“Sometimes all you need is a little bit of luck when it comes to photography. Usually you try to plan everything out to the last detail, but sometimes things go a little haywire and you scramble at the last second to pull it all together. That situation is exactly what happened when capturing this image of Matt Lough doing a ledge ride to drop in Joliet, IL while filming for his latest edit.
Matt and Anthony Loconte, hit me up when they were going to head out for a evening of filming about 35 minutes outside of Chicago; they had said there was a set up Matt wanted to hit up around golden hour. So, I had braved rush hour traffic and headed out to Joliet to meet up with them and we kind of just cruised around and played on some nibble spots while we waited for the light to be just right. Once we were ready we headed over the the set up, which was a pretty tight ledge ride to drop that went right into a busy street and down hill. So, we tried to figure out the angles for the video and where I can get a clear photo of everything and still be out of the way of the second video angle. I settled on a head on shot, since it flattened things out and I just liked the clean look of everything as well as the side lighting coming through from the sunset. The street where Matt would land into had tons of traffic and we had to wait for the right moment where the traffic lights synced up and he could get a go at it. I knew it would most likely be a one and done situation and I had to be ready. Myself and our friend Pat Richert were on traffic duty keeping an eye on everything and all of a sudden I glance up and Matt was heading down the ledge. I guess Pat had yelled and gave the OK to go and I hadn’t realized it, while still looking at traffic. So I pulled my camera up to my eye and tried to get everything composed and lined up to where I had wanted to have him on the ledge although he was already getting to the bottom of it and I just got to fire 2 quick shots. Magically on the second shot he was coming off the ledge and the brief second where his elongated shadow synced up with the overpass tunnel was captured. I had originally wanted Matt a bit further up on the ledge, and I was super upset at myself for practically missing the shot I wanted, which I wouldn’t get a second go at. Afterwards, some of the crew really digging the shadow image I kind of started to appreciate it more and more. It was all pretty serendipitous and there was something rewarding about scrambling and getting something probably a little better than what I had originally planned.
Nikon D800
NIkon 50mm 1.8 AF (Old Version)
1/800
f / 5.0
ISO 1600″
Push It A Stop 