"Jackass" blew up almost immediately, and when it did, it was only obvious that stuff my friends and I were doing would be equally as popular. We never did anything extremely stupid and/or harmful, but never the less, the random kids at school thought it was awesome. I'd sneak my camera to school to show everyone, and they ate it up. Every Monday the kids would line up to see what goofy shit we did over the weekend.
I was never particularly popular, especially with girls. I had quite a few friends and in fact when I look back, I'd like to think most of the people liked me, but I still was pretty awkward. What a doctor would later describe as a chemical imbalance kept me from keeping casual conversations with people and thus, never really feeling accepted. The odd thing is I kept company with the most popular guys in school, who always came to me for laughs, which at this point were on video tape. When even more of the popular kids started paying attention to me, as did the girls. It never went farther than me showing them what was on my video camera, but I'd like to think it only had to do with my shitty personality at the time, and not because I was fugly. I still have self esteem issues, but that's for me to worry about, and not for you to read.
It didn't matter, it was enough for me. While still to this day I'm awkward around women, I knew I could use my photography to get the attention of almost anyone I wanted. You can call it shallow, but I always thought of it as my bridge into the normal world. I was still pretty crappy at it, but I didn't care. I could never figure out how those guys make their videos look the way they did. I was "crouching down and pointing up" like my friend said, and I even saw them do it on a couple of skate video B-rolls. What the hell was I doing wrong? Maybe it's my cheap camera. All the skate videos seem to have these HUGE cameras with handles on them, so maybe that's it. Enter: the fish-eye lens.
"They use a fish...a fish lens.", my friend casually mentioned. That stuck, too. I went home and scoured the internet. This was before Google became SUPER popular, so I was using "Ask Jeeves" because I thought the butler was stupid. I was coming up pretty shy, until I found the VX-1000 and the Century Optics MK1 Fish Eye Adapter. Those combos are still pretty expensive, but at the time they were running about $5000+ something a lower-middle class 8th grader would have to mow the lawn a million times to get. I wasn't satisfied, I was still hungry.
Eventually, I found a "38mm .05x Wide Angle Lens Adapter" that I had to order a special step up ring for, but I was almost there. It wasn't quite a fish-eye, but I got a little bit of that "bowing" effect I so eagerly craved. This was the beginning of the end for me. After a while I upgraded from VHS-C to Hi8, and then to MiniDV, with a bunch of different lens adapters and step up/down rings in between. I was close, but not quite. At the same time. I was filming more and more antics, and more and more skateboarding.
I became obsessed. I watched more and more skate videos, and I'd take notes. "Ohhhh, they crouch down at the bottom of the stairs. Got it." Paying more and more attention to their techniques. At the same time I started noticing the work of Atiba Jefferson, arguably the greatest skateboard photographer videographer ever. Reading some interviews with him, he mentioned how he did both photography and videography. Same thing with Ryan Gee. Most of them did it because no one could pay both a photographer and videographer.
At the time, a friend had just gotten a digital camera. They were huge with no custom controls, but he would bring it out and let me use it to take pictures with to "tease" on our website. It worked pretty well, not much blurring, even in the dark. The photos were absolutely awful, but it was cool enough to see our digital photos we didn't care. We were stoaked! I didn't pick up a still camera to shoot photos after that for another 3 years.
Then one day, I was messing with my Sony adapter, which had two glass elements in it. One in the front, and one in the back. I wish I could find a picture of it, but you'll have to use your imagination. I was just bouncing it back and forth, and the back glass came unglued and popped off INSIDE the adapter. Oh crap. I used all my muscle and some tweezers to pull it out, hoping I could some how glue it back into place. I decided to put it on my camera to see what the hell happened.
And that my friends, was the greatest day of my life.
It didn't ruin it at all. Quite the opposite. It turned my "semi-wide angle" adapter into a full fledged, make shift fish-eye. Everything looked all "bendy", and it had the dark corners and everything! I was in heaven. I started filming EVERYTHING with my brand new "fish-eye". I couldn't wait to go out skating. I was going to make the greatest video ever. This day was the turning point of my life. Right then and there, I called my friend to go skating. I made my decision right there, even though I had no concept of a career or even could grasp the idea of making money at a job. I still made the decision. I was going to document skateboarding for the rest of my life.
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