Picking up where we left off. Last month I moved back to San Francisco. After nearly a decade of living here, and 4 years spent living in other cities I can honestly and confidently say that SF is the best and only real city on the West Coast. Good vibes and great friends are a hard thing to find everywhere you go, but the Bay Area has it in abundance.
On Saturday (September 5th 2020) we all got together at “The Island” and made our way up Market street to session both Wallenberg & The Museums in GGP. The gang finally convinced me to get back on my FGFS bike, and I must say… I’m sure glad they did. I almost forgot what it felt like to ride this bike and how much it raises my spirits. It’s like the old saying, “you never forget how to ride a bike”.
Steel is real. Matt “SLUMWORM” Reyes for MASH SF. I’ve been riding the MASH Steel frame for a couple years now and it’s my every day, all in one, dream machine. I’ve traveled the world with this bike, logged thousands of miles on it, and have used it in every way imaginable. It’s by and far the most versatile bike I’ve ever ridden and continues to put a smile on my face every time I get on that saddle.
Clips of Andy Sparks riding bikes in San Francisco from various Wheel Talk videos filmed throughout the course of 2019. Figured It would be fun to make a little behind the scenes / raw section of some of the footage we shot throughout the year.
I miss San Francisco. We move where the wind takes us and word on the street is there’s a strong wind blowing North. Anyways, I was doing some spring cleaning and stumbled across this batch of photos that were never shared on here, so I figured I’d take the time to put this post together. I hope everyone is doing well out there and I’ll see/talk to you soon.
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All the usual stops. We took Jake 100, Isa, Grady, JN and a bunch of the other homies on a tour of downtown Oakland back in January. It’s always good having out of town energy come to a place you’ve been time and time again. Helps keep it fresh. I can’t imagine how many times Andy has ridden bikes at Dragon Park. It’s easily one of the best ledge spots around, you just don’t want to fall, but that’s like most cities I imagine. The ground isn’t always the cleanest place to be. Anyways, check out more photos below and peep the video from this day to see everything in motion. It’s always better that way. One more quick note… I love shooting these no foot wheelie kicks at the camera with Jake 100.
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Oakland California – January 3rd 2020. I took the subway from San Francisco to Oakland with Jake 100, Isa, CBreezy, JN & Grady to ride bikes in the East Bay. Jakob Santos, Andy Sparks and a bunch of the usual suspects met up with us for a day wheelies around Downtown. We pulled over at some of our favorite spots around Lake Merritt before ending up at Jack London Square for the Sunset. I won’t waste too much time with words on this one, so stop listening to me immediately and press play already. Oh yeah, I quickly whipped up the soundtrack for this one too.
15 Shots. Recently Mike T Schmitt made me aware of a thing called “sprocket photography. Basically shooting full bleed on rolls of 35mm. I already had a medium format camera, my Hasselblad 503CX, but had to order a 35mm adapter to shoot on that 120mm camera. The results were what you see both above and below. This made me remember why I love shooting film in the first place.
Out of a roll of 36 exposures I was able to get 15 shots. These are them. Every last one of them. Again why I love shooting film. Instead of capturing a thousand photos, then coming home and having to sort through everything, you shoot one shot. The shot. Then move on to the next one. It’s incredibly liberating not knowing if you got what you wanted. If it was captured correctly, exposed correctly, in focus, out of focus. It quickly becomes more about the act of doing, than the end result. But when the end result looks like this, who can argue that only shooting 15 shots is such a terrible idea. Haha. I’m sure there are tons of apps out there that try to imitate this effect, but you can’t beat the real feel of film. Riders: Johnathan Ball, Deacon Wong, Marco Marquez, Oscar Lopez
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https://wheeltalk.org/2020/06/29/fgfs-los-angeles-keeping-distanceOnce a week. It’s been good to get back on the FGFS bike again and even better to have a social distance session with the boys. The photo of JBALL hitting a table top is one of my favorite shots from the day. He brought a film video camera with him and we got a quick clip with that at our first spot of the day. The banks. After that it was off to the local high school to ride some surprisingly beautiful and uncapped set of ledges. If only more schools were built like that.
I’m looking forward to dropping off the roll of 35mm I shot on my 120mm Hasselblad 503cx. I just got a spool adapter recently and have never shot full bleed 35mm. It’ll be fun to see how the sprocket style film photos turn out. I took some top down photos / video through the view finder to help give you an idea of what we got. Stay tuned for video clips from this day as well as a solo part of Marco Marquez we recently finished piecing together.
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