Wednesday night at Radlands in the mid nineties was usually the best night of the week to catch the very best skateboarders from the entire country. People would travel to Radlands from miles around because it was one of two places that was consistently dry all year in the area. The other one being the Pioneer Club in St Albans.

Tom would normally be there anyway but I think that I warned him that I wanted to try and do one of these ‘strobe’ style sequences with him as I knew I wanted to be able to show that he was capable of doing pretty much anything over the corner of the small box in the middle of the space.

This particular photographic technique relies on the skateboarder having to deal with a series of flashes going off while they perform the move in, ideally, subdued ambient light. These days we are so used to be able to do what we want with retouching in post production but this really was a way of getting the full effect in the camera.

It must have been really annoying to have to deal with it from the point of view of the skater. But the results are quite distinctive and have a different effect to the put together ‘photoshopped’ sequences of the later era.

This particular frame was never used in the magazines of the time. Tom must have landed several tricks on the night, as you’d perhaps expect and another frame was chosen as a double page spread in Read and Destroy Magazine at the time.