Last night I met up with Dave and Brad Truxell (the amazing
father/son photography team) to shoot some pictures of the new and improved
water fountains at Point State Park in downtown Pittsburgh. This park is the point of the city
where the Monongahela River and Allegheny River come together to form the Ohio
River. The fountain hasn’t worked
in over four years. They just
renovated it and turned it back on this summer. I’ll post some pictures of that in the future.
While we where down there (after the cops left) a young man named
Joseph Gill from Sharpsville PA, started jumping his bike off the high (over 6
feet tall) columns down onto the sidewalk in front of the foundaton. We got his permission to photograph him
and took some pictures while he jumped.
This is a series of pictures I took of him merged together
so you can see his flight path through the air as he leaves the column, spins
in the air and lands backward. Now
on this specific run, he crashed.
I saw him land it a number of times before this, so I don’t want you to
think he couldn’t do it. But I
just liked this specific ending because I thought it was more interesting.
So you have some idea of scale, Joseph is at least 6 feet
tall. That should help give you an
idea of the size of this jump, his skill and the technical difficulty of this
activity. I started this by asking
if it was a stuntman or whether he was just crazy. In the end, I think it’s both. It was cool meeting Joseph and awesome watching him perform. Thanks to Joseph for the show.
