#1 - Seoul Skate Photography

Welcome to post #1! My name is Chris da Canha, and through these posts I’ll be giving you a look into working as a freelance photographer in Seoul, South Korea.

Diving in, I’ll take you through a recent shoot for my friends at Fixed, a loose collective of photographers living in the city. Bob, their soft-spoken videographer, hit me up about walking him through skate photography. Having skated since I was 8 years old, I supposed I’d be able to help. 

We met up in Dongjak-gu, a quiet neighbourhood south of the Han River, and set up in front of a DIY wallride spot some diehards had built along one of Seoul’s many snaking streams. We were waiting for local shredder and Vans team rider Kobuk (translated as ‘Turtle’) who seems to have a well-earned nickname as he was over an hour late.

He caught up with us around 5 in the afternoon and started warming up while I set up my SB-900 speedlight not too far from the landing bank, hoping to pin Kobuk’s movement and throw a big shadow on the wall. I hustled across the path to shoot from a distance, in order to give the shot a sense of scale. Kobuk started throwing himself at the wall in earnest, and as expected, started leaving wheel marks well above their predecessor’s. 

One smashed speedlight and a thousand pedestrians later Kobuk stomped the frontside wallride, making short work of the crustiness of the DIY concrete.

Bob had to roll out, but Kobuk and I were down for another photo, and I wanted to take him to a spot I’d found the day before, being fairly sure it had never been skated. We rolled out with Don, Kobuk’s filmer, and Moon, my speedlight defence, skating along the river until we found the inclined part of the cycle path that had a board-width of sloped and skateable barrier. 

I gave it a few tries myself to see that it was possible, and then left it up to Kobuk to make it look good. I set up my flash up-slope of the illegal fisherman below (“Stop skating, it’s too noisy!” — “Stop fishing it’s illegal” — Radio silence). Kobuk gave it a few goes, looking to boost an ollie off the corner of the bank. After one misfire nearly earned me a black-eye for shooting where he’d prefer to be landing, instead of slowing it down he started from way further back, powersliding around the corner and boosting hard to the right. He bagged it and rolled away into the embrace of a thrilled older lady who chanted “Handsome! Cool!” in Korean.

Here’s the full interview and video on skate photography.