It’s been over three years since my last Photo Journal. But sometimes you should visit the past to reconnect to a part of yourself that has been dormant due to the stresses of life. 

When you have a chance to visit those old memories of skating hard after work and being a part of a session it’s a special feeling that we often overlook. Remember that some sessions are epic and others are mediocre, and sometimes you don’t really accomplish anything and that’s okay cause you’re with friends, bullshitting about life and pushing yourself not to be lazy. Which is how this shot came to be.
 
I got a text from Alex Wick asking me to help out some travelers that were in the area. Then he tells me it was Julien Cudot, Stephane Alfano, David Mounigan and Jeremy Ghouila from France who are in San Diego to skate and need help finding some fun spots. Unfortunately, work and life are extremely busy during this time of year so I mapped out some spots knowing that I wouldn’t be able to meet up with the dudes before they left for LA… which was a huge bummer. 

Well as luck would have it I ended up receiving another text letting me know the guys were back in town and trying to grab some beers. Over cold ones I learned that they’d been having a hard trip with injuries, long travel days and not a ton of skating. So I rearranged my schedule to at least meet up for one spot, and thought of somewhere we wouldn’t get kicked out. I settled on the famous Encanto rail where Aragon did fakie 540 Topsoul.

Meeting everyone at the spot I was surprised to see that Jeremy was not skating the usual rail — nope. Instead he had opened a gate and was doing a gap of about six stairs to a rail similar to the “real” one but with a horrible, dirty runway and landing. Since he’d already warmed up and was bascially doing the trick I had very little time to set up, which had me really worried about how busy the background would be with the fence and rails. On top of that I didn’t have my fisheye so instead was using a 12-24 meaning I was more limited in how close I could get.

With no time to test my exposure or mess with the flash set up I started taking test shots to experiment and moved around to change angles, then moved a ridiculously heavy set of bleachers so that Jeremy would have more run-up to really charge it. Which he did, doing Gap to Topsoul.

I shot this with my Nikon D7000 18mm F6.3 1/250 with my flash, a Nikon SB900, on camera at full power. However, I have to confess I was early on my shutter so the flash fired when he didn’t have his topsoul feet in position so I had to fix my lighting in PS. Filming is David Mounigan and you can see the clip right now on Julian Cudot’s IG.

It was awesome skating with everyone and hanging out after getting to learn about their experiences traveling and touring. Come back anytime! — Steve Steinmetz