Riding photos #6: Goodbye Shailer Park!

Today's riding focus was to go ride Shailer Park skatepark, a fairly old skatepark that I'm told is soon to be demolished to make way for a set of shops. It's pretty sad, since this skatepark has been featured in an absolute ton of riding videos, including videos for the Brisbane based BMX parts company Tempered Bikes. Despite it's age it's bursting with very fun lines and is great for riders of all skill level. Riders for this set are a mate of mine who is just learning BMX, Alex Johnson, and sponsored rider Christian Dilizio.

I absolutely love the photo above. Today was the first time I've used a CPL filter, and I see why people use them. I hardly touched this photo in post processing at all. Rider above is Christian, with a decent x-up to get a bit warm and loose.

In about 3 or 4 riding sessions, Alex has really started to pick up why I've been riding so many years. He is more of a gamer, but since he's picked up a bike it seems as though he gets in to it as much as a damn good battlefield session.

Above, nac-nac. The weird name comes from it being basically the reverse of a can-can, where you kick one leg over the frame in front of your other leg as if you were dancing the can-can. Doing a nac-nac, you kick the leg behind your other leg above the tyre.

Above, Christian transferring bowl to bowl. A prime example of why this skatepark will be missed, one bowl features steel coping and a sub box, while the other is coping-less and a little more mellow for beginners. When we got to the skatepark, Alex started out riding around the coping-less bowl and did a few jumps out of it before moving on the the "better" bowl. Both bowls are open ended and you can transfer from each one into another bowl or section which creates some awesome lines. I even backfipped the coping bowl right before we left, and out of the handful of backflips out of concrete ramps I have done, it was by far the smoothest.

Above is Alex getting a little more psyched and jumping out of the corner pocket of the coping bowl. Between runs, Christian and I muttered a joke that we thought he was getting hooked on bikes like us, next minute he called out across the park "MAN! THIS IS ADDICTIVE!". Hunch confirmed? That pocket is the very same I launched a flip out of too, this place was definitely built for everyone.

After a brief stop off at Mt. Cotton skatepark and KFC, we went back to our home park of Victoria Point. It's a small skatepark with pretty mellow banks and quarters, but it's close to where we all live so it ends up being a regular weeknight riding spot. Apparently our local council has agreed to a petition to upgrade the park, but they're pretty slack when it comes to improving anything other than shopping centres or housing estates to be honest.

It was an awesome day with good mates, and everyone making  bit of progress. I feel pretty sad that Shailer park may be gone soon, but I am glad I got to ride it one more time and get the things I wanted to learn there done. Being around Alex while he took it to the wall and learned more was probably what pushed me to want to bring out the flips again. Backflips are incredibly fun, and there is no other rush like it in BMX (or anything else!), but the obvious dangers and intensity of them makes me hold back a lot, not to mention that right up until the point of already being commited to the flip, I'm always fighting a tough mind game. But that's just another thing I love about BMX, fighting to overcome what holds you back, and being rewarded for it. Enjoy!

Riding Photos #5: Thornlands fisheye set

Been meaning to upload these for a while, but work and my Cert III course has really been eating up all of my time lately, and, when I actually do get free time it's usually spent catching up on some riding time. I recently learned frontflips as well so usually there's a lot of resting time after I go out riding now (you gotta crash a lot to learn them, and crashing hard takes it out of you even if you walk away uninjured).

So, here's the rest of the batch from the 2 days of riding Nick Barnier and I did at Thornlands skatepark.

Nice tailwhip

Such a great day for a ride

Black Weapons

These last two shots were our focus for the day. Nick wanted a few shots of riding this hip, and some of an invert over it (one on the right). I framed it with the the edge of the tree at the top and the hip itself at the bottom, and had to use a bit of magic in post processing to cut the brightness of the sun.

This hip is one of my favourite spots to ride and appears in many riding photos in Australia. There's plenty of shots of young Alex Hiam blasting ridiculous stunts over it, among others. The reason being, this skatepark is fairly photogenic to riders, and the hip is a really nice shape to get a lot of height but it doesn't kick you hard enough to disrupt your balance. I typically have troubles trying to bring it up short when transferring in to the short side, there's not much room to land in but it's way too easy to boost too high.

Anyway, all of these shots were with a Canon 1000D with the 18-55mm f3.5-5.3 lens with a $30 eBay fisheye filter. That lens setup is worth no more than $130, and the distortion is pretty terrible but it's fun to experiment with, and I'm not a professional looking for super brilliant photos. I'm just a dude with a camera that likes to play around with angles and settings for fun. Maybe one day I will invest a lot of money in to my camera gear, but not while I'm still enjoying this setup.