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Stories Behind The Photos With Matt Beringer

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Jeff Z.

  • December 24 2008
  • 2,870 views
  • 50 comments

Shooting photos with Matt Beringer has always been one of the biggest perks of my job. His tricks, spots, outfits, and wild ideas have always made for some of my favorite photos. I went through our archives and pulled three photos of Matt from different eras and asked him to write something about each of them.

I guess that the first picture to talk about is the double rail one…


Photo: Elf (Director of Photography: Mark Losey)

I can’t believe it’s been so long… 1999—the glory days. I was 22 and my bike weighed 40lbs. [Mark] Losey came out to shoot a Redline poster with me and I took him to a really long rail. After a bunch of tries I had only made it about half way down and had a bunch of tumbles. Pissed off and grass stained I decided my rail balance was shit and that we should go try and find something at Weber State. The first thing we came to was the double rail. I had just happened to put four pegs on a couple days before. I was psyched, a rail that didn’t require balance that was still sweet. After starting in the rail a couple times at the top, I put a sticker between the rails at the top, hopped in and jumped off the back sending my bike and landing on my butt on top of the two rails at the top. The second try I got the whole thing. I think that ended up being the picture and sequence. Elf shot the sequence that this picture is out of. I have Ralph Sinisi to thank for bringing the four-peg inbetween two rails grind to BMX, I saw him do it in an FBM video [Albert Street]. Now the rollercoaster rail has knobs down it, they’re about .480” tall and 2.25” wide. There are 12 of them and they are right next to each other every 5 feet or so. I was kind of relieved that it was knobbed at first because crooked pedal grinding the thing was on my list of things to do before I die. Now that that’s out of the question there is that high risk mission of epoxying little steel wedges in front of the knobs to make the 4 x 4 grind possible again. I already bought the stuff to do it and now it’s just a matter of getting enough balls to do what it takes to bring back the most rare and sweet double rail setup that exists. And fight back the rail knobbing man, too!

The yellow garage…

Photo: Zielinski

This photo was all about getting an opener for my Ride interview that was in the April 2005 issue. After busting my ass a bunch of times to conquer a couple of my arch nemeses for photos for the interview, we needed something sweet for the opening shot. I’m really happy with this picture, my garage has been a constant project for about seven years. When I look at this picture now I can’t believe how much has been built in there since then. The yellow and red definitely made for a cool photo with the S&M shields, but when I went to the skatepark and my all yellow bike was out of the garage it was too hard to look at. I had to paint it black.

The X-up curved wall…

Photo: Zielinski

2006 is the year that I decided to rack up my credit card to it’s fullest. After months of building we had about ten new things added to the backyard including a deck that comes out of the upstairs with a door where there used to be a window. Thanks to S&M, Odyssey, and Ogio, I had enough money to make everything as good as I could to have the GnarBQ after Interbike. Brian Foster flew in to SLC and we drove down to Interbike, we had a couple fun Vegas days and then brought Chad Shackelford back with us to film for Electronical. Chase Hawk, [Steve] Crandall, Tony Cardona, Tony Hamlin, Captain Fun, Heath Pinter, Corey Bohan, A.J. Anaya, and a bunch of people from Colorado and Idaho had a great session and BBQ with a bunch of locals. The local SLC band LeForce jammed on the deck of the ramp while people went off—it was awesome!
The next day was really fun because it wasn’t such a mess of people. I felt like I needed to get out the Hessian gear, light some stuff on fire, and get the x-up curved wallride done with. I was pretty nervous because I had never even tried this before and if I fell I was probably going to get burned. After a couple loop outs and tumbles and going through that emotional battle of making myself land in an x-up in the curved wall, I got it. Thanks to my friend Cody for the sleeveless “Leathers” shirt, Dave Freimuth for those sweet acid wash pants, the Polygamist owned Family store in SLC for still having those white Roos in my size, Chad Shack for filming, Jeff Z. for shooting the photo (and all the photos, and this chance to write about some of them), LeForce for rocking my backyard, and everyone who has helped me build anything at my house.

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