You don’t need to be a photographer to appreciate the lighting in this photo. The twilight backdrop adds a beautiful, almost fake gradient that fades into the distant mountains. I am certain that this photo wouldn’t be as striking had it been midday. The flash placement inside the bowl corner is optimal to show where the rider is coming from and going to. The composition is super clean- a prime example of the rule of thirds. Not to mention that inverts pretty much cannot get any more inverted than this.
“On the day this photo was shot Tazz and I had made the short drive south from Albuquerque to Los Lunas to help dig at some backyard trails that were in the works. After digging at the rained out trails for a while, everyone was ready to get some riding in so we relocated to the small concrete park nearby.
We had a fun session and toward sunset Tazz and some of the Los Lunas locals were sessioning “the U-bowl”. It’s maybe seven feet deep with super mellow transitions and very little flat bottom. Tazz can shred anything you put in front of him so it didn’t take too long for him to start boosting some tricks out it.
I had recently bought a Nikon 70-200mm and right away I could tell this was a perfect opportunity to put it to use. The deck of U-bowl is elevated by about two feet from the rest of the park. This gave me the ability to get a lower angle,hide my light source in the middle of the frame and also put Tazz above the trees in the background. I put a Sunpak 522 and a Sunpak 120j mounted next to each other on a light stand in the flat bottom. The flash were set at 1/4 power and pointed up toward Tazz from underneath. There was also a Quantum Q-flash set to quarter 1/4 power on the deck to just out of the frame about four feet up. My D300 was set to f/4.8 and a shutter speed of 1/125 to try to catch some of the fading ambient light.
We snapped a few frames of good inverts but Tazz wasn’t satisfied. He says that the best way to get a clicked invert is shirtless so that you don’t catch your bars on it. So.. despite it being late January he took the shirt off and buzzed his tire on his bare shoulder a few times ’til we got one he was content with. That’s the sort of thing that makes Tazz my favorite dude shoot with-he’s always super stoked to ride and down put in a good time for a clip or photo, whether he’s in front of the lens or, much of the time behind it as well. Long live the juke life!”
Check out more of Alex’s work here.
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