I was about to call it a day when Russell Day texted me that he was going to skating in La Jolla, which happened to be on my way home. Luckily, I remembered an obstacle that I never got to skate, so this was a perfect opportunity to try it out since it was close to where we were going to meet. I had Russell follow me to the location and upon arrival I was greeted by someone new. He introduced himself as Chris Couture and told me he had just moved to San Diego from Detroit after graduating college, and for the past month he and Russell had been blading everyday.

I recognized the name from his 50/50 flow edit a while ago, so I told him I was down to get some photos. We all warmed up together on the bottom rail but Chris was the first one to hop up to the top rail; first with a royale. After filming that trick he decided to go for a soyale on the bottom rail to soyale on the top rail. There’s lots of danger elements in this trick. First, you have the vertical rail to worry about hitting as you are grinding the top rial. Second, the space between the bottom rail and the top rail is awkwardly close. Third, if you are not careful your foot could easily get caught in between the rails.

I went to go set up for the shot and the sun was starting to set. This made it easier to get my exposure correct, with my flash doing the work of freezing the action rather than pushing my shutter to 1/320 or 1/400 and possibly missing the shot. I set up one Nikon SB-600 to the left at 1/4 power. I used my 55-200mm lens at 66mm. It took me two shots to figure out the aperture and depth of field I was looking for. On my third shot I thought I had waited too long and he had come off the rail, but I captured the moment just before his soul foot slid off the end. I wanted the viewer to see he was only inches away from having his foot hit the rail post—but was still solidly on top of his soyale all the way through the end of the rail. I shot this at 1/200th on a Nikon D5000 at f6.3 ISO 250.