Tour de France photographers get to ride on the backs of motorcycles to make photos. I’ve never had that luxury, but one year I covered the White Rock Marathon while riding a bike. Yeah, it’s harder than you might think.
So when this year’s Oak Cliff Dash for Beads 5k kicked off I figured I’d hop on my mountain bike and give it go. Trouble was, the tires were flat and I was without a pump or time to spare.
So I grabbed the next best thing: an old, warped skateboard. What could possibly go wrong skateboarding alongside runners with a camera held to my face?
During the one-mile walk and the 5k run I experimented with longish shutter speeds and a degree of surrender to the forces at play: gloomy weather, an unsteady hand and the possibility of sudden, violent death.
(Disclaimer: I have a couple decades of black-and-blue skateboarding experience.)
All in all, aside from a near brush with disaster when a pack of runners bottle necked down a hill, the experiment concluded without incident, save being terribly sore for a couple days.