Jay Adams - The Early Years - Photos by Kent Sherwood Captions by Jay - Released Today!

This is a book of photographs of the legend as a boy, taken by his stepfather Kent Sherwood. Kent was my first and only hourly wage employer when I worked at the Z-Flex shack in Venice one summer as a teenager. These images are some rare, early moments of Jay, his friends, family, and his lifestyle, most taken before anyone like Craig Stecyk or myself made pictures of him.



Jay was the personification of all the DogTown stories that Stecyk wrote, and all the DogTown photos that I took: all we were trying to do was capture Jay Adams’ essence. He was the life- long wild child, and he was incredibly great at the same time. Kent’s pictures of Jay are an advance peek, the test pressing— or the “demo” version—of the man Jay would become.


Kent Sherwood at his beach rental

Jay was a living legend . . . and a crazy friend . . . and now that he’s gone, we only have the memories. And for you all who didn’t know him personally I am happy that we have the photographs to share. I suspect his legend will live on gloriously.



Get The Book on crazy sale at Amazon Now. (click here)

Smashed in the Face for X-Mas

After 35+ years of shooting skateboarding off and on (mostly on),
there's a price to pay to get stylish shots like this one:

(click to enlarge each image)

Actually on thursday I was hoping to finish my last 2 rolls of Kodachrome before the processing deadline next week. While shooting about half a roll that day, I asked to take a look through Dan from Juice magazine's 35mm digital SLR, and then asked if i could shoot a few pic's. He seemed stoked to oblige. It was pretty cool I must admit, to see results immediately, but honestly the lens was too wide (believe it) and the timing of the shutter took some getting used to. That said I got this great shot of Venice local, Haden McKenna (above). I actually knew this 15 year olds' dad, when he was 15 and i was probably just 18. He reminds people of some other popular young Venice rats over the years long gone by, but as bad ass as the kid is, he was still really nice, and had a good attitude with me, I was happy to shoot a couple of shots of this virtual unknown on film, and with Dan's digital. I think we'll see something in Juice from this session. For the first time ever, I shot a few of Jesse Martinez (the Godfather of the Venice skatepark) and another blazin' local Jaime Quaintance as well.

So, here's the shot of my dues being payed up:


Yes, I always look through the lens when i'm shooting, so yes, blood was drawn from the brow for several minutes and numbness in the face for about a minute, but I actually felt no pain and continued shooting....

"Welcome back to Venice" as one of the locals said to me.

Good times.