The lights! The costumes! The pageantry! The rental skates! Those lights! Like a Crayola “basic dozen colors” box melted under black lights casting rapid fire shadows of every color across the glossy boards.

Amazingly those kids went through a dozen costume changes — from cows ‘n cowboys, to zombies (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” brought down the house), appropriately red, white, & blue May pole outfist… to boxes of frozen vegetables in celebration of those (hopefully bygone) Thanksgivings of my very ’70’s youth.

Pleased overall with this batch of photos, with all but Ludlow’s portrait being sans flash. Standouts would have to be the “tracking shots”. Threw the camera into “Time Value” Priority mode (marked “Tv” priority for you Canon kids), slowed the shutter way down, to 1/25 of a second, f8 (typical street photography aperature, nice ‘n deep). The zoom lens was backed out to wide-ish 24mm. (the Canon 5d is full frame, so no digital pseudo-zoom, it was a “true” 24mm focal length). Then it was a matter of focusing and trying to pan with subjects as they skated past. It was a bit like trying to get a nice ice cream curl … all in the wrist.

Set your parking brake

and put your car in its lowest gear!

I arrive home in Silverlake around 1AM to find a concerned, dejected Ludlow sitting on the front stoop, his car was down the hill, and sort of up another — into the neighbor’s yard, where it had come to rest after a quick backwards roll and jump over the curb. That it didn’t go any further is the amazing and fortunate part: houses and concrete walls lined the remainder of the street and the bottom of the hilly street (Ivanhoe Drive, if you’re familiar with Silver Lake in Los Angeles).

Oh, and the neighbors? What did they do? After our walking around on their porch for several minutes they finally pulled back the curtain, waved and smiled a sort of knowing, "gosh, we’d love to come out and help but we can’t stop laughing" shit-eating variety of smiles, before just going back to sleep.

The tow truck driver (there would eventually be three) — after an hour of walking around the Jetta tsk-tsking finally strapped himself into the car (it teetered real nice and scary like) and with the other trucks as safeties, drove it off the hill.

Not a scratch on the car, though the undercarriage was stuffed with ivy.

Oh, excuse the photos; I didn’t want to get out a tripod and it was very dark — so they are a bit grainy and blurry. And no — I didn’t perform any manipulations to present the scene as more precarious — it was that on its own. Though clearly I did comp (poorly) a shot of a fake street sign in with Ludlow in one shot for a card.