YoBeat: Making Fun of Snowboarding Since 1997

Dave Brewer said he’d take naked pictures of the YoBeat staff if we put him in the Firing Squad. So Zim went on vacation and he got his wish (but no nude YoBeat photos.) He lost, but at least there’s a good story behind it. Maybe after you read it, you’ll feel bad for voting for the other guy. Or not. Thanks for playing, Dave. Better luck next time.

This was the first photo I shot at the beginning of the 2008-2009 snow season. Cody Comrie and a few other Thunders called me and did an awful job of explaining the feature that they had in mind. I believe Ben Gustafson’s failed attempt at an explanation went something like this: “‘Brew daddy, Man, we want to build like a whale. Like a weird gap to crazy wave-like whale that pops us up onto this dumpster thing. You should come shoot some photos.”  Needless to say I had no previous vision of what a “whale” was going to look like, but I trusted in Ben and Cody’s creativity to pull something together. After shoveling for literally a few hours and making a few trips to the near by smiths to buy salt, the whale seemed to be ready. This was before the bungie craze had really hit the scene, and speed was a problem. The runway was pretty flat and you had to land and pump “the whale” just right to even be able to make it up on top of the storage unit (or dumpster in Ben’s world.) Cody Comrie kept comin in hot but could never find enough speed to get into a proper backlip. That explains why I decided to shoot a little earlier than usual. He was just sort of getting up high enough to somewhat wall ride for a bit before frustratedly unstrapping, yelling and throwing his board (which can be seen in  Team Thunders ‘08 vid, Gold Country.)

As far as the weird fisheye panorama goes, I knew that I wanted to show the obstacle as two seperate features. The gap in and the pop onto the storage unit. I didnt want to shoot an entire sequence, but thought about the post production possibilities before we were even done building the feature. It was a whale/wave, so I felt like coloring it blue. I threw a sunpak 622 gelled blue behind the landing of the first gap. I also knew I needed Cody to pop out from the dark background, so I placed a little rim light  behind him. Another sunpak 544 was used just outside of the frame to camera right to fill in the rider and the landing…And then I had an Elinchrom strobe to light up the main feature (Codys failed attempt at a back lip.) But I knew that if I were to simply stand in the middle and shoot with a fisheye, there would be crazy distortion due to the paralax error and it would be difficult to line up the scene as a panorama. So I made the decision to stand closer to the landing of the first gap, shoot one photo with my pocket wizard on one channel, then I shuffled my feet parallel with the whale and followed the rider along 10 or 15 feet (keeping my shooting angle parallel) and somehow was able to switch my pocket wizard channel just in time to fire the strobe to light the rest of the scene.

Even though Cody didn’t end up sliding more than a foot, I still wanted to expirement with compositing the two images together. So I did. And it ended up on Yobeat. And people hated on it. And that is fine with me.

You can check out more of Dave “Good Sport” Brewer’s work at http://www.davebrewerphoto.com/