I can’t remember when i was so excited about a show like i was a couple of nights ago when Queen Sea Big Shark from beijing came to play in ningbo.
I haven’t heard about them before, but i started to listen to their stuff a couple of weeks before they came, there was a lot of hype building up for this show and they totally delivered. They’re music is awesome and if you haven’t heard of them, i highly suggest you check them out. their website has music and other links.
and if you get a chance to see them play live, you should definitely make the effort.
we got to hang out with them a bit before the show and to party like no one’s got anything better to do on a tuesday night and it’s so refreshing to be this excited about new music.
fountain of youth
skating tel aviv
mid january i was contacted by shai of adrenalin magazine in israel to submit a photo. he was making a series of articles sending off 2012 and for this part he contacted several israeli skateboarding photographers and asked them to submit their favorite photo of 2012 and tell the story behind it.
i automatically thought about this one:
we left grey china and after a long couple of days of flights and staying a night in hong kong we arrived to sunny tel aviv. we put down our bags, i took my camera and my skateboard and we hit the streets. I went to say hi to Lalo, he owns the graffiti paint shop, he was really excited to see me and there was an event in the port he partly sponsored, so we decided to go to the beach and on to the jaffa port with beers and boards and took some fun pictures along the way.
and then i realized… this was our first visit in israel after moving to china. this wasn’t in 2012 at all. it was may 2011. so i looked for something else. thought about the night sessions we always have when i come to visit.
the night sessions happened also in 2012, but the pictures are all from 2011.
okay, so maybe my story should be that Im in israeli photographer and i live in china and i’ll submit a photo from china.
and then i realized that this photo of nolan on our last session before he left china was in october 2011. and after he left i didn’t really have anyone to skate here with and no one to shoot.
so i came to the dark realization that 2012 started and ended and i had not even a single skateboarding picture. and it was important that 2013 won’t be the same.
a couple of weeks before our most recent visit i wrote on Facebook that Im coming to visit, and asked who wants to shoot something, pako wrote back that we should go skate.
i’ve known pako for years, but we never actually went skating and shooting together. i met up with doh doh, who i’ve been skating and shooting way before i even had a proper camera, and before doh-doh had any proper skateboarding skills, but all that is changed now. Then we met pako. we started off to a slow start, but ended up having a killer day.
i thought that since he’s really involved with what’s going on and i’ve been away for two years he’ll show me some new spots, or some places that he’s been thinking about, but hasn’t been yet, but we ended up hitting the regular spots that were crowded and not exciting for skating nor for photos, and then he suggested we just hit the streets “take the camera out, and lets go find some cool stuff” and so we did.
k-grind with the girls on the lunch break and the guy napping in the back at a spot that only looks from a afar that there’s something to do there.
but pako also managed to get a backside lip slide out of it.
then we looked around for some more stuff to hit in the area, but found nothing, checked out some more spots until we took a snack and beer break in rabin square and continued to gan-hair, skating that little bank was pretty chill
doh doh’s on the backside tail slide
then we started riding towards the beach and made one little kid very happy and one old lady very upset
wallriding on statues… you can see the old lady’s legs behind pako ready to question him again if he’s crazy.
reached the beach just in time to catch the sunset and pako busted out this killer 5-0 , in between traffic, jumping up the curb then up this wall thing, then to the grind with sh*tty approach and landing and everything. but some guy was kind enough to give up a parking spot so pako could get a better approach, maybe that part is about as unbelievable in tel aviv at this hour as the rest of the buildup that leads up to this trick.
switch flip by the marina.
tel aviv isn’t really a big city, but we covered a lot of ground pushing on our skateboards that day, and got some really fun shots at really cool spots, with some local old school harassment. security guards were cool with us, but old ladies and concerned citizens weren’t.
night snow
last night when we went to sleep it was snowing, and has been for more than 24 hours. that’s very rare in the part of china where we live. last winter when we woke up to snow we had to rush downstairs very fast to snap a few pictures, because soon enough it all melted away. yesterday it seemed like everyone did the same, but though out the day it kept on snowing.
so at night when we had much more snow than in the morning i had to go out again and get more pictures.
it felt so out of place. reminded me of my time living in america in places with “real” snow and not just temporary flurries. returning home on snowy paths, watching your step not to slip, and enjoying the low light reflecting off the snow.
end of dinner
i’ve been wanting to post this for a while. chinese dinners have so many plates and you leave the table with so much mess, especially if you’re eating seafood, then it’s total massacre. so I’ve been collecting these, taking the best ones from our best dinners and the biggest and messiest tables, and didn’t really think about when will be a good time to say, “yup, i got it, lets post it!” and then i realized it’s 12.21.12 today, the only thing i can think about that is ending is dinner.
so cheers and beteavon to that!
sylv and yael
last week was yael’s birthday. so we got another picture of her and sylvie with yael super serious and sylvie totally freaking out. It started last year on yael’s birthday, so it’s been a year of shooting these once in a while.
it was sylvie’s idea, so we have joint creative custody over this post.
boxhead dancing
a post with not much to write about. we went to shanghai for the weekend and had an amazing time partying there. one of the places we went to had a couple of of box masks and i just loved how they came out in the photos, and thought that i have to post this!
