I met Rutger whilst working on the Reservoir Dogs project with Red Bull in 2009. He was full of stories from his travels as a Photofiles photographer, a job that had taken him around the world, and introduced him to the top athletes that don the Bull. Safe to say my little brain instantly started pulling together this feature. During the project Rutger would disappear for an hour or so. You wouldn’t hear a peep! Then he’d come back with “The Shot”. Tom’s the amateur photographer in the pair and Richard Kenworthy regularly works with me on my content therefore I introduce Rutgers work simply describing what I feel when I look at it. I represent the common untrained eye in this feature. So, for your viewing pleasure I introduce Rutger Pauw.
Once a year I do a roadtrip with the simple bikes team, usually quite some time is spent in Copenhagen, which has to be one of my favorite cities by now. Some of the guys on the team are close friends now, in fact i’m sitting right next to good lad travis johnston as i type, since we’re on a trip in San Diego now, dodging the winter weather. On that trip two years ago i started getting into getting the actionshot, and then panning the camera shooting several other shots stitching them together to get a panorama like shot. It works really well, it’s just different from a cropped wide angle shot.
The roadbike guys in the shot were just racing along as i took the panorama shots, and it ended up working out nice. Good times.
There used to be a flatland contest in Holland called flatground, verberg, the guy running it always gave me a lot of freedom in coming up with wild posters for the event, and this one was definitely exciting to shoot. I wanted to shoot a photo of BMX legend Martti Kuoppa riding on water in an Amsterdam Canal.
Easier said than done we started brainstorming, and came up with a platform that we could attach to a jetty. It had to be done fast, because permits in Amsterdam are ridiculous, and we were convinced they’d send us away real fast. And then there was also the minor detail that I had no clue if it was even possible to ride a bike under these circumstances.
So, maximum possibilities for failure. It ended up being a really relaxed shoot, police just left us alone, maybe because I brought out all my studio equipment , thus rendering us too “pro” to be there without a permit.
Michael van der Lee is a close friend with a riding style that can adapt to anything. That’s a treat for me, I like to find a cool location and then just put a rider in there somewhere. This seawall I found was difficult to ride, but Michael still made it work. The photo is stitched together out of 6 panned shots, the thing I like about it is the hazy atmosphere, it’s a bit of an abstract backdrop.
Next to photography and BMX music is a big love, so I was very excited when Tom Oberheim, inventor of the synthesizer came over to Amsterdam to give a lecture. I had only little time to take this photo, and it’s certainly not a favourite quality wise, but the whole afternoon of listening to someone who changed the course of music so much was well impressive.
Even though a lot of stuff gets faked in photography nowadays, there is nothing like making a shot work for real under very uncomfortable circumstances. For a fashion shoot with a balloon theme I thought it would be nice if Daniel would air the miniramp in a cloud of balloons. How to accomplish this was a mystery once again. So, in a moment of sheer brilliance, I attached the 40 something balloons to Daniels helmet. When he dropped in to make speed the balloons created so much draw it nearly decapitated him by his helmet strap. Great fun.
I never really experienced anything icespeedway racing related before being asked to go and shoot Franky Zorn in Mid-Sweden. The whole travel there was an experience alone, taking 3 flights, then being picked up by Franky in his van, driving through the darkness passing volvo’s left right and center. Of course they had spiketires, and we didn’t. Sometimes you just take a leap of faith I guess.
All the icespeedway guys turned out to be nice gents, it reminded me of the BMX scene in Holland ten years ago, when there were only 40 guys riding in our country. They had a strong community, and the stories of injuries are horrible. Just imagine hitting a block of ice at 90 kms… no brakes, being in a wheelchair for months, definitely not the weakhearted.
Taking this shot was quite dangerous, since i was standing on ice in hiking boots, which makes it impossible to get out of there fast. Sometimes you just get a good feeling about someones skills though, so I gave it a go.
Sometimes I get phone calls to go places you’d never really think of going by yourself. This particular trip sent me to Sarajevo, Bosnia with footballer Vedad Ibisevic, Bundesliga superstar.
It was my first shoot with a footballer, and coming from a freestyle background without too many big heads, I expected some diva behaviour, I guess purely based on the image you get on telly (though I haven’t watched any football in 15 years).
I promised myself one chance with a big name mainstream sports guy, if there’d be any diva behaviour i’d leg it. Of course all my expectations turned out to be completely false, the guy was a treat to work with, humble and patient. Every big name guy i’ve worked with since was just as friendly, maybe it’s because I have a bit of a freestyle sports tunnel vision, i’ll rarely know any of the mainstream sports guys I work with, so the atmosphere is always casual.
Vedad left Bosnia around the time of the conflict, and this was the first time he went back to his primary school, and first football club. So the trip was quite emotional for him. I found this spot on a hill overlooking Sarajevo, I figured it would be cool if Vedad would shoot a ball into Sarajevo, from one of the places where 15.000 grenades a day were fired into the city.
As I was taking photos of Tony Allen, founder of Afrobeats, I asked him to show his hands. They looked remarkable, and I wanted them in the shot as well. I didn’t expect him to put them next to his head. It was a moment that was gone in a second, we took a few more shots after that but it looked made up, funny how things like that work.
Sometimes photography allows me to witness things that are truly unique. Bas Keep decided he wanted to air out of the Sadgeberg reservoir, with a bit of motor driven aid from his friend Ben Hennon.
I remember standing there shooting the thing. Usually you keep focussed and keep making photos, the world might as well be on fire, you’ll have no clue. As a result of that, after you come home you have the photos, but it’s not a real memory. After a while it’ll just be pictures, and it’s like you were never there, strange but true.
So that day I decided for just one shot to watch Bas air the shit out of that reservoir and fully enjoy it, i’m happy I did that, i’ll never forget how scary high he was up there.
This is one of the most adventurous shoots I ever went on I reckon. Sealand was founded in the second World War during the battle of Britain to shoot the germans out of the sky before reaching the UK. So it’s 10 km out of the coast of Harwhich. Then in the sixties it was taken over by radio pirates, who declared it a principality defending it with Molotovs and machine guns during hostile helicopter take overs. Somehow Red Bull managed to get four skaters to stay at the platform for two days, which made for a unique back drop to say the least. The first day i shot from the heli, which is the shot you are looking at.
The adventurous part started the next day when I was picked up by a dingy (without too much air) and we set course for the platform. Mind you, when you leave the harbour, you can’t even see the structure. All we saw were frikkin waves… as the pirate captain assured us his record time from the platform to the port was 11 minutes, with these 2 meter high waves we weren’t going fast at all. The bags were lying in the front bit of the boat, upon captain morgan’s advice (yes they drank loads) and exactly that bit crashes flatout on the water after every wave. It’s like somebody gives your camera bag a nice big ole kick, times 400.
Upon arrival I fully expected all my equipment to be broken to pieces, but was very pleased to see everything in one piece. Since a storm would come in after an hour I only had an hour to shoot on board (the thought of being stuck up there for several days with captain morgan gave me wings). I remember running with everything I did, it was the opposite of what my brain was telling me to do. You see, the boys and girls at Sealand had a bit of a fire. Which made everything rust. So naturally there were foot by foot holes everywhere in the floor. 18 meters above the sea.
As we were finally done and waiting for the boat, we relaxed a bit, and Kris threw a lump of metal off the platform, everybody giggling a bit about it. I’ll never forget everyone’s reaction when Chris, the pirate living there casually mentioned after the war they just dumped all the ammo off the platform in sea.
Just imagine going out with a bang.
