After shooting the first MTB triple backflip with Ethen and Gavin in June 2014, I saw a video online of Travis Pastrana and crew hitting the ridiculous stepup jump at Travis‘ compound. At the end of the clip there’s a short scene in which Travis manages to get a triple around on his moto bike! As you can tell I was instantly hooked on the project. Rumors had been flying around for quite some time about Travis and his plans to realize the FMX Triple, but it had never seemed to be possible, until now…

As I knew that the crew was going to film for „Action Figures“ that fall, I got in touch with Travis completely out of the blue and asked for his permission for me to come to Maryland basically on my own, to check out and document what was going on. I didn’t really expect to hear anything back, but surprisingly, a couple of days later I got a message that I was okay-ed to come over! You can imagine how nervous I was after receiving that message and it only got worse until the day of departure. But soon enough, I found myself on a plane to MD and still couldn’t quite grasp what had brought me there 😉

I have written a blog post about the week of filming and sessioning here – it was a rush of adrenaline and mind-boggling stunts but of course what stood out for me the most was seeing the crazy-ass stepup jump for the first time… and witnessing Sheeny and Travis hitting that thing full throttle and going pretty much to the moon and back on it.
During the first week of filming the guys „only“ went to the airbag but still it was a gnarly sight to see. Freestyle motocross is something different to any non-powered wheel sport for sure, but the speed and height and force behind this place are beyond anything even seasoned action sports guys would call sensible 🙂
Funnily, I had already made up my mind photo angle-wise when I watched the Youtube video above – I had thought that probably the trees to the right of the landing would give me the best overview angle and indeed, I found myself up in one of those trees after checking out several other angles all around the jump setup. Only the tree angle gave me the perfect overview over the entire backyard and also allowed me to separate the rider’s jump arc in the sky for better visibility.

During the november session, Sheeny threw a lot of very good Triples onto the airbag but still had some occasional emergency jump-offs and other mistakes. It was interesting to see the development in Sheeny’s mindset as well – one month later during the second session right before christmas, those small quibbles were already pretty much erased. Sheeny practiced the Triple to the airbag for some days before the entire production team (not that many people though…) removed the airbag, helped set up the scaffolding construction and placed the 1500kg landing bag on top of the landing ramp in a late night session in freezing conditions. Good times for sure!!
A couple of hours after this night workout, Sheeny and Travis both geared up and set out to hit the jump again, this time with the landing bag in place… st this point, Travis still hung on to the last straw concerning the Triple – he hadn’t felt good about it during airbag practice and he had kept the landing bag as a last glimmer of hope in his mind. He got his Doubleflip KOD out of the way pretty quickly, landing it with a perfect extension, and then announced that was going to give the Triple one last try. He jumped off after two flips, sailed through the air and onto the bag landing and he seemed happy and relieved to pass the torch on to Sheeny…

After accepting the responsibility to bring the trick home, Sheeny did a couple of warm up Doubles and then sent a perfect Triple onto the landing bag, riding away successfully and clearing the path for the final Triple in the near future…

After Sheeny stomped the Triple to the Bagjump landing, preparations immediately began to realize the project to a ‚real‘ landing. Everything was in place anyway, the only thing left to do was have Sheeny send lots and lots of Triples to the airbag landing and then, once he felt ’safe‘ enough, remove the airbag and give Sheeny exactly one attempt to land the trick to the hard landing underneath… it was surprisingly difficult to be allowed to shoot the trick. I had to pull all the strings I had and it was basically a last-minute flight to Maryland on the day before the big show that got me to the „event“ just in time. Anyway, all there was left to do was shoot the exact same photo I had shot some weeks earlier, just in a nicer looking environment. Talking about the vegetation and the blue sky, not the jump branding obviously.. ;)
I can honestly say that I have never been as nervous as at the time I heard some producer guy scream „go“ and then heard Sheeny gun the engine in the woods. I had two identical camera setups in both hands, firing simultaneously with both in fear of a camera mishap or whatever might happen. I counted Sheeny’s flips in the air and it all looked just perfect. Perfect takeoff, perfect Triple, perfect landing… and then the perfect celebration storm when he rode away and everyone came running and screaming towards him. I hope I will never forget that moment’s feeling – I obviously scrolled through the photos immediately to check if everything looked good and I was just completely stoked on the moment. It took me a while to get down the tree, but after getting down with my tree climber and shooting some after-Triple-pics with Sheeny I was racing to Travis‘ house as fast as possible to get behind my computer and work on the photo. The sequence took me seven or eight straight hours of work and I missed a good part of the party, but the guys from Bagjump helped me out a lot to get back to speed immediately when they greeted me with a Fireball whiskey bong! 😉 thanks again Hannes and Martin!!! I should have some party pics from the after party somewhere on my hard drives.... maybe I'll post them at some point ;) 

The Triple Flip photo is the most complex panoramic sequence shot I've done so far. I believe it had about 75 layers in total, including a full panorama of the background in two rows. If you are interested in how these kinds of photos are made, check out the All-in-one sequences article I wrote a while back. The technique is still the same ;)

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Five years have passed since the Triple session now – it’s definitely the proudest moment of my photo career. So much went right for me to be able to document this trick. I’m beyond grateful for this opportunity (THANK YOU Travis, James and Sheeny!) and I will always cherish those memories. Crazy, crazy, scary, awesome times!!!!!