I’ve been thinking about Nick Drake recently, which isn’t surprising as this week is the 50th anniversary of his death. Drake released three albums of music that never achieved any level of praise or popularity until long after his passing. It’s a shame he would never see that success.
On the flip side it’s fortunate that he created a few small cultural artefacts that would go on to hugely influence other people in positive ways. That includes myself, as I found his music through my dad’s record collection, and it probably had a small part in some of my formative years.
There’s probably a thread that I could draw from here to there, my present situation back to the point I discovered the 12” compilation that featured one of Drake’s songs. But I could probably draw that thread through many things, it’s hard to say which influence is more important than another.
Anyway…
Skateboarding As Culture?
The best skateboarding photograph I ever took was never really seen.
In fact I’ll lay a claim down here, seventeen years later, that it’s the best skateboarding photograph anyone ever took at the Milton Keynes skate plaza. Not just for the reasons that make skateboard photographs good, but all the other reasons like aesthetics, composition, historical context, documentation of a moment. All that stuff.
I’m usually pretty modest about the things I create, and the above is a pretty monster claim given the skate photo heavy hitters that went there over the years: TLB, Wig, Leo, Sam, over a period of three decades or more. Not just that, but the heavy hitters of skateboarding they were shooting. Nah. I shot the best skate photo there. Period.
And yet, it was never used for anything.
Why? Because I messed up.
Plan B
In the summer of 2007 the Plan B skateboarding team were touring Europe, the last stop scheduled them to attend a couple of events over a weekend in the UK. This would include them showing up at the Milton Keynes Bus Station/Skate Plaza (“The Battle of The Buszy”1) on the Saturday, and then the next day they would put on an actual demo at the newly built Saffron Walden skatepark.
In 2007 the Plan B team were an absolute powerhouse of both technical and transition skateboarding, so this was not to be missed. While it wasn’t rare for US teams to visit the UK, it was rare for them to openly announce their intention to visit two of the best skateparks in the country for free to attend demos.
At the time I was having skate photos run relatively frequently in the magazines, a few times a year, so I was keen to attend both events to try to capture some images.
Due to the Plan B schedule a few other locals wanted to make the most of it as well and get to both events, which would mean staying somewhere close. Fortunately former Huddersfield skateboarder Anthony “Mr Gauky” Gaukroger was now based in Cambridge and offered us a floor to sleep on.
This was perfect - we’d drive down to Milton Keynes, stay at Gauky’s place then drive down to Saffron Walden the next day. It would be a long trip back, or at least it seemed that way. The world feels a lot smaller these days. So early on Saturday morning we piled into a couple of cars and headed down the M1.
Milton Keynes
The Milton Keynes skate scene has always been pretty substantial, so the first event was going to be a very crowded. The Plan B team would also draw in many other skateboarders from around the country. Add to that the media scrum keen to record and photograph the action? Yeah, it was going to be difficult to get any sort of photo from both events.
I had sold most of my gear a few months earlier and was now limited to a single camera and a single lens. I couldn’t get my shoulders out to get up close with a fisheye lens. I had to look for other compositions. That was going to be difficult, because I expected it to be busy.
Oh it was more than busy at The Buszy, it was four to five bodies deep in most places:
The camera I was using still afforded some advantages, it being medium format allowed me to throw the distracting background crowds out of focus; and the higher shutter speeds of the particular model allowed me to freeze the action without using flashes, which would have been impossible to setup anywhere given the crowds.
So I tried to take advantage of that but really most of the photos I took ended up being too, well, busy. I mean, they’re relatively well timed and composed. Exposures good. But, yes, busy. I wandered around for a while looking for angles, trying to compose through the crowds, trying to get low down or high up or some sort of direction that cleaned up the images. It was difficult.
The most promising location was the long ledge with the raised platforms on either side - most skaters were taking it one by one so the background was relatively clean. But there would still be the media scrum with their fisheye lenses at the end of the ledge, and it was difficult to compose anything that got them out of the frame:
I hung around here for a while, and shot a handful of stills, but I knew they wouldn’t be great. What I did notice was that there were some skylights above the plaza, and a spotlight it created in various places had slowly been making its way across the floor towards the ledge. In a couple of hours the natural light would be beaming down directly on the part of the ledge that all the riders were hitting.
If I hung around here longer, and managed to get higher up, and was lucky with the light, and the riders were still attempting tricks, and there was a trick that would work as a still, and I could get the timing right. I might be able to get a good photo. So I looked for something, anything, that might help.
There was a bin directly opposite the end of the ledge. Perfect. Even more perfect was the moment I realised that it was ideal, the person currently standing on it decided they wanted to go elsewhere. I jumped onto the top of the bin. It was the perfect location and angle. Now I just need to be patient, so I waited.
I waited for 2 hours.
During that time I shot a few photos, but was being economical with my choices - I only had two rolls of HP5+ with me. That meant a total of 24 frames. The nature of most tricks meant there was no point shooting them anyway, and I was saving at least half a roll for when the light would be a spotlight on the end of the ledge.
Eventually the waiting paid off. A good number of skaters were still attempting tricks on the ledge, Most of these wouldn’t make a good photo, but Neil Smith was working his way up to something. Smithy had nollie flips on lock, many kinds, and was trying a nollie kickflip into a crooked grind. I knew this was the trick to shoot, and the light was dancing over the ledge.
I couldn’t quite get a light reading so asked Joel Peck, another skateboard photographer who was sat in front of me (in the background of the above photo), to take one for me. He was reading f4 at about 1/500 so I decided to shoot f2.8 at 1/750, slightly overexposing to bring out the shadows a bit. I needed a slightly faster shutter speed as well to better freeze the action.
I shot a few frames of Smithy trying the trick, he had a very consistent style so I was relatively confident I had got a frame with good timing. It was always difficult to know on film if you had got it correct until you developed the roll sometime later.
I may have run out of film before Smithy landed the trick, I honestly can’t remember at this point. The best frame was number 16/17 on the roll, which means it was the penultimate frame I shot that day (Ilford always had weird numberings if you were shooting 6x6 on 120 roll film). It’s possible the trick wasn’t landed even. I can’t remember that either. Skateboard photography has always had interesting unwritten rules around these areas. But looking at the resulting photo it’s hard to doubt he landed it.
The next day Plan B were scheduled to visit the newly finished Saffron Walden skatepark. After a slightly messy night in Cambridge we all headed down to watch the demo. I shot some photos at that event as well, having managed to blag my way behind the fencing. I’ll cover that in another post later. Not the demo, but rather some history of the park and how it ended up as my local for a number of years.
Back Home
I got home late that Sunday night and developed all of my film (4 rolls in total from the weekend) the next day. I didn’t care about most of the shots, I just wanted the photo of Smithy’s trick to come out.
When I pulled the roll out of the developing tank it look weird. I had developed hundred’s of rolls of black and white film by this point, and none of the frames had looked quite like this one did. I thought I might have messed up the exposure or damaged it in development.
In reality? It was perfect. Absolutely. Perfect:
A couple of days later, having printed the ones I wanted to scan in my darkroom, I sent all of the photos from the weekend to Document magazine. I did this rather than sending them to Sidewalk as I saw that Leo had been shooting photos at both events so knew they would likely run something. For some reason I thought they wouldn’t use any of my photos if Leo had material from the events.
That was my mistake. I later realised that Leo absolutely didn’t take this approach. If a photo was good enough, it was good enough. It didn’t matter who had taken it.
That wasn’t the only mistake. At the time it was extremely rare for Document and Sidewalk (the two skateboarding magazines in the UK) to run anything that would effectively be a duplicate, to prevent any sort of clash and to avoid the embarrassing situation of running a photo of the same trick at the same event (by two different photographers).
Not just that, Document rarely ran coverage of events, jams, competitions, that kind of stuff anyway. I always thought that was a bit weird, but it sort of made them different from Sidewalk magazine. Document’s focus was mostly road trips, scene coverage, and the occasional foreign team touring - photos shot at skate parks and such were very rare.
So I sent my photos to somewhere that would not likely use them, given the coverage they favoured, and would certainly not use them given Sidewalk’s senior photo editor was covering the Plan B tour and demos already. And they would have known this, they certainly would have been talking to one another at the time.
I didn’t hear anything after sending the negatives in, and a couple of months passed where I saw no use of my photos. Sidewalk ran their coverage of the Plan B tour about a month later, including some photos from MK and Saffron Walden.
I thought Document might save the photo of Smithy and use it at a later stage, perhaps within a couple of months. But there were other factors at play - the photo features a prominent DC Shoes logo in the foreground (a sticker) and two subliminal DC Shoes logos in the background (on the hoodies of a couple of skaters). Smithy was sponsored by Nike SB at the time.
A third mistake, or perhaps factor, was that Document had run a feature on a local from MK in a recent issue, and it featured a sequence of a nollie heelflip crooked grind on the very same ledge. An absolutely mediocre sequence of not quite the same trick at that. I mean, photographic sequences were, by definition, mediocre but even so that meant they were not going to run a photo of almost the same trick at the same spot.
So another one of those unwritten rules sort of got in the way of my photo being published as well: You can’t run a photo from the same spot of a similar trick within an arbitrary time period (recent memory?). Possibly. Maybe. It’s moot after all this time. I eventually got all of my negatives back some months later. Possibly even a couple of years later. I can’t remember now. So the photos I shot at the event were never seen outside of some long since defunct skate photography forums.
…
Over the years since then I would look at this photo and think “what a fuck up”. But in recent years I’ve mellowed out about the whole thing, and by this point it doesn’t bother me. I’ve always created things for myself, so it shouldn’t matter. If they got used for something else, great. But that was never the intention. That thought process remains today.
Sometimes you can create the best thing you’ve ever created but nobody will see/hear/read/watch/consume/experience it. The success of your creations is mostly out of your control. That’s the hard truth for most artists. Just make sure not to beat yourself up over it, and keep on creating more stuff. Someone will appreciate the things you create and perhaps be influenced in positive ways, and that should be enough even if it’s just one person.
To read some history of the MK skate scene, including lots of great photos from Wig and Leo, take a look here. You’ll find some footage from the above demo on YouTube. And yes, in some shots you’ll see me in the background stood on top of a bin.