July 30th was a hot day. Jeff Dalnas and I were cooking some burgers on the grill at his house when we figured we might as well go try and shoot some creative photos after we ate. Jeff wasn’t trying to do anything crazy that day due to a slight hangover, but of course he was still down to blade. I had been thinking about taking some sort of photo of this sculpture in downtown Providence for several months now. We drive by it about once a week and I always knew it would be cool to shoot, but never really followed through until now.

So, Friday was the day to do it. Perfect lighting, perfect sky, perfect trick, and a cool, creative obstacle. We parked the car across the street, put 2 quarters in the parking meter (which gave us 30 minutes of time), set up the lighting and my camera, and got the shot after a few tries. We got back to the car with 12 minutes remaining on the meter and we were both pretty amazed how quick that went.

Later that night we showed Jeff’s brother Eric the photo and he said, “It’s about time someone did something cool on that thing.” It’s just one of those things you see a lot but never really look at it closely.

Recently, Jeff and I have been going to old spots we used to skate as kids, just looking for different ways to skate them or just for little things we never noticed before. This has turned out to be very helpful for us to either get video clips or photographs of stuff we didn’t think was cool anymore. But in fact most stuff has actually turned out to be cooler to us now than it was several years ago. When you live in the smallest state like us there’s only so many spots you can skate, so we have to put a spin on a lot of them. All in all it has turned out pretty well so far.

Equipment: Canon 1-D Mark II N, 8mm Bower Fisheye, one wireless Canon Speedlight 580 EX II flash. 1/320th, f 16. ISO 640. — Paul Yacovone