Last friday a group of my friends and I headed west to camp in/outside of Leavenworth, WA. On our way there we watched the sun set behind an incoming storm heading out way. I shot photos for pretty much the whole drive there just messing around. We had planned for bad weather there the whole weekend because thats what Weather.com said, but instead while every other city in the Pacific Northwest got rained out, Leavenworth, WA stayed dry the whole time until we were just rolling out of town. We had a great time just hanging out in the town and just meeting the “germans”. I didn’t plan on shooting as much as I did with my camera because I didn’t want to haul it around but I ended up shooting just about everything we did which was actually a lot of fun to shoot. The Leavenworth skate park is basically all tranny so that was really fun, but kind of limited to shoot. But there was this one wall that was very fun to shoot and thanks to Joey Ozol, he can shred so we shot this wall.

There is so much to talk about from this trip but I think the highlight was our mountain climb. It truly was a mountain climb. I do quite a bit of climbing my self and I can easily say that this was a challenging climb, especially in skate shoes. Props to trip member, Brynn Hathaway for conquering our mountain with a healing ACL and her knee in a knee brace. There are photos below of the mountain. Here are the shots from the trip:

Group Shot

Aaron Vetsch on left, Joey Ozol on right.

Aaron Vetsch everyone.

Vaguely you can see a climber towards the bottom corner, They thought we couldn’t make it to the top, psshh.

Beauty in the Northwest.

More beauty.

A good sunset to start the trip off.

One of the mountain goats I spent 30 minutes chasing around the mountain. It is weird, they don’t like to be followed, yet they love to follow.

A good stream to take a photo of with a slow shutter.

Same stream, different spot, I didn’t have a tripod so its sitting on a log.

Pathway leading towards our destination mountain in the top left corner.

Another sunset shot from the car.

Can you say “natural framing”?

Thought this was a cool photo.

Some cross hatching in bokeh form.

Typical road trip photo.

Some locks I thought looked cool.

Joey Ozol, Shredding.

Bringing skateboarding back to the old school days, literally. Behind Joey is a school. There is a skatepark in a school parking lot. How lucky are those students.

Pretty much our staple food of the trip.

The Leavenworth Maypoll.

We all really wanted to get a group photo, but I didn’t have a tripod so I came up with the idea of taking individual portraits of everyone and combining them on to one canvas to make a complete group shot. Props to Joey Ozol for taking the one of me. If you look at the mountain shot with the blue sky (5th photo down) we managed to climb to pretty much the top of the mountain/peak on the left. We felt like champions. We saw mountain goats, rolled some large rocks off the side of the mountain. I didn’t get any photos of that because I was pre-occupied with the rolling of rocks. Defiantly something I wish I had taken a few photos for.

For the photos of Joey skating, I had my friend Matt hold a flash above the wall pointed down on to Joey just so I could really expose the back ground good and flash Joey with some fill light. We were pretty excited of the out come of those shots. We plan on making a trip back in winter (hopefully there is some snow) to hit some rails in Leavenworth. Leavenworth has some very impressive rails and ledges that are perfect for snowboarding.

For the majority of the photos it was just mess around stuff but it was tight, we had a good trip.

Here are the rest of the photos from the week:

Good ‘ole Coeur d’Alene Lake

A good sunset for Coeur d’Alene

The Plane down on the lake docks.

Trevor Groth, Coeur d’Alene, Chamber of Commerce

Zack Black, Coeur d’Alene skatepark

If you remember a while back I shot a photo of Joey Ozol ollie-ing through the Chamber of Commerce heart downtown CDA in mid-winter. This last week, we shot it again but with flashes. Trevor was trying kick flips through it but never landed one, but he did land the ollie. I had a light to the left of the heart pointing directly where he would be. And for the last shot of Zach Black doing a back tail slide at the park I had very similar lighting on it. Really loving skate photography right now, so that is a big part of my photography.

Defiantly my influence for this week has been Garric Ray. He is a photographer for transworld skateboarding and wow, he is just super good. His lighting on everything is just perfect and he has published so many skate shots with natuaral framing and I am pretty sure that is what won me over with him. I have always follow his work but have just recently been reading a lot about him. Props to Garric Ray.

Thanks for looking,

-Steve