Fourth of July weekend I took a quick trip to Tijuana, Mexico in search of whatever I could find that would be outside of my comfort zone. Along with the incredible and unique food from various street vendors, tourist strips of shops and bars, and a wild beachside festival, I got to experience a traditional bullfight. I was really looking forward to the authentic taste of the Mexican culture, and honestly had no idea what to expect, but to say that I was completely blown away by the whole ordeal would be an understatement. I couldn’t figure out how else to explain a bullfight other than to give my extremely uneducated gringo take on things while showing a series of photos of what I saw. Ole!

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Photos taken on July 3, 2011 in Tijuana, Mexico.
Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Lenses: Canon 24-70mm & 70-200mm

The concept of me shooting RAW + JPEG came up recently when I posted about my digital photography workflow, and I know a few people questioned why. I’ve definitely been asked the question in the past when I’ve told people I shoot this way, and I honestly don’t know many people (if any) that do this, so I’m going to explain my reasons…

What Is Raw & JPEG?
If you aren’t sure what the difference between the two file types are, then feel free to Google the subject or click these reference links. Just to give you my nutshell version, here goes… RAW is an unprocessed piece of data that your camera creates that must be processed before an image is viewable. It is comparable to an undeveloped piece of film from a 35mm camera. A JPEG is a processed and compressed file that does not need to be processed any further to view the image. It is like a piece of 35mm film that has already been developed and is ready to be printed.

Reference Links:
- What is the difference between RAW and JPEG?
- Learn about RAW files and how they work.
- Why you should shoot RAW.
- 10 part video series about RAW vs. JPEG
- How to set RAW + JPEG on Canon cameras.

So why do I shoot both file types on my digital camera? Like many newcomers to digital photography, when I got my first DSLR I didn’t know what RAW was or why I should shoot it. I started out shooting only JPEG, but when I tried submitting photos to a magazine they told me they could only accept RAW files. I immediately switched my camera to the RAW mode, but I also went to Google and started doing a little research about RAW because I was clueless as to what it was, why I should shoot it, or how to handle the file it once it was on my computer.

One of the first things I read simply stated that you should always shoot RAW and JPEG because someday your computer or programs may not read RAW files anymore. However, computers always have and always will read JPEG files. That was all the reason I needed to begin shooting RAW + JPEG. It was a simple concept, but I took it very seriously because I completely understood the principle. Digital photography is still in the very early stages of its life, and no one knows where it will end up, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Before I got so proficient with Adobe Bridge for my digital photography workflow I actually used the JPEG files as previews or thumbnails because they loaded so much quicker than their RAW counterparts. I’ve since stopped doing that, but for a while it was convenient, and definitely helped me sort through my images.

When I upgraded from a Canon 20D to a Canon 5D Mark II, the RAW files were different, and the version of Adobe Photoshop I was using at the time no longer read or opened my RAW files—just like I had feared several years prior when I started shooting RAW + JPEG. I couldn’t open the RAW files until I got a newer version of Photoshop, but luckily I had the backup JPEGs so I was at least able to see my images to get a general idea of what the photos looked like.

Yes, shooting both file types is slower, but at a measly three frames per second, I’m not shooting sequences with the 5DMKII anyway. And yes, shooting both file types takes up more room on my hard drives, but digital space is cheap, and it’s an extremely small price to pay to have backup files of all my photographs. And of course, shooting RAW takes up more time in post-production, but that extra time is absolutely insignificant when you consider that you are working with high-quality, professional photographs.

The one time I can recall turning off the + JPEG option was when I was in Africa for two weeks and I didn’t have a computer to upload my files to. My memory cards were all full and I was desperate for extra space, so I saved some room by switching to a smaller RAW setting and eliminating the extra + JPEG feature.

That brings me to my last point… I always shoot in the largest RAW format possible (my camera has multiple sizes of RAW files), but I use the smallest JPEG option. This may sound hypocritical based off my “digital space is cheap philosophy,” but remember; I only use the JPEG file as a reference file and a last-resort backup.

The bottom line is this: In my opinion, there is just no reason to shoot RAW files without the extra backup JPEGs.

Feel free to leave comments on this post and let me know what you think and how you shoot…

Over the Fourth of July holiday I went with a few friends south of the border to Mexico. Even though it’s only a few hours away from where I live I had never been there and I was super excited for a quick taste of a different culture. I had an amazing time and even got to experience a traditional Mexican bull fight, which although was a bit difficult to watch at times, was really cool to be a part of. Here are 15 travel photos from my weekend in Ensenada and Tijuana.

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I’m really excited about this one… Yasu “Green-G” Takeo from Tokyo just launched a brand new BMX magazine called Encounter, and I am featured in an article where a handful of BMX industry types discuss what got them into BMX and how it changed their lives. It is a huge honor to be a part of something like this and to have my name and story right along side of iconic Japanese riders like Takashi Ito and Hiroshi Uehara.

(Click the second page of this article to read what I wrote for the feature…)

Encounter Japanese BMX Magazine Issue #1 Cover

While I’m already talking about him, I will take this opportunity to voice my respect for Green-G. I’ve been stoked on what he is doing for the international BMX community for years, and I’m consistently more and more impressed by what he cooks up.

A few years ago he started the BMX Flatland World Circuit as a way to unify the flatland riders around the world and give them a proper competition platform to help progress the sport. This series alone is a monumental step in the right direction for the sport.

Green-G also recently put out a book that chronicles the King Of Ground contest series’ 10 years of history in Japan. The book is an amazing look at where the series came from and how it got to where it is today. The book is a priceless keepsake for Japanese riders who have been involved with KOG over the years and a great history lesson for anyone who is unfamiliar with the contest and Japanese flatland scene.

On top of all that, he has also put on his own one-off contests, flown to the U.S. to help out with other contests, contributed photos to several magazines around the world, and so much more. Green-G has an incredible amount of passion for helping BMX, and it is truly inspiring.

Yasu, thanks for doing what you do…

(Click the second page of this article to read what I wrote for the feature…)

What you are about to read is how I organize and maintain my workflow with digital photography. Like everything else I share on my blog, this system has been developed and refined over several years and works really well for me. With this system I can upload, sort, select, and edit hundreds and hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes. I doubt my system will work for everyone, but hopefully it will work for some of you—or at least give you some tips on how you can tweak and improve your own digital workflow.

Equipment Used In This Tutorial:
Camera: Canon 5D Mark II
Memory Card: SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash 30MB/s, 32GB
Card Reader: FireWire 800/400 UDMA Reader
Computer: Apple MacBook Pro
Hard Drive: Western Digital external, 2TB
Programs: Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe Bridge CS4, TextEdit

STEP 1 – UPLOADING

You can see from the image below exactly how I have my hard drive organized—by years and topics/categories. Inside my 2011 folder I have a sub folder for photos, and inside that folder are separate folders for each month. Why do I have a number in front of each month? Because if they were just named by the months, the folders would default to alphabetical order, meaning they wouldn’t be in chronological order. August would be at the top instead of January, and that just doesn’t work for me.

My hard drive.

Each time I shoot photos I put the images in a folder that has a specific date (m/d/yy) and an easy to understand label so I know when the photos were shot and have a general idea of what kind of photos are in the folder. When I shoot digital photos I always shoot RAW+JPEG (I use the highest of both settings… I may do a whole separate blog post on just this topic alone if needed.), so I first create a folder for RAW and a folder for JPGS inside that dated and named folder, which again, is inside the proper month folder on my hard drive. Once I plug in my card reader, the icon for my card appears on the desktop. To copy the files from the card to my hard drive I can easily separate the RAW and JPEG images by selecting the “list” view in my finder window, then clicking the “kind” tab. After the files are separated, I select all the RAW files and drag them to the RAW folder, then do the same with the JPEG files. Once the files are copied to the hard drive, I eject the memory card to make sure I don’t accidentally write or edit on it.

Finder's List view with the Kind tab selected.

The folder I created for the photos I shot on my trip to Mexico.

For demonstration purposes throughout this post I’m going to use the photos from a recent weekend trip to Mexico. Why do I have extra folders in there besides RAW and JPGS? On this particular trip I also took snapshots with my point and shoot digital camera, so I put all the photos from that camera in a different folder to keep them separate from the files from my 5D Mark II. The folder labeled “WEB” is for any photos that I edit and resize for Web usage later on, and the “Travel Blog” folder is for photos I will edit, resize, and rename specifically for a blog post with my best travel photos from the trip. If I had edited photos for personal use, or for any other reason, I would have made a separate folder for those as well. (Which I’ll end up doing very soon…)

Ok, I have my folders organized on my hard drive, the photos from my recent shoot in a specific folder, the RAW and JPEG files separated, and a few extra folders for edited photos—so how do I sort through 500+ images and pick the 15 best shots for my travel blog post? Glad you asked…please continue.

STEP 2 – SELECTING

To start the photo selection process I drag the RAW folder onto the Bridge icon in the dock, which opens all the photos from that folder in Bridge. Once the program is open it’s a good idea to let it load for however long it takes to process all the images. There’s nothing worse than trying to flip through and scan your photos and have the program lag on you. While the images are loading I like to grab a glass of OJ, check Twitter, and update Facebook…

Adobe Bridge window.

I have my Bridge set up into three columns as shown above—the Filter tab on the left, the Content tab next to that with small thumbnails, and the Preview tab taking up most of the screen with the image shown pretty large. I use the arrow keys on my keyboard to scroll down through the photos, and when I find an image I like or may want to use I hit the keystroke sequence Command+1 to give it a “1 star.” You can label the photo with a star by clicking “Label” on the menu bar and selecting the star, but keystrokes are much quicker and better for efficient workflow. I quickly go through the entire selection of photos and give every good photo that I may end up using a single star rating. This first pass through only takes me a few minutes. If you slave over each image it will waste valuable time, so I suggest doing this part of the process as fast as possible. You will narrow down your selection even more in the next step, so don’t worry about picking too many at this point. Your goal here should be to mark as many photos that have even a little bit of potential. Once I have my selection of good photos starred, I select the single star under the Ratings tab on the left side of my Bridge window so I’m only viewing those photos that have been marked with a star.

For this particular set of photos from Mexico I know I want to make a blog post with the best travel photos from the trip, and I know I want to pull out some personal photos to send to some friends, so from this point I’ll go through all of the single-starred photos and select the ones I want to use for the different applications by using a second star or a colored label. But wait! Won’t you get confused in a week (or a year) when you look back at these photos and can’t remember what the stars and colors are for? No, because you will also make a text file to remind you what the label and star ratings are for. I use the program called TextEdit program for this and save that text file in my root folder for the photos. The text file doesn’t need to be anything fancy. It just needs to clearly remind you exactly what each star or color is for.

TextEdit document.

With my Mexico photos, once I start clicking through the single star photos and come across a photo that would work for my blog post, I hit Command+6 to give it a red label. When I come across a photo I want to give to my friends, I hit Command+2 to give it two stars. After I make this second pass I have 30 red label—too many for a gallery on my blog. So I will click the red label under the Filter tab on the left side of my Bridge window to show only the 30 photos with a one star and a red label.

Adobe Bridge with one-star and red label photos selected.

Now I can narrow the selection down even more, and to do this I can either hit Command+6 to take away the red label, or give it a different colored label. I chose a different color just in case I wanted to go back and look at my rejected images and make any changes. So I went through the 30 photos and hit Command+7 on 15 of them, so 15 still had a red label, and 15 had a yellow label.

Adobe Bridge with one-star, red label, and yellow label photos selected.

Finally I have narrowed down 586 photos to 15 that I will use for my travel photo blog post. It’s now time to edit and resize them for the Web…

STEP 3 – EDITING

With the red label and the one star selected in my Filter and Ratings tabs I hit Command+A to select all 15 photos, then I drag them onto the Photoshop icon in my dock to open them all in Photoshop’s RAW editing window. When the program opens, all 15 photos will be in a column on the left side of the screen. By hitting Command+A again, I select all of them to make changes to all the RAW files at one time. If you’ve read my Behind The Photo posts, you know that I have what I call my “personal stock settings,” which are settings in the RAW editing window that I apply to all of my photos as a starting point before I begin making changes to them. With all 15 of the photos selected I move the Contrast slider to 65, the Clarity slider to 25, and the Saturation slider to 10. Then I click the Detail tab and move the Sharpening Amount slider to 125, the Sharpening Masking slider to 50, and the Noise Reduction Luminance slider to 50.

Adobe Photoshop's RAW editing window.

My personal stock settings in Photoshop's RAW editing window.

Once all of the photos have my stock settings applied to them I go down the column of photos one by one and edit them individually until I’m happy with how they all look. Then I click Done at the bottom left hand corner of the screen, and all the changes and edits I just made are saved in the RAW images’ corresponding XMP file. I click back over to Bridge and wait a moment for all the changes to the images to be processed—I can view the edits I just made in Bridge.

The folder of droplets I have saved on my computer.

STEP 4 – RESIZING

I select all of the photos, then I drag them onto a Photoshop *droplet I have on my computer. I have lots of different droplets on my computer for different reasons, but the one I use most is the one I have labeled 800px Tall RAW Quick. This droplet bypasses the RAW editing window in Photoshop, so it opens RAW files without the need to click an extra button, then it resizes the images to 800px tall at 72dpi and uses the “Save for Web & Devices” option to save the photos to a specific folder on my computer with the “High” JPEG setting. When I drag the RAW images from Bridge onto this droplet I simply sit back and wait, and a few minutes later the resized Web-ready images are in the folder labeled “800 Tall” in the main Droplets folder on my computer. I then drag those photos into my folder labeled “Travel Blog” that I created earlier.
*Creating A Photoshop Droplet Tutorial

Move the files from the 800 Tall folder on my computer to the Travel Blog folder on my hard drive.

STEP 5 – REORGANIZING & RENAMING

From there I create a new folder on my desktop and name it specifically for my travel blog post. Naturally I have my blog posts organized in folders on my hard drive a certain way, and I keep them separate from my individual photo sets. I create a copy of all 15 photos from their current location and paste them into the new folder on my desktop. This way I have a copy all the Web-res images with their native names still in their original folder. This gives me easy access if I ever need them again. I drag the new folder for my blog post on the Bridge icon in my dock so all 15 low-res JPEG images are visible in Bridge. For this step of the process I make the Content section of Bridge larger so I can see all of the thumbnails at one time.

Original order with native file names.

Since I don’t necessarily want the images to be viewed in the order I shot them, I click the individual images and drag them into whatever order I want them to be in when they are posted on my blog. After I’m happy with the order they are in I select them all and hit Shift+Command+R (Tools > Batch Rename; in the menu bar) to rename them all. I always use text and a two or three digit sequence number to name my photos, and I pick a name that will hopefully help generate some SEO that describes the photos in a few words. (SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In a nutshell, if someone is searching Google Images for photos of Tijuana, I want them to find my photos so they visit my blog.) For this photo set I named the files Ensenada-Tijuana-Mexico-00.jpg. Also, I always put hyphens in between the words and numbers because the Internet doesn’t typically like spaces in file names.

Batch rename screen.

New order with new file names.

BONUS STEP – METADATA

The final step of my digital workflow isn’t something I do for every photo or set of pohtos, and it’s not a huge deal to me, but I typically do it for blog posts that contain photo galleries anyway. While in Bridge still, I select all the images and click on the Metadata tab on the left side of the window. I fill out some of the information so that if anyone pulls one of my photos from the Web it has enough information in the file that they know who and where the photo came from, and how to contact me if needed. I also fill out the Headline, Description, and Keywords for basic SEO reasons—although I’m not 100% sure this even does any good.

Filled out Metadata info.

After the Metadata is filled out, I’m finally ready to upload the photos to my blog, and my digital workflow for photography is complete.

If any of the terms or topics discussed above were over your head or a little too advanced for where you are with digital photography, this would be a perfect time to search Google so you can educate yourself and start pushing your skills to the next level.

As always, if you have any specific questions about anything in this post, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to help you out.

The DC Shoes team and team manager are all awesome dudes and I’m super stoked that I’ve had the chance to go on some rad trips with them and do some photo work for them over the past year or so. They recently launched a new Web site that features a bunch of my photos on the team pages. A lot of the other photos are by my friend and fellow photographer Matt Lingo who is based out of San Diego.

Check out the site and click through some of the team photos at dcshoes.com.

A lot of people are pretty surprised when they find out I don’t drink alcohol and that I have never tried smoking or drugs. As a result I have received a full spectrum of reactions after revealing this fact about myself. While my thoughts and feelings about this subject have shifted slightly over the years, my core beliefs and values have remained the same since I was 15 years old.

I’m not sure why, but growing up as a young kid in a small town I never really had the desire to try drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes like a lot other of kids my age did. Every once in a while my parents would let me have a few sips of whatever they were drinking at the time—wine at Thanksgiving, or rum punch at Christmas, but I never drank enough to get drunk or ever experience what a buzz was. Then in ninth grade, a friend I looked up to introduced me to a new term and concept a few of the bands he liked subscribed to: “straight edge.” I don’t remember exactly how he explained what straightedge was, but I knew I fit the description, so during my freshman year of high school I made the choice to live the rest of my life free from alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs. I understand some people might find this shocking given that I had never even tried any of those things, but to be frank, it wasn’t a difficult decision. I didn’t even have to give it a lot of thought because it simply wasn’t a big deal to me at the time—and it still isn’t. The desire or curiosity was just never there, and part of what lay beneath that lack of desire was the fact that I never wanted any outside substances to affect my actions or decisions, and I always wanted to keep a healthy mind and body.

Throughout the rest of high school I had what some would consider a bit of an elitist attitude about “being straight edge.” I marked big black Xs on my hands and drew an sXe symbol on my backpack to show people that I was straightedge. I purchased and proudly wore straightedge T-shirts and hats. I was openly vocal that I thought my life choices were better than someone else’s if we didn’t see eye to eye on the issue. However, as I grew up I grew out of that attitude and mindset.

One of the early straight edge hardcore bands I listened to; Earth Crisis.

Over the years I stopped using the term straight edge and stopped labeling myself as such. A big reason for that was I didn’t want to be associated with people that acted like I did in high school. Also, I didn’t want people to ever think I was labeling myself something just to be a part of a group or to fit in. I especially never wanted to be associated with straight edgers who were violent towards others who didn’t have the same beliefs as them. I became mature enough to come to grips with the fact that my decisions and choices are just that—mine. They are personal to me, and although I’m proud of the way I live my life, I also respect other people’s decisions on how they choose to live theirs.

Nowadays if someone asks me if I’m straight edge I may or may not say yes, but I’ll always tell them I have committed to living my life without drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. If asked I’ll always tell them my reasons are that I never want outside substances to affect my actions or decisions, and I want to maintain a healthy mind and body.

I’m smart enough to realize that I’m the minority when it comes to this topic, so I know not everyone will understand my decisions. I’m also smart enough to know that, in moderation, none of these substances are that bad and wouldn’t really have much affect on me, if any at all… The easiest way I’ve found to help people relate is comparing my lifestyle to being vegetarian: Most vegetarians don’t think that eating a piece of meat will hurt them. But at the same time, they don’t have the desire to eat a piece of meat because it’s simply not a part of their life. Have you ever seen a vegetarian look at a steak dinner and be bummed they can’t eat it? Probably not. It’s not that they can’t eat it; they simply don’t have the desire to eat it. Vegetarians don’t necessarily have above-average willpower—many simply don’t have the temptations to begin with. So even though many vegetarians do not think a piece of meat will hurt them; because they’ve lived their lives without it for so long, if they were to eat a bite of steak, there is a good chance it would make them sick to their stomach, and possibly even cause them to throw up. Sometimes even the mere thought of eating meat can make a vegetarian feel queasy. Obviously these statements are extremely broad and don’t apply to all vegetarians, but again, this the best way I’ve come up with to help people understand my perspective. So, everything I just wrote is true for me if you replace “eating meat” with “drinking alcohol.”

I don’t expect anyone to read this and decide they are never going to drink or smoke, but on the same token, just like any other commonalities in life; it is great to meet people who share similar beliefs on this subject. And of course, if I were ever in a serious relationship, I’d love for it to be with someone that has the same values as me when it comes to this.

Today is the seventh day of the seventh month of this year and I’m posting a random photo of a seven year old BMX rider…

I snapped this stretched no-footed can-can of Kaden “Dubby” Stone last week in Corona, California after filming a video with his older brother Daniel Sandoval.

I’ve been a fan of a blog called Twisted Sifter for a while now. It has a ton of cool photo features, lots of awesome artwork, some great travel ideas, rad lifestyle pieces, architecture, technology, and more. It’s a good place for entertainment and inspiration, so it’s at the top of my list for daily blog checks.

Recently I submitted a gallery of flatland photos to the site that they posted up in a feature called “21 Unbelievable Flatland BMX Photographs.” I’m always stoked to help get BMX out to audiences that normally wouldn’t see it, so thanks to Ben over at Twisted Sifter for posting my stuff…

Check out the gallery!

If money and finances bore you, then this post probably isn’t for you. Come back next week and I may have a post about photography or something. However, if you geek out like I do about this kind of stuff, this may be a good little read. And actually, if you just go ahead and download the file I have here for you, you probably don’t even need to read any of this because it’s fairly self-explanatory. I’ll write it all out anyway just in case it can be useful to some people. Here goes…

I know I’m super anal about being organized (some would call me obsessive), and one thing I always have to be able to see at a glance and access quickly is my finances. It’s even more important to me because I have two income streams—a full time job and a part time side business.

Over the years I’ve developed a simple and effective Excel spreadsheet for keeping track of the money I make and the money I spend. When April 15th starts creeping up on me I simply send the document over to my accountant, and because of how I have everything laid out he can prepare my tax return without any extra hassle on either of our ends.

In this post I’ll go over how the spreadsheet is set up, and of course, give you a link to download a blank template for you to use and customize however you want.

If you don’t know how to use Excel, I’m sure there are plenty of online tutorials that can help you with the basics, but if you know the gist of the program you shouldn’t have any problems with this.

Download: Blank Tax Deduction & Earnings Spreadsheet

Basic Spreadsheet Breakdown:
Sheet 1 - Freelance Earnings
Sheet 2 - Freelance Deductions
Sheet 3 – W-2 Deductions

The first page of the spreadsheet is definitely the most fun to fill out because it’s for the money you are pulling in. The first column is for you to write a quick note about what the job was. The second column is for who you billed for the job. Next is the type of payment—cash, personal check, business check, wire transfer, etc. Then is the date that you received the full payment. After that is a column for the invoice number, and finally the amount of money you made from the job.

If you scroll down, there is a section for jobs that are pending payment so you can keep track of which jobs have not been paid for. This allows you to see who you should follow up with when needed, and also allows you to see a projection of how much you will have made once all of your invoices have been paid.

The “Pending Total,” “Total Income Earned,” and “Projected Earnings” fields will be automatically calculated as you enter figures into the “Earned” section (column F). It’s seriously like magic…

My advice is to fill this out as soon as you submit an invoice to a client and as soon as you receive a payment. But again, I’m anal and obsessive, and I wouldn’t do it any other way.

The image here is condensed down for on-screen viewing, but the template you will download has more spaces for additional jobs when you scroll down.

The second page of the spreadsheet is the most detailed and complex (although still pretty simple), and is used for your freelance or side business tax-deductible expenses. I don’t know a whole lot about tax laws, but I do know that for most small businesses nearly everything you do or buy is tax-deductible. Never underestimate how far simple deductions can go and how much money they can help stay in your pocket when tax time rolls around.

The first column on this sheet is for you to write notes about the expenses you plan to write off. The second is to list any specific items you purchased. The third is where you put the date of the purchase. Then the fourth column is a field for tracking any mileage you incurred while out on the job—driving to and from photo shoots, meetings, etc. Finally, the last column is where you put the dollar amount of what you spent on the items listed in that particular row. Pretty simple, eh? I told you most of this would end up being self-explanatory.

You’ll also notice there is a dollar value added to the mileage at the bottom of that column. In the U.S., the 2011 standard deduction for miles driven for business is $0.51 per mile, so that field simply multiplies the miles you recorded by $0.51 to give you an approximate dollar amount you’ll eventually write off for all the miles you drove.

For people who work from a home or have a small office, there are fields for your basic monthly bills such rent, electricity, water, Internet, and cell phone. Of course, all of the sub totals and totals are automatically calculated. Maaaaagic!

Again, the image here is condensed…the template has more on it than you see here.

The third and final page of the spreadsheet is for any tax deductions you will be making as a full-time employee when you file a W-2. The columns are set up the same as on the previous tax deduction page, but this sheet doesn’t have all of the extra areas for monthly bills.

If you submit expense reports to your employer and get reimbursed for things, then you don’t put any of those expenses on this sheet. However, I often drive places for my full-time job or buy things that I don’t expense to the company, and those are the items I put on this sheet. Again, don’t sell yourself short when it comes to taking tax deductions! That’s why these tax laws are in place—so people can use them to their advantage and keep more money in their pockets and pump it back into the economy.

I think it goes without saying that I’m not a certified CPA, so don’t look to me for professional accounting advice. That being said, this is my system—it works for me, and I’m sure it will be helpful to some other people, so take it for what it is. As always, if you have any specific questions, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them so everyone can see.

Download: Blank Tax Deduction & Earnings Spreadsheet

If you found this post helpful, you may also like my post on using a net worth calculator (with spreadsheet to download).

Here’s a new full-page print ad for TSG helmets featuring a Brian Hunt I shot at the 2010 Las Vegas Dew Tour.

Click to enlarge.

The original photo submitted to TSG.

(This blog post was originally on my Transworld blog, but I recently came across it and decided to re-post it here with a few slight modifications.)

For a three-year stint back in college I lived in a ratty old house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, right across the street from LSU’s campus. It was a prime location on a corner lot, but to say it was a complete dump would be an understatement.

I don't have any photos of the house, so here’s a screenshot from Google maps.

Over the years I had a slew of people live with and stay with me… Everyone from cool friends, to deadbeat acquaintances, to bands, to hot chicks, to professional bike riders, and more either lived in or stayed in that house at one time or another. There were also a hell of a lot of rats that lived in that house over the years who helped themselves to whatever they wanted.

Besides the dirt cheap rent ($425 a month for a three bedroom), the best part about the place was that I could make up to $450 during a big football game by letting football freaks park on my lawn. There are more bad things about the house than I could ever write in a single blog entry, but here are a few that stand out right now that helped to give 709 Aster St. the nickname “Disaster Aster.”

- It smelled like crap and made anyone who set foot in the door smell like crap for at least three days. I lived there, so I didn’t shake the stench for about a year after I had moved out.
- Rats ruled the joint. Over the years I caught and killed more than two dozen of the varmints ranging in size from “Awe, it’s kinda cute.” to “Holy mother of god, that thing is a monster!” I once found their stash of food—they stole entire packs of hotdog buns and ramen noodles out of the pantry and somehow brought them to a room out back, leaving only scraps of plastic wrappers and bags to be found.
- The insulation was so bad if you didn’t run the window air conditioning units on full blast at all times mold would grow on everything from the kitchen table to the leather armchair. I learned this the hard way, of course.
- For the first year or so I lived there the roof leaked when it rained, which in Louisiana was several times a week. We finally got a new roof after “the ugly room” caved in from all the water pouring into it.
- It had “the ugly room” as we called it, which was a room that was so destroyed, dilapidated, and disgusting, there was no fixing it so we just put a shower curtain over it and never looked in there.
- The floor was several different levels and the windows and doorframes were anything but straight. It basically felt like you were walking around a fun house…without the fun.
- It got broken into one morning while I was donating plasma for some extra college cash. That’s right, while I had a 14 gauge needle in my arm and was pumping out blood for a measly $25, some bastards kids kicked in my door and stole my entire camera gear bag, my laptop, and my bike, among other things. As a rider, graphic design student, and photographer, they took pretty much everything I had.
- Squirrels ran around in the ceiling, making scratching sounds all day and night.
- A good friend of mine was practicing some hardcore dancing moves and kicked a huge hole in the wall. We just hung a picture over it to cover it up. And the same went with the BB gun breaking windows…we just Duct taped them up the best we could.
- The back room flooded when it rained hard. The worst incident ruined a huge box of old BMX magazines and an awesome Pee Wee Herman Halloween costume, and worst of all a brand new mattress and box spring I had just bought and hadn’t set up yet.
- There was no heater. Luckily it didn’t get cold that often in Louisiana, but when it did I was just out of luck. My only savior was a tiny space heater from Walmart that blew the fuse every 20 or 30 minutes.

After I moved out of the house in 2006, the Aster legacy lived on through friends and fellow riders of the area. Not too long after I was gone, the living room ended up becoming home to a ramp, a motorcycle, and a few more people than it could handle…and things were getting wilder by the day. First the ceiling in one of the bedrooms completely fell in, then a few months later the entire place caught on fire, putting a grand finale end to it’s reign of terror on humans. Then after it was sitting vacant for a while a tree fell on it during a hurricane.

I’m pretty sure it is still there to this day, waiting for the next thing to happen to it before someone buys the land from the slumlord holding onto the property…

May Disaster Aster forever live in infamy though our thoughts, stories, and through this blog post.

Not quite gone, but trying hard to be forgotten…

Screenshot from a video clip showing the tree on the house.

One of the questions I get asked most often is how I got my job as Associate Online Editor at Ride BMX magazine. The answer isn’t a short one, and as many times as I’ve given nutshell versions of it in person and in writing, I decided it was time to divulge the full story once and for all. Obviously I’m biased, but to me it’s an interesting and insightful story, and it’s certainly one I’m proud of.

The Background
I’ll start off from when I was in 9th grade. (I told you this wasn’t going to be a short one…) Although I had been into riding bikes practically my whole life, during my freshman year of high school I got a bit more serious about it. Around that time I started racing BMX and hanging out with other riders in my area. I feel like that’s when I truly transformed from being a kid that was stoked to pedal a bike and catch some air into a BMX rider. Part of that transformation included watching videos like Road Fools and subscribing to magazines like Snap and Ride BMX. The videos were awesome, but for some reason I was really drawn to the magazines more than anything. Maybe it was because I had been interested in photography since 5th grade. Maybe it was because I liked tearing out the photos and covering my walls with them. Or maybe it was simply because I could get them more often than videos… After all, there weren’t any online videos, and VHS tapes were expensive, and they certainly didn’t show up in my mailbox twice a month.

Me with two pros I looked up to when I was 15 and still admire to this day...Ryan Nyquist and Chris Doyle. This photo was taken from the ABA Grands in Oklahoma in November of 1998.

Setting The Goal
Over the course of the next few years my passion for BMX continued to grow and I continued to plaster my walls with the pages and posters from BMX magazines. Then in my senior year of high school I was finally able to get onto the school’s yearbook staff—something I had been trying to do since seventh grade. I always knew that I would love being a part of putting together my school’s yearbook, but I didn’t know how much I’d love it until I actually started doing it. As part of my duties for the class I walked around school taking pictures, then laid out the images into pages that I created for the yearbook. Being that this was going on during my last year of high school, at a time when kids are encouraged to think about their future and potential careers, it didn’t take long for things to click in my naive mind. My train of thought was very simple… “If I could take pictures and lay out pages for a BMX magazine, that would be the coolest job in the world.” So with that basic notion, several months before I actually got my diploma I made it my goal to work at Ride BMX magazine. I remember countless people at school, at home, and at church asking what my plans were after I graduated, and I had a response ready for all of them that went something like this… “I’m going to college for graphic design as a backup plan, then when I graduate I’m moving to Southern California and doing whatever it takes to work at Ride BMX magazine.”

I was 18 and had never read self-help books, had never studied successful people, and had never watched The Secret, but somehow I already knew how important it was to set goals and have a clear direction. This is something I still hold very true today and is still extremely important in all areas of my life.

My path was set, but as the cliché goes, I couldn’t see the top of the staircase (not by a long shot), but I saw the first step, and that was enough for me. I enrolled in Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and declared fine arts as my major with a concentration in graphic design. I didn’t know the first thing about graphic design or the magazine business. And I didn’t know anything about professional photography. And I was totally clueless about the BMX industry. What I did know is that I wanted to make a career out of what I loved and nothing was going to stop me.

This is a letter I wrote to Keith Mulligan (my current boss) that was published in the April 1998 issue of Snap magazine.

The First Big Step
Over the next four and a half years, while working towards my bachelor’s degree I slowly and very organically pushed myself to learn about everything I needed to know so that when the time came I would be ready to make my dream a reality and get that job at Ride BMX I wanted so badly. This is where the story gets a bit more complex and really starts to take shape… (Again, I told you this wouldn’t be a short one!)

I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on things now I attribute the first big step in my journey to a friend of mine that decided to build a mini ramp in his backyard during my first year of college. Sure, it was cool getting to help build a ramp, and since I had never ridden ramps before it was definitely fun learning how to ride it, but even more importantly, that ramp brought together and helped build up the local BMX scene. After the ramp was complete Brad Jensen (the guy whose backyard the ramp was in), Brock Gomez (the other friend who helped build it), and I all decided it would be cool to call up all of the riders we knew around Louisiana and our neighboring states and get them out to Baton Rouge for a jam at the freshly built ramp. Our plans were very informal, but within a few weeks we had secured a local cover band to come play a few songs and had riders from all over the South excited about the event. Brock and I made flyers and posted them up wherever we could think that riders may see them—in bike shops, at popular street spots, and around the college campus. Then I thought it would be a good idea to make a Web site so our friends in other states could see pictures of the ramp and read all the information about the jam. So I signed up for a free Web site and used an easy template to make a simple page explaining what we were doing.

That jam went much better than we could have ever expected, and before people even left they were already asking when the next one would be. Brock and I knew we had created something great that people in are area were stoked on, so for the next four years we continued to build on our DIY backyard jam idea, and by the fifth year “Transitions” had turned into an internationally recognized event with riders coming from all corners of the country. What was once a single ramp and a small cover band in a backyard had turned into two side-by-side backyards with two wild ramp setups, five touring bands, an entire street blocked off, flatland riding, DJs and break dancers, and enough free food to feed upwards of 1,500 people throughout the all-day affair…

The poster for the third annual Transitions jam.

Part of us building on the event each year included doing proper promoting, which meant that I sent posters and press releases to every BMX company I could think of along with all the BMX media outlets I knew of, including Ride BMX. This outreach helped people in the BMX industry associate my name with the event, and allowed them to see I was doing positive things with my local scene.

As a spin off of the event’s no-name Web site I ended up building a more legit, custom site under the name LouisianaBMX.com. It was a full-on Louisiana community site where I posted news about what was going on around the state, information about the spots we rode, photos from events and trips, interviews with local riders, and occasionally videos, too. Just like the event grew each year, the Web site continued to mature and more and more people around the country started to click on it on a regular basis.

With our event getting bigger each year the local Red Bull market in our region took notice and stepped in with some funding to help make it even better. Part of that money was used to fly in media to cover the event, which really helped give the event some good exposure and credibility, and of course in turn, helped give me some credibility as well. The first year we flew in someone from the BMX media we brought in Ryan Navazio, who at the time helped run an independent video magazine called Standpoint. The coverage of our event was only in the bonus section of the Standpoint DVD, but that was enough to get some attention on the event, and on LouisianaBMX.com.

The E-Introduction
After seeing the LouisianaBMX.com logo in the Standpoint DVD, Ryan Fudger, one of Ride BMX‘s Associate Editors emailed me and asked if I wanted to be interviewed for a feature in the magazine called “Web Site of the Month.” I remember receiving that email like it was yesterday—it was a bigger deal to me than you can imagine. To me, this meant I was doing something right and the people I wanted to notice me were in fact taking notice. There I was, about the farthest place away from the BMX industry, in South Louisiana, and all of a sudden someone from Ride was contacting me. I had never even dreamt that someone from Ride would know who I was before I started pounding on their door asking for a job. But it was happening, and I was beside myself.

I did the interview and got my half-page feature in the magazine, complete with a screen shot of the Web site. However, I didn’t let the correspondence with Ride end there… I wrote back to Ryan and asked if I could be a part of another feature for the magazine called “Quick Look,” which was a one-page scene report in each issue that a rider from that area wrote up describing the local vibe, spots, and riders. Ryan and the other guys at Ride agreed, and before I knew it I had my name and work in the magazine once again.

Other Projects
Along with organizing the Transitions jam, and running the Louisiana BMX Web site, Brock and I filmed and edited a full-length Louisiana-based BMX DVD that we sold to our friends through the Web site and local bike shops. It was a personal project for us, made specifically for our own keepsake, for our friends, and for our local BMX community. But unknowingly at the time, it also became a good way to promote myself to the BMX industry. After the video was complete I pulled out my list of BMX companies and media outlets that I had used to promote Transitions and sent each contact a copy of the DVD. It was a good way to remind everyone in the BMX industry that we had a strong scene in the South while giving them something new to watch, and of course, helping associate my name with another project.

DVD artwork.

Click here to watch the full-length video entitled “Chronicles.”

Entering Into The Magazine World
Around this time I was in my third year of college and I realized that if I was going to work for a magazine I needed more experience in that world than just a quick write up and a short interview in Ride, so I applied for and landed a job at my college campus magazine as a graphic designer. For two semesters I helped lay out pages of the magazine before moving up to the design editor/art director position that I stayed at for another year and a half until I graduated college. That job was my first introduction to the print media business and allowed me to learn a ton of valuable skills and lessons that would help me out in the marathon I was running to achieve my goal of getting a job at Ride. The job and experience also gave me some much-needed insight as to how things worked in the real world publishing industry.

My biggest lesson learned from working at the magazine was one I desperately needed to know, and that was this: designers sit at a desk all day, and photographers get to travel and do cool stuff. Back on the high school yearbook staff I shot photos and laid out pages, but that’s just not how it works in the magazine business. In most cases the designers and photographers are two very different people with two very different jobs and roles, and they rarely have any crossover. This realization created a pretty big paradigm shift for me, and although I didn’t give up my major in graphic design, I slowly began to alter my focus from design to photography. I came to realize that I didn’t really want to be a designer for a BMX magazine after all…I wanted to be a photographer.

Two spreads I designed for LSU's Legacy Magazine.

The next step of the staircase was starting to become visible and I bought an entry-level professional digital SLR Canon camera, a cheap lens, and a generic brand flash and began to teach myself how to shoot photos. While working for the college magazine I did manage to weasel a few of my photos into the pages, but when I asked my editor if I could write something for the publication she told me I should just stick to one thing and focus on design and layout. The rejection lit a fire under my ass and motivated me to do something on my own. I figured if I wanted to write, photograph, and design for a magazine, then why not make my own? So that’s what I did… I took old journal entries, life stories, write-ups from the Louisiana BMX Web site, and other ideas I had and created enough content for a 40-page magazine. I shot all the photos for it, did illustrations for it, designed and laid it out, and edited the entire thing by myself. Since it was solely a personal project and the content was based around my life, essentially it ended up being one big self-promotion piece. I got 50 copies printed, and once again, sent them out to BMX companies all around the U.S. I never sent a resume with them or asked for a job from any of those companies—I simply just wanted to get my name and my work out there. And it actually worked. Years later several important figures in the BMX industry told me they remembered the magazine, and as a result, remembered me.

The Face-To-Face Introduction
Once it came time to plan for the fourth Transitions backyard jam I got in touch with the editors at Ride and offered to use some of our event budget to pay for a flight so one of their photographers could cover the event and give it some exposure in the magazine. They agreed and sent out Jeff Zielinski, which was the first time I met one of the editors face-to-face. It was huge deal for me to get to meet someone who had the same job that I wanted. Meeting Jeff was eye opening and an instrumental part of me being able to connect the dots in the giant puzzle I was blindly trying to put together.

While Jeff was in town for the jam he set aside time to shoot photos with Terry Adams for an interview in the magazine, and lucky for me, Jeff allowed me to tag along for a day while they shot photos. Maybe he just didn’t know how to tell me no. Or maybe he was trying to throw a hungry dog a bone. Or maybe he just needed me to help find them cool spots to shoot at. But whatever the case was, I got to go out on a photo shoot with one of the most well-respected and talented BMX photographers in the world as he shot with one of the best flatland riders in the world. Throughout the day I watched Jeff work and tried to ask specific questions about what he was doing without being too nosey or annoying. And of course, I took a lot of mental notes along the way.

Jeff Zielinski shooting Terry Adams for his Ride BMX interview.

While I was driving around with Jeff that day we stopped by a famous street riding spot that Jeff planned to use for a department in the magazine called “Spots” where they featured a photo of a famous riding spot and had pros write about their memories from the location. Since I was the local in that area who was already on their radar, naturally the guys at Ride asked me to write the intro for the feature—another huge score for me.

Things Falling Into Place
By this time I had helped organize four very successful BMX events that had seen coverage in Standpoint video magazine and Ride BMX magazine, I had three small features in Ride, and I had sent out a full-length DVD and a self-promo magazine to people in the BMX world. Industry heads were starting to take notice and things were starting fall into place, but I was still a year and a half away from graduating, and I was still extremely new to BMX photography. It was obvious that was what I needed to work on, so I cranked it into high gear and started shooting as much as possible.

I didn’t live around any professional riders, so I was only able to shoot with amateur-level riders that did amateur-level tricks, but that didn’t matter. Every time I set up a shot and pressed the shutter I was learning more and more. And every time I opened images in Photoshop I learned even more. I looked at every situation as an opportunity to grow and improve on my skills. I studied each image in the pages of Ride and tried to figure out what made it a good photo. And I attempted to dissect the photos and imagine how I thought the photographer set up the shot. Then, after months and months of shooting, when I thought I had a few photos that would be good enough for Ride, I sent them to Jeff Zielinski and crossed my fingers. Several days went by and I finally got a reply in my email inbox. It was a no go. None of the photos were good enough. However, Jeff was nice enough to take time to give me some solid advice as to why they were rejected and what I could work on to improve my photos. Getting free, professional advice was a pretty new concept for me. For some reason I never even thought to ask the pros for tips… It seems so obvious now, but I guess when you look up to someone and admire them so much, you tend forget that they are just people too, and you don’t realize they are probably willing to help you out, even though you may feel like you are “a nobody.”

An early photo I submitted to Ride for the magazine that was rejected.

I continued to shoot with the local riders in my area as much as possible, and every so often when I got to a roadblock or was confused about something I sent Jeff an email asking for tips and advice. And lucky for me, he was always extremely kind and helpful. I quickly learned that sometimes the simplest tips from an expert can make a huge difference to a struggling novice. Those tips from Jeff meant a lot to me, and remembering how much he helped me out is part of the reason I started this blog in the first place—so I can help others who are trying to push themselves and get further in life.

A New Kind Of Submission
Over the next several months I sent a few more photos to Jeff, and all of them were turned down. I was beginning to see just how difficult it was to get a photo printed in Ride, so I decided to take a step back. Instead of asking the editors to print my photos in the magazine, I sent them eight images and asked if they would post them on their Web site as a photo gallery.

I visited the Ride Web site almost every day, but it was rarely updated. I saw a void that I thought I might be able to help fill by giving them free photos to run in order to keep their site updated with fresh content. They were more than happy to run the photos, so the next time I had eight more photos, I sent them in again. And they posted them again. I began to contribute photo galleries several times a month, and never asked to be paid for them. I eventually even contributed short stories and coverage from local contests. I was just excited to have my work seen by riders all around the world, and of course, I was excited to have my big toe in that heavy door I was trying to pry open.

A photo of Zack Warden from a contest report I did for ridebmx.com.

Traveling
Throughout all of my college years I traveled as much as possible to new places to ride, meet riders, and eventually film and photograph them. The more time I spent on the road, the more I wanted to keep traveling, and during my last summer of school I took my biggest road trip to date and made my way all the way from Louisiana to Southern California. The purpose of the trip was to see as much of the country as possible, but I did have a specific plan on my agenda to try to meet some more people in the BMX industry.

In one of my college classes they told us that, as weird as it may seem, people are usually really receptive and inviting if you ask to visit them at their workplace to learn more about their company and what they do. I had nothing to lose, so I emailed the editors at Ride along with another BMX company and asked if I could pay them a visit while I was on my trip. To my delight both companies agreed, and a few weeks later I walked into Ride’s office for the first time and shook hands with the other photographers and editors I had previously only had email correspondence with. I didn’t ask for a job, or even if they’d have any positions available any time soon. I simply asked questions about the office, about the magazine, and about what each of the editors did. It was a short visit that afternoon, but an important one that I feel truly served me well.

The Home Stretch
The next personal project I worked on was a Louisiana BMX calendar. It started out as a one-page class assignment, but I ended up expanding on it, and I eventually made a full-size 12-month wall calendar with photos of riders from Louisiana. The project helped show off my growing photography skills as well as my graphic design skills, and of course my ambition, drive, and love for BMX. And you guessed it…I sent a copy to a bunch of BMX companies again.

A spread from the Louisiana BMX calendar.

I was about a month away from graduating college—that exciting, but frightening time when you are forced to break free from everything you’ve ever known about structure and become completely free and independent. Then, one night, out of the blue, I got a phone call. It was Keith Mulligan, the Editor in Chief of Ride BMX magazine. He said they were opening a position at the magazine for someone to run their Web site full-time and wanted to know if I was interested in the job. Everything I had worked towards for the past four and a half years had come to a head, and this was the moment I had been waiting for.

I didn’t hesitate to tell him yes, and within a few short weeks I was on a plane to Santa Ana, California to be interview for the position.

By the time I walked across the stage in my cap and gown to receive my bachelor’s degree my dream job was in plain sight and I was on course to start my career in the BMX industry. And as yet another cliché goes…the rest, my friends, is history…

* If this post has brought up any additional questions, or if you want to know anything more specific about any part of this story, please leave a comment and I’ll reply so everyone else can see.

If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you already know that I took a trip to Africa last year. And you also probably know that I came back with a new outlook on a lot of things as a results of my experiences there. Well, after struggling for so long to find ways to share my stories from my trip, and after a few blog post attempts at doing so, I finally have something I’m super proud of that I want to share with everyone…

My good friend Lindsay (who went on the trip with me) and I had the idea of making a book to give to our friends in Africa as early on as halfway through the trip. However, we knew it would be a difficult task to complete. Not because of the logistics—that was the easy part. But because we feel it is utterly impossible to put our thoughts and feelings from this journey into words. Attempting to communicate these things left us struggling for quite some time, but having a few months to dwell on them helped us process everything that much better.

The two weeks we spent in Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya in early December of 2010 were life-changing for us, and we will never forget our experiences and the people we met. The following pages were created as a way of saying thank you to our friends and hosts. This book is our attempt at sharing how our journey has impacted our lives.

For Best User Experience:
- Click the “Full Screen” button at the bottom left.
- Double click the text you want to read to zoom in on it.
- Please be patient while pages load.

Click here if you would like to download the full book in a .pdf form.

Lindsay and I got 15 of these books printed for ourselves, our parents, and for the people we met and stayed with in Africa. However, you can purchase a copy of this book for yourself from Blurb for $26.95 plus shipping. (We don’t make any money from it…only the printing company does.)

When I found out Nike was going to fly me to the England for a wild BMX contest called “The Pool” I jumped at the chance to book my flight a day early so I could check out London. After arriving at the Heathrow airport I immediately jumped on a train into the city center, hopped aboard the first double decker bus I saw, and played the role of a tourist for about eight hours before heading back to the airport and hunkering down for the busy work week ahead of me. The city is beautiful and filled with rich history, and the hop-off, hop-on style bus tour was a great way to take in a lot in a short amount of time. Here are 20 photos from my day out and about on my first trip to the U.K.

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Sometimes things are so difficult to put into words that I never even open my mouth in attempts to articulate what’s on my mind. That’s what my trip to Africa has been like for me. For the past six months I’ve wanted to post so much stuff on my blog about my trip to Africa last December, but I’ve always felt nothing could ever do my thoughts justice, so I’ve just procrastinated on posting much of anything at all. Westerners like myself who have been to Africa have a common bond, but if you’ve never been you simply cannot relate to the experiences one gets from taking a trip there. That lack of connection is part of the reason it’s been so difficult for me to come up with blog posts to share my stories. Knowing that people won’t fully relate makes me shy away from sharing the subject…but I know I must. I must share my stories…not only for me, but for the people I met in Africa who only asked that I tell people their stories and what I saw.

So after several months of going back and forth over hundreds photographs and countless text documents I have finally come up with a way to share a small portion of my African experience…

A few months ago I randomly stumbled across a narrated slide show by a war photographer on YouTube I got inspired to present photographs and stories of African children in the same fashion. So without further ado, I present to you my narrated slide show: Children Of East Africa – Stories & Photos From My Journey Through Rwanda, Burundi & Kenya

Just as I didn’t want to feel any kind of awkward obligation towards these children before my trip, I would never want anyone reading this or watching my slide show to feel that way. However, once I was deeply affected by the people I met in Africa I truly wanted to help in any way I could. Part of the way I am helping these people is by sharing their stories like they asked me to. Another way I’ve been helping is financially… Since my journey to the Motherland I have helped two Congolese refugee teenagers that I stayed with in Kenya get into high school when they couldn’t afford to enroll. I have also helped many young orphan children in Rwanda by donating clothing money to get much needed health insurance that protects against preventable but common diseases such as malaria. I have also helped Congolese refugee widows get loans to start small businesses. I know my contributions are extremely minor in the big scheme of things, but I know they make a difference. And I am reminded of a quote I heard

If you are ever inspired to help out children like these in East Africa and would like to learn more about how you can help, please visit randolphworldministries.org.

Or if you would like to make a quick donation to the orphans we visited in Rwanda at Alfred’s churches you can simply click the Paypal donate button below and I will make sure all of the money gets to the children to help with health insurance, clothing, and food. As little as $10 can provide insurance for a child for an entire year.

Click on the next page of this post if you’d like to read the entire narration from this video.

I’m always stoked when mainstream media wants to feature BMX, but it’s definitely a bummer that it never comes across very good and never really makes BMX look cool. Over the years I’ve been involved in BMX I’ve been featured in newspapers, I’ve been interviewed for papers, and I’ve put on and been a part of events that have been featured in papers, and not a single one of them did BMX any justice. It’s just the nature of the beast, I guess.

Nonetheless, when a rider has a chance to get some exposure in a newspaper, I’m always happy to help out so when the less mustach-ey half of Team Pralex (Prasheel Gopal) asked if Glebe Report out of the Ottawa area could use a photo I shot of him at JoMoPro earlier this year of course I said yes.

Click article to enlarge and read, but prepare to shake your head in disappointment.

At least they used a photo of an actual trick…most of the time newspapers take their own photos and never time a trick properly so the photo is complete garbage.

Here’s the original photo…

Ever since Unit Clothing popped up on the BMX radar about two years ago they’ve been doing things right. They do a great job of keeping a core image to their particular niche market, but they do things on a big scale like very few “BMX brands” do, and I have to give them props for that. Being in the media I get a lot of press releases and videos sent my way, and there aren’t many as dialed as Units are so I really take notice when a company is run like that—it definitely makes me look at them twice and think about them more even though their products aren’t really my style.

Recently Unit stepped it up (even for them) when they announced that one of their Kiwi riders Jed Mildon was going to do a triple backflip on a BMX bike. The triple flip is something I had only heard talked about by one other person before, and that was Cory Nastazio. Cory said he wanted to build a special ramp and get it done when I interviewed him nearly five years ago for a ridebmx.com feature, but Jed obviously beat him to it. Not only did Unit and Jed land the world’s first ever triple flip on a bike, but Unit marketed it and promoted it incredibly well. Right now it has nearly six million views on YouTube and it’s only been online for six days. That doesn’t even include Vimeo or countless other sites who embedded their own copy of the quick clip. This may be the most successful BMX video that has ever gone viral. Mad respect to Jed and all the guys at Unit for being such a legit company and pushing BMX so much…

EDIT: The episode with Dickie’s story was supposed to run a few weeks ago, but got pushed back to tonight so I’m re-posting this with the proper air date.

This Friday night (June 3, 2011 – 10 p.m. ET) ABC’s 20/20 will air a special piece on Dickie Sanders. If you aren’t familiar with Dickie’s story, he was a flatland rider from Mandeville, Louisiana, who sadly took his own life recently after using bath salts as a recreational drug.

Set your DVR or tune in so you don’t miss the prime time TV coverage that will tell Dickie’s story to the world.

Dickie Sanders - 2006 Flatland Voodoo Jam - New Orleans, Louisiana - Photo by Fat Tony.

You can read more about Dickie’s story on Terry Adam’s blog or on the Fox 8 Web site.

Rest in peace, DUDE!

Last year around this same time I was on the road with the DC Shoes team on their first ever Roughing It Tour. Somewhere along the way the guys riding in the back of the RV with all the bikes decided to use several hundred stickers to give my bike a facelift. I didn’t find out what they had crafted until I woke up from a nap and checked Twitter and saw the photo of my bike they posted. (Shown below.)

So when the second Roughing It Tour came around this year knew what to expect—especially since I had to send by bike on the rig a week early while I was out of the country. Once I met up with the team and saw that my bike was in one piece, all parts were in place, and wasn’t covered in stickers I thought I was in the clear. I thought I had somehow dodged a hefty bullet… That is until I picked up my bike for the first time and realized it weighed more than double what it was supposed to.

I looked around in shock for several minutes trying to figure out what they had done. I thought maybe they filled my frame with cement or something. Then I realized it was the tires…but how in the hell could you possibly fill bike tires with anything but air? Finally, I guarded my had with my hoodie, grabbed an Allen key, and proceeded to press on the valve stem. Sure enough…liquid. I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept, but no matter how they did it, it was done. They had got me good…again.

My bike stayed in that bloated state for the entire trip until one of the very last days when I finally had time to put in new tubes. The whole time I was on the road with them no one would fess up to who was the mastermind behind the prank, but I always suspected Allan Cooke, because I figured he was the only one smart enough to have that kind of useless knowledge floating around his head.

Here’s a video that surfaced a few days after I left the trip that explains everything that went down.

Ahhh…BMX road trips. Good times!

I can take a joke and I know when a prank is good so obviously I’m not bummed on this at all, but I am supposed to go on another tour with these guys in September so leave some comments on this post of ways you I could get them back…

Joplin, Missouri is smack dab in the middle of nowhere, and most people had never even heard of it until a week ago when one of the biggest and most destructive tornados in U.S. history devastated the small town. However, to me, Joplin isn’t just a name I saw on the news alongside gut-wrenching photos of a city in ruins. I’ve visited Joplin a number of times over the past several years for their annual JoMoPro BMX contest at the non-profit youth outreach organization known as The Bridge and have come to know some of the people who call Joplin home very well. Having lived in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this type of catastrophe really hits home, and knowing that a place and its people I care about so much was affected by Mother Nature like this is truly heartbreaking. My most sincere condolences go out to those in Joplin and all the people who lost a loved one in the storm, especially the family and friends of Lantz Hare, a 17 year old BMX rider who was a local at the The Bridge’s skatepark, Autumn Ramp Park.

This is a photo of Lantz that I shot at JoMoPro in 2010.

Click here to read an article from USA Today about how The Bridge is working as a relief station to help their community. (Includes a photo I shot of Terry Adams.)

Here are links to a few ways you can help Joplin in this time of need:
- Rebuild Joplin
- The Bridge Joplin’s Official Web Site
- The Bridge on Facebook

Here are a few links to some photo galleries from the damage done to Joplin:
- The Big Picture
- National Geographic
- Buzz Feed

Until recently most of the time I visited new places I merely took BMX riding photos and the occasional snapshot of various sights and scenes. However, over the years of traveling and shooting photos I have managed to amass a pretty nice collection of beautiful cityscapes and skylines from all around the world. It’s amazing to me to look through this series of photos and realize that my position in the BMX industry has allowed me to get to so many incredible places. I truly am a very lucky man…

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I’m in Indianapolis for Red Bull’s Battle At The Bricks flatland contest. It’s taking place inside the Indy500 Motor Speedway, which is really awesome. I’m not a race car fan, but I know that’s a big deal! The main event is on Saturday, so if you are in the area make sure to be there! It’s definitely going to be a wild show with so many top international pros here!

I’ll be covering the event for ridebmx.com as well as announcing the contest. Check out the flyer featuring my good friend Terry Adams.

Nine quick snapshots from London’s Underground Tube in England on May 11, 2011.

Taken with iPhone 4 / Hipstamatic.

Click to enlarge.

While I normally have a ton of camera gear with me on any given trip, back in April of 2008 I decided to travel all the way across the Pacific with only a 35mm body, a 28-105mm lens, and three rolls of black and white film. My good friend Bobby Carter and I spent about 10 days exploring Okinawa, Japan, and along with some incredible lifelong memories and experiences, I also came home with a handful of great black and white travel photos of the Land of the Rising Sun.

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As a photographer and videographer I’m in front of gnarly BMX tricks all the time, and every once in a while I find myself a little nervous for the rider because of the possibilities of what could go wrong. It’s not that I ever really doubt the rider’s ability, I just know all too well from firsthand experiences that anything can happen, and I know it only takes a split second for someone to get seriously hurt—I’ve been there myself, and I’ve seen good friends get broke off more times than I care to remember. And while that’s not something a photographer or a rider really wants to think about, it does occasionally pop into your head. This fear factor while shooting has definitely diminished for me quite a bit with time and experience, but several years ago I shot a photo that was pretty scary for me, and it has an interesting story behind it, too…

The Scariest Photo I Ever Shot – Johnny Devlin

Date: September 24, 2007
Location: Downtown Los Angeles, California
Rider: Johnny Devlin

Camera: Canon 20D
Lens: Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 USM @ 70mm
Settings: 100 ISO, f/5.0, 1/250

In the fall of 2007 Johnny Devlin came out to California with Talem Cowart and stayed at my house for a week or so, and I ended up shooting a short interview with him for the magazine.

I had never met Johnny before, and was immediately impressed with his personality and skills on a bike. While we were out filming for a Web video he began calling out some pretty crazy tricks that he wanted to film for his section in the Shadow video, “Into The Void.” Since I couldn’t film the bangers for my Web vid I put down my video camera and picked up my still camera…

The day we shot this photo started out at the famous L.A. white banks where Johnny did a massive gap to wallride off the bank. (That photo and clip ended up in the mag and Shadow video, too.) After that we went into Downtown and started cruising. One of the first spots we pulled up to was this parking-lot-to-parking-lot gap that I had been to a handful of times and showed to a handful of people. Everyone else that had seen it just kind of laughed it off, but Johnny got real serious about wanting to do it. I anxiously started setting up my flashes and was nervous right off the bat. The hop over the top guardrail decently pretty high, the gap out away from the bottom guardrail is pretty far, and the drop to flat is easily 10 feet. If he were to tag the rail or not clear the distance, there could have been some serious consequences. However, as nervous as I was, Johnny was just as calm and collected. He obviously knew his limitations, but at the time I had only been working at Ride BMX for just over a year, so I wasn’t that used to seeing pro riders do such burly tricks on a daily basis.

A sideways view of the setup...

After I set up my flashes and did a few test shots to check my lighting and focus Johnny was ready to go. He eyed it up a few times and fired it out, but he landed like a ton of bricks and his foot blew off. I was bummed for him that he didn’t pull it on the first try, but also relieved that I was going to get another chance to shoot it… I was so scared while taking the shot that I jumped a little and messed up my composition, chopping off Johnny’s head completely. Luckily for both of us the second go was good on both of our accounts… He landed the trick smooth and got his clip for the Shadow video, and I had a proper photo with his head in the frame.

Amateur hour... :-/

A few minutes later Talem was looking at the images on the back of my camera and somehow accidentally deleted the photo. Johnny said he was willing to go do it again, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. I reluctantly took the memory card out of the camera, put it in my pocket, and crossed my fingers that some kind of recovery software would be able to restore the deleted file.

A few days later back at the Ride office I was able to recover the file, and the photo was eventually used on the opening spread of Johnny’s interview in issue 143.

Sámara Beach, Costa Rica is a beautiful little resort town with a population of only about 1,500. Back in February of 2008 I had the opportunity to go there with a group of flatland riders for a week of vacationing before heading into Costa Rica’s capital city of San Jose for the annual Ticos Flatland BMX jam. Although I did shot a handful of riding photos of my friends while in Sámara, most of my time was spent relaxing on the beach, riding, or looking for adventures such as zip lining across the jungle canopy, kayaking, and snorkeling. In the midst of everything else I managed to snap these photos of some of the beauty Sámara has to offer.

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Inspiration can come from anywhere and at any time, but when I’m starting a new design project I typically look through a bunch of books to get those creative juices flowing. Since I don’t do a lot of graphic design on a regular basis these days I don’t add new design books to my collection very often, but I still have a handful that I really find useful and enjoy from time to time. Here are my top five favorite graphic design books from my bookshelf…

Graphic Design America Two: The Work Of Many Of The Best And Brightest Design Firms From Across The United States
I’m pretty sure I got this book as a random gift from my parents at some point, and as the title suggests it showcases some incredible works of graphic design. This is definitely one of the books I look through most often when I begin a design project to help me get some initial ideas out on paper. There is usually one small part of a one a design from this book that inspires an idea that I can build off of.

Pantone Guide To Communicating with Color
This is a great book to look through when you start thinking about the type of color pallet you want to use to communicate certain feelings, emotions, or themes through design. It has a ton of great examples to help jump start your imagination and even has specific Pantone swatch numbers on a good handful of color combinations in case you want to copy pallets directly from the book.

Communication Arts Design Annual 45
This is another book that is filled with great designs that help inspire ideas. I used to have a huge pile of Communication Arts magazines, but over the years I ended up throwing them all away except for two or three. After all, you don’t need to look through mounds of magazines in order to get those creative brain waves pumping, you just need a little stimulation.

Print’s Best Logos & Symbols 4: Winning Designs From Print Magazine’s National Competition
This is another inspiration book that is great to look at, specifically when designing a logo. This book helps me to remember to keep the mark simple and to the point by showing examples of some of the most effective branding ever created.

tellmewhy: The First 24 Months of a New York Design Company
I don’t necessarily look through this book often, but I first read it back in college and did a report on it for an art history class. I’m a sucker for success stories, so it was really interesting to read how a graphic design firm (karlssonwilker) started from nothing and became successful. The layout uses what became one of my favorite fonts (FF DIN) and has a lot of really cool elements worked into the design of the book.

I grew up about 25 miles from New Orleans, but now that I’m an adult and have been away from the city for the past 11 years I have a much greater appreciation for the culture that The Big Easy offers. Last month I decided to take a trip to Louisiana with a good friend of mine who had never been there to share some of what makes the area so special and help revive my love for the south. While touring around the French Quarter and the Swamps I casually snapped a handful of photos to put together this gallery. Laissez le bon temps rouler!

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Not shown: The inordinate amount of delicious seafood we consumed.

About every two years or so I get a new bike. Being a photographer, a sucker for nostalgia, and of course a lover of all things BMX, I always managed to take a picture of my different bikes. I recently went through my archives and found one photo of each of my bikes so I could take a look back at what I have been pedaling around on throughout the past 16 years of my life…

I’ve only owned one BMX bike over the course of my life that I didn’t take a picture of, and that was my first “real” bike ever. It was a black and purple splash-painted Mongoose Menace that I got for Christmas. (Probably around 1994.) That bike ended up getting stolen out of my friend’s garage, and there was a few weeks time where I actually contemplated not buying another bike and just saving up to get a car. What was I thinking?

It was probably some time in 1996 that I ended up buying this Schwinn Predator Pro for about $250, and since my last bike had been stolen my mom made me keep a lock on it for a while. I eventually put Jad three-piece cranks on this bike and upgraded a few of the other parts before I bought a more legit setup.

I bought my next bike sometime around 1998 and it was a complete DK Legend. A kid at my school owed another dude some money and didn’t have it, so I was able to scoop up this $600 bike for around $200 and buddy was able to pay off his debt.

By the end of 1998 I had stopped racing and was running pegs on my DK Legend. I was pretty much a full-on street rider by this point and eventually had to swap out the race frame for something a little more fitting so I got the second generation DK General Lee… Check out that gnarly seat! I had socks under all that duct tape to make it more comfortable to pinch with my knees to sling barspins. (On flat ground only, of course. Haha.)

In 2001/2002 during my first year of college I felt like the General Lee had run its course and I bought a slightly used Volume Compton from my friend who owned a bike shop. This thing was by far the heaviest bike I ever owned…an absolute tank. 48 hole wheels with 14mm axles, 44t sprocket (at one time I even had guard sprocket on it), ACS Fat freewheel, Kink fat chain, four pegs…the works. It was probably weighed 40 pounds or more.

At the end of my second year of college I sold my show car to focus more on traveling, filming, and riding. It was the summer of 2003 and I bought a new bike with some of the money I made off the car. I dropped well over $1,000 on the bike. It was my first fully custom bike that I built from the ground up…a Kink Cielencki. Every other bike I owned was put together with used or spare parts, but this one was brand new and made up of every part I circled in the catalog. It was my absolute dream bike at the time. I pulled out all the stops, didn’t worry about the price tag, and simply got exactly what I wanted. And I couldn’t have been happier with it.

After replacing a few parts here and there and giving it a few paint jobs, the Kink lasted me nearly four years. I didn’t get a new bike until 2007, and because I had loved building up my dream bike so much I did the same thing again. I couldn’t go back to just replacing certain parts and building up used bikes… By that time I had been working at Ride for about six months and had some great connections with some wonderful people in the BMX industry and Chris Moeller at S&M gave me a custom Metal Rebel Contender. I had asked that the dropouts were left solid without making the lightning bolt cutout, that a cable guide be welded onto the frame, and that the frame be painted a custom color of my choice. Moeller hooked it up perfectly and it came out amazing.

In 2009 I decided it was time for another fresh build and the guys at Tip Plus hooked me up with a Federal Notorious frame. I was super picky about how I wanted the bike to look—teal frame with all white parts. It’s no secret that I’m completely anal about a lot of things, and I was definitely anal about how this bike came out. I couldn’t rest until I had all the right parts to pull off the color scheme I wanted.
(Click here to see the bike check on my old Transworld blog from my Federal Notorious.)

Now it’s 2011 and I just built up my latest ride. This may be my best looking bike ever!
(Click here if you missed my bike check of this bike that I posted a few days ago…)

[NOTE: I also had two old flatland bikes that were hand me downs from Terry Adams and Justin Miller that I don't have photos of. I do currently have a dialed Colony Cube flatland bike and you can click here to see that one. I also have a Supercross race bike right now, but I don't have a photo of that one either. I figured this blog post was good enough with all the bikes I ride most often.]