Standerd Slides

Subject: Pat Panakos
Photo: Josh Letchworth
Concept: Joey Meddock

TSQ Location: Book 1.2, front cover

Joey Meddock (concept):
Damn, it feels good to finally have a medium that supports one of many photographic ideas I’ve had boiling in my head for years. There is so much more to do with wakeboarding and wakeskating photographically. It just takes time and dedication to make those ideas come to life. The best part about The Standerd is finally being able to see ideas like this come around full circle, and land on the pages in the final print.

I’ve wanted to do this idea for quite some time now. Each year, when the fourth of July came around, I’d always paint this picture in my head of a rider on a rail and have the fireworks blasting off in the background. Until now, I’ve been biting my tongue about the idea. I knew how to pull it off, we just had to give ourselves the right rail set up and have the physical property (space) where we could try to control the conditions.

Since the birth of The Standerd, I felt I could let the cat out of the bag and actually make this thing happen. Speaking to Josh about the idea, he was keen to shoot it. I made my way up to Sky King fireworks and armored up with several packs of morters.

I mentioned the idea to Pat Panakos and about shooting it out at The Projects. Before long, he had a rail strategically built in a position where we could catch the fireworks in the background and was ready to give it a shot. Ironically, this shot went down on May 5th, 2007…Cinco De Mayo. Weird.

Josh Letchworth (the shot):
Yes, of course the fireworks are real. Do you really think that we would just take them from clip art an drop them in behind him? I like photoshop, but not THAT much. Besides, who doesn’t like shooting mortars over and over again until you get the timing right?

So, Joey presented the idea to me of doing a long exposure of someone on a rail while timing a fireworks display in the background. I tend to be very optimistic and seem to think everything will be “no problem.” Just compose the shot, light the mortars, signal Pat and the driver, open the shutter, hit the strobe and hope that everything happens just right inside that window of opportunity. Let’s just say it was a good thing that Joey bought 80-something mortars and that Pat can do really consistent tail presses.

There is always more to the equation once you actually get out to setting up a shot. You really just don’t know until you actually set up and look at it. This shot just presented a lot of variables that had to all happen flawlessly.

First off, it was dark. That made it hard to set up. Joey put his headlights on the rail, so that helped a bit. We had two strobes for this shot and we were having a hell of a time getting the flash duration set right. They were not my strobes, so the unfamiliarity was getting the best of me. Still to this day, I am not convinced that we got them set 100% right. Sometimes you just have to wing it.

We must have moved the launch spots for the mortars about 10 times until we got it right with only a few to spare. Pat stuck the tail press and booming all around him was the sound of independence. The lights fell perfectly around him. We knew we had the shot.

James Krawczyk (photoshop effect):
Pretty much as soon as this idea was on the table, I was envisioning the fireworks “bursting” out of the top of the photo frame. After witnessing the shoot first-hand and seeing where the fireworks would be in the frame, I started thinking through the steps to accomplish the effect we were going for.

We don’t typically “mess” with photos (in photoshop), so we wanted to be sure to stay as true to the original photo as possible in this case.

Basically, we needed the fireworks removed from their dark night sky background and on solid white. I knew masking or clipping them out manually wouldn’t work with the level of detail in fireworks, so it would have to be done using what is called “adjustment layers.” Adjustment layers are editable, non-destructive ways to manipulate the color (and other details) of an image.

Using an adjustment layer called “selective color,” I was able to pinpoint and remove only black and dark grey colors. I then used contrast and color-level adjustments to further clean the color up so that I got just the original fireworks on a uniform white background. After some other corrections to get the natural colors of the fireworks to show up on white, we had the image we needed.

Then in InDesign (the page layout program), I simply placed the special fireworks image behind the original cover photo. That allowed me to get the two images lined up perfectly, so the “photoshopped” fireworks were in their exact original location.

Using a separate image for the fireworks afforded us the most flexibility for where the top of the original photo ended, and where the “bursting” fireworks began.

The progression of this concept showed us a whole new dimension in the design of The Standerd. As the photo was being shot, I could offer advice on ways to shoot it that would help in the design phase. Then as we moved from camera to computer, Joey and Josh could make comments to help me hone in on the exact image we were all picturing.

By working together in this way, we could take an abstract concept and turn it into the Book 1.2 cover shot.