Ecology: the scientific study of the relationships organisms have with each other and with their natural environment. After hearing the definition of "ecology" in class I decided to go for something about the relationship of humans to different environments. I always get asked the question, "Mountains or beach?" and almost every time, North Carolinians prefer the beach and people who have recently moved here prefer the mountains. Point of view. I see it as all environments and how we relate to them is simply a point of view. I, for instance, prefer going to the mountains and climbing rocks, skiing down slopes, and longboarding down hills whereas other people I know prefer the ocean and sun rather than mountains and clouds. It was this thinking that brought me to the thought of doing a project on longboarding.
I spend hours every week longboarding like many people spend them going to the gym or studying for classes. It has become a part of me just as much as my love of music and art and because of that I have focused various different works of art towards it to pay respect to something I love doing. As a longboarder, I look at the world differently. Where most people would see a mere staircase, I almost instantly calculate in my mind, "How many stairs is that? Could I land the impact without getting hurt from that height? Could I jump far enough to clear the last stair?...." When I am driving in my car up/down a big hill most people would see a hill, occasionally you would get people thinking about sledding but that is normally exclusive to fall/winter time and a longboarder would do the same calculation, "How fast could I get going down this hill? Is my board hardware tailored to survive until the bottom without falling to pieces? Are there blind corners where traffic could be coming? If I fall how bad will the injury be?....." It is all merely a point of view.
For this reason I chose to do a picture of Luke (my younger brother) doing a trick called a "slide" where you break the wheels' rolling friction from the ground and slide (much like socks on a waxed floor) until your wheels begin to roll again. I chose a photograph because longboarding is such an action-adrenaline sport and no other medium could really capture what I was trying to express for this project. I chose a sequence of photos because I wanted to show the progression of the slide from the "wind-up" to the actual slide progressing towards the exit. Also because of the nature of longboarding, I wanter to show the speed and high-voltage nature of the sport. The filters and coloring I used are supposed to be a throwback to the 50's when skateboarding actually started and the smudges on the pieces are merely for aesthetic appeal.
If I were to go back and do this project again I would not change a thing. I went out for a boarding outing with some friends originally but when I took the pictures they just seemed too staged. I later went out with my brother and received the shots necessary in a single take which just reiterates how you can't stage something so natural. I don't even remember how I made the filters to look how they did with the reddish tint and I tried going back to recreate it because a friend asked me about my process and I couldn't do it. This whole project was a "fly by the seat of my pants" experience and I thoroughly enjoyed the subject matter and assignment as a whole.
-N8
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