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Lords a leaping
December 19, 2006Okay...that was a bit of a 12 days of Christmas reference...I know.
It will make sense in a minute...
Jason Palmer/Times Record News
Jeff Marion, owner of Digital Deviance, the only skateboarding store in town, performs a kick-flip in the alley behind his store on Indiana. He's been campaigning for a skate park in Wichita Falls for years and has finally received the approval by the City Council to move forward with the project.
To a small, but very dedicated, group of area kids...skateboarding is king. Jeff Marion is no kid, he's actually a very successful businessman first, then a skateboarder second. Or vice-versa sometimes. He's their local leader.
Jeff has spearheaded an effort to bring a real skate park to Wichita Falls for several years. Burkburnett has one...albeit a small one that has outgrown the needs of the area. It took a while, but the City Council finally agreed to providing the funds for one. A nice one.
This photo is one of the shots I took for a big profile page we did on Marion after the City Council made history and agreed to build the concrete park. It wasn't an easy shot.
First of all....Jeff had a bum ankle from a few days earlier. He couldn't do many of the really cool tricks, but I didn't need many...I needed one impressive one. Actually...all I really needed was for him to get some air.
A kick-flip would be perfect if he could land it. And even on that...I didn't need him to land it, just jump really impressively. Only he and I would know if he landed it. Jeff wouldn't have any of it...he had to land the trick.
We probably ran the attempt about 10 times before getting one perfect...a combination of him getting airborne and me getting the shot at the height of the jump and the board at the right angle.
Technically...it was an easy shot...but it was one of those kind of shots where two people have to be perfect and in sync...that's the hard part.
A large carp leaps out of the water at the base of the spillway on Lake Wichita Wednesday morning. Dozens of the rough fish were attempting to swim back up the spillway after water poured over the concrete for the first time in months thanks to the record-breaking rainfall over the weekend. (Jason Palmer/Times Record News)
I have received more feedback in the community about this shot than any other the entire year. Everybody agrees that this is pretty awesome.
Back in October when we got something like 10 inches of rain in a few days...the newspaper turned to me to find a shot of people fishing or something in the rain-swollen creeks and Lake Wichita.
I don't know why they suggested that......but I gathered up my rain gear and headed out. Sure enough...the rain stopped. Never fails...it never rains hard when I'm actually fully prepared for heavy rain.
So I head up to one of my favorite spots..the Lake Wichita dam and spillway. There are always people fishing up there.
I'm walking up the side of the dam, when I hear a random splash in the water running over the spillway. Now...keep in mind, the water is flowing over the spillway and frothing about at the bottom. But this was a much bigger sounding splash.
I turned and saw several large carp jumping out of the water.
I immediately thought of all of those nature magazine shots of trout and salmon jumping over waterfalls as they tried to swim to their spawning grounds. Those guys made that shot look easy.
I've always had an "If they can do it, I can do it." attitude.
Then I realized exactly how hard it was to get that shot...especially when the fish have an expanse the width of the spillway to jump. My "cat-like" reflexes weren't good enough on their own for about 20 minutes.
Fact is...I was struggling...but the more I missed the shot, the more determined I was to get the shot.
I changed tactics...I had been zoomed in quite a bit and trying to find them in mid-air. So I zoomed back out (with the 70-200mm f2.8) to cover a larger area. I knew that I could crop in quite a bit if I needed to.
As soon as I did that...I got the shot. Fish perfect out of the air. I just kinda shook my head a bit and walked back to my car.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
