The factory that built your heroes is stepping out of the shadows. X-LAB makes factory direct carbon road and gravel bikes, the GT8 and AD9, at prices that expose what you've really been paying for.
Read MoreRoute2Change - Boulder
Route2Change is a moving town hall event organized by The White Line Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for safer roads for cyclists, pedestrians, and other vulnerable road users. Launched in Boulder, Colorado, Route2Change puts state legislators on a bus tour to locations where traffic fatalities have occurred. At each stop, the event honors lives lost, shares stories behind the statistics, and encourages community members to advocate for stronger protections. The initiative aims to transform outrage into policy action by directly engaging lawmakers, and affected communities, on the ground.
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Dale
PhoMo - Dale
A special thank you to Dale and all the PhoMo (Photo & Moto) out there; it is a crazy job, and I have been fortunate to work with some great ones. I have been hesitant to get back on the back of a motorcycle and shoot again, but the event being so perfectly aligned with what I do on so many fronts, I knew it was time. Luckily, I got hooked up with Dale, who is very experienced and carried me like a champ.
Dale all they way to the right of the road
Dale on the Diagonal
If you are a motorcyclist and are interested in working races, the PhoMo Facebook group is a good place to start.
Ride For Magnus
This ride was very special for me; Magnus was killed when he was hit from behind by a likely distracted driver; somehow, I managed to live when, in 2005, I was hit head-on at 55mph in the bike lane by a distracted and likely DUI driver. This event was also my first time shooting from the motorcycle since I started having seizures, which seemed incredibly appropriate.
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The Specialized FUCI Concept Bike Designed by the Rebel Robert Egger
The Specialized FUCI concept bike, the brainchild of Robert Egger, is a thing of beauty - a sleek and deadly weapon of speed and agility, built to outrun the wind itself. But the UCI, those gatekeepers of all things cycling, have placed their shackles on this beautiful beast, limiting its potential with their strict regulations.
Read More2019 Koppenberg
Another great day of creating images at Boulders Koppenberg! This year there are two ways to view the images, the first is by Wave and the second is by Team/Kit, not all Teams and Kits were categorized but the ones that were are below, simply click on the image of your Team/Kit to take you to the gallery.
Images by Wave
Wave 1
Wave 3
Wave 2
Wave 4
Images by Team/Kit
Boulder Cycle Sport
Full Cycle
BJC
Modern Market
Lucky Pie
Boulder Orthopedics
Alps
Primal Audi
Palmares
Floyds
Melton Design
Great Divide Brewing Co.
Skylar
Groove Subaru
Jumbo Visma
Old School Industries
Stages
Cinch Cycling
If your Team/Kit is not in the images above simply search for it below, if you can not find via searching it look above by Wave.
2018 Rapha Festive 500
2019 Bike Law Foundation Ambassador
So most of you know by now that I have been having some pretty severe health issues over the past few years but over the past couple of months, thanks to a couple of very generous health care providers and a costly CBD regimen my seizures and the associated issues have improved a ton. So naturally, I have felt like I need a team or group to ride for as riding is something that helps my brain issues a ton and was prescribed to me. I am not quite ready to commit to a race team yet, but I did want to make my hours in the saddle count for something.
As a lot of you also know I am also passionate about vulnerable road users rights as I have been a victim multiple times from not only motorist but from LEO's failing to do their jobs. I have been looking for and creating Opportunites for years on how to effect change both locally, nationally and culturally.
This is why I am so proud to announce my 2019 Bike Law Ambassadorship!
Bike Law is an ethos; a mission; a social change movement; a collective of people dedicated to the pursuit of cycling justice, advocating for people on bikes, leading by example, and being the change we wish to see in the world.
As a Bike Law Foundation Ambassador sponsored by the Bike Law Network, I am committed to the improvements needed to make cycling better, safer, and more sustainable for everyone who rides. Everyone who rides is a cyclist, and every cyclist is deserving of a culture in which riding a bicycle is valued, protected, encouraged, and celebrated. We're all in this together, and together, we ride safe, happy, often, and PROUD!
No I won’t give you legal advice but I will point you towards someone that will!
#bikelaw #BLFAmbassador #RIDEPROUD
2019 Ford Transit Passenger Wagon 360
2018 Ford Transit Cargo Van 360
My latest 360 for Ford’s 2018 Transit Cargo Van is live on Ford's website.
Click here: https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/transit-cargo-van/gallery/
2018 Koppenberg
Today I went and shot the 2018 Koppenberg, lots of grit and lots of smiles.
If you care to use these images please use the button below.
Enjoy!
Contact Carson
Shooting my first GOLF world record for 18birdies.
I photographed four PGA Tour Rookies for the 18Birdies app; Lanto Griffin, Stephan Jaeger, Tom Lovelady, and Andrew Yun as they set a Guinness World Record for the Fastest Hole in Golf by a team of four.
Then we did a quick portrait session.
Watch the video to see if they made it!
The 18birdies app is kinda like STRAVA for Golf, check it out! The 18Birdies app is now available for iPhone and Android devices. Click here for your free download. For more information and content, log onto 18Birdies.com
Road Bike Action Cover: Levi's GranFondo
Always a good time on the back of the moto at Levi's GranFondo!
Gwen Jorgensen in the Specialized WinTunnel
Gwen was a pleasure to shoot, and they saved here some time on the bike, look out Rio!
Alberto Contador visits the Specialized Win Tunnel
Ironically, this Image was taken by one of my best friends, who helped me get through the worst of this ordeal two weeks before I got hit.
Carson v. Land Rover
I should not be here. Not after fifty five miles an hour, head on. By all the usual math, I should be a roadside memorial and a fading anecdote, a name in a police report and a line in a spreadsheet. I am a statistical anomaly, the kind of outlier you do not plan for when you design roads or write policy. Instead I am still upright, still breathing, and still loud enough to make people uncomfortable. That is why I do not shut up. Not just about cyclists, but about policies, enforcement, and laws. About the ways we pretend the road is neutral when it is rigged from the start. This is not a crash story. It is a story about what happens after, and what you do with the wreckage.
There is a question I get more than any other. Why I cannot shut up about cyclist rights. Why I keep making noise about respect, accountability, safe streets. Why I started Ride Redding, and later Ride Broomfield. People think it is some midlife campaign, a hobby turned into a cause. They have no idea what it does to you when you have already died once on the road and somehow walked away anyway.
A few months before the crash, I am at the top of my game, on and off the bike. I ride with a crew four days a week, the kind of group that slices through the wind like a single organism, each rider holding the line because no one wants to be the one who cracks. We do the Solvang Century in four hours twenty two minutes, a blur of motion and effort where the world narrows to cadence and breath and the satisfaction of knowing you belong out there. On campus at Brooks Institute of Photography, I am a production and creativity machine, helping other students, tutoring, working with instructors as everyone scrambles to figure out this new digital workflow. I am the guy people come to when they are stuck. I still graduate magna cum laude. From the outside, it looks like everything is dialed.
I am in my last year at Brooks in Santa Barbara. The days are long, split between classroom light and darkroom silence. I head home on my bike after class, thinking about light ratios, shutter speeds, the next assignment, the next ride. I have one small errand to run, dropping off my new health insurance paperwork at FedEx. A chore so boring it barely counts as a thought.
It is a perfect California afternoon. Clear air, that soft golden light that makes every mile of road look like a postcard. Then, in one breath, it all ends.
A woman coming the other way drops her phone while using it. Head below the steering wheel. She crosses the double yellow center line and drives straight into me at fifty five miles an hour, head on.
There is a moment when the brain stops screaming. It just starts recording. Every sound, every flicker of light, every fragment of chaos gets etched into you. The crunch of metal. The empty, echoing thud of impact. I remember a violent, bone rattling silence that launches me into the sky. They say I fly forty five feet up and forty five back. A little girl in the car behind asks her mother, “Why is that man falling out of the trees.” From a distance, that is what it looks like. A man falling out of the sky.
I remember the eucalyptus branches. The slow, haunting spin of the world. Sky, road, sky, road. The car crosses the line. I am in the air. The trees are spinning. I have enough time midair to think two things. “This is going to hurt,” and “If I can wiggle my toes when I stop, I will be fine.” That is the kind of bargain you make with yourself when the universe has you by the throat.
When I hit the pavement, I land sitting. My back against the bumper of her Land Rover. Inches from being run over. I close my eyes, try my toes. They move. For one second, I feel grateful. Alive. Shredded, but alive. Then reality comes back like a siren in your ear.
She stumbles out of the car, shaking, words spilling everywhere. “Oh my God, I am so sorry, I know Lance Armstrong.” As if name dropping a stranger could absolve anything. She drops her phone again. The California Highway Patrol does not cite her. Does not arrest her. Does not even treat it like what it is. They send her home, the woman who has just crossed a double yellow at full speed and put me through a windshield. Good work, CHP.
The paramedics scrape me off the asphalt. My knee is shattered. I am loaded into an ambulance and hauled under fluorescent lights. In the ER, a nurse asks for my insurance. I do not have any. “So your parents will be paying?” she asks. No. The temperature in the room seems to drop ten degrees. I am no longer a patient. I am a problem.
They patch me together in surgery and hand me anti inflammatories and a pack of ice. “This should do,” another nurse says when I ask for pain relief. As if that kind of impact could be smoothed over with pills from a sample drawer and a bag of frozen water. Hours later, screaming and sleepless, a different nurse finally hands me the button. I press it like it is the last mercy left in the world. When I wake up, someone tells me it is time to leave. Less than a day after being hit head on by a two ton machine, I am being shown the door.
I try standing. My shattered knee folds under me. I grab the toilet seat to brace myself, leg straight out, lungs choking on the pain. That moment sears itself into every nerve I still have. Pain beyond language. But to them, I am a charity case with no coverage, and that means I do not belong in recovery.
I am uninsured for exactly two weeks of my life. Two weeks. Because of that gap, the ER does the absolute minimum. No scans. No imaging. No CT. No MRI. No one checks for a traumatic brain injury. They fix what they can see and send me home with the rest. Years later, the bill for that decision comes due. I start having seizures. Not subtle skips in time, but grand mal convulsions that hijack your body, throw you to the ground, and leave you wrung out and empty. The kind that rip control out of your hands and make witnesses step back with that look that mixes fear and pity. Once, I come to on the floor of my basement, tongue bitten, muscles on fire, staring at a concrete wall like it might answer a question I do not remember asking. The impact to my head has left damage no one bothered to look for. Because I do not have insurance, no one looks. Because they do not look, I am never treated. This is pre ACA, before the country pretends to tidy up the edges. It is not just a bad day. It is a blueprint for how the system treats people without money, without a safety net, without a name that opens doors. The road is not an accident. It is policy made visible. Someone wrote this.
The court case starts while I am still limping through my final semester. Days divided between lectures and legal strategy. Lawyers argue over medical codes while I try to remember which side of the camera I am supposed to be on. The woman who hit me walks into court surrounded by suits, the physical embodiment of a twenty million dollar trust fund. She dodges her deposition nine times. Her lawyers argue that my pain and my future should be valued not by what they actually cost me, but by what they would have cost if I had insurance. They turn my life into a spreadsheet, then hit the discount button. That is what policy looks like up close. Not language in a bill, but a stranger’s lawyer explaining why what happened to you is not worth very much. Nice to know my existence can be rounded down for efficiency.
An Olympic cyclist testifies on my behalf. He sits there in a suit, explaining my body to a room of strangers. He tells the jury who I had been before the crash. The strength. The discipline. The kind of conditioning you only get after thousands of miles fought against gravity and headwinds. He explains how a cyclist lives in their body, how balance, power, reaction time, that sense of absolute control at speed, are not hobbies. They are identity. He tells them what I have lost. Not just a little speed. Not just a handful of personal records. An entire athletic future. The long rides I will never take in the same way. The races that evaporated. The simple trust between mind, muscle, and machine that has been broken. Listening to that is like hearing a eulogy for a version of myself that died on that road while my pulse kept going.
Then there are the deadlines. The graduation paperwork. The final projects. I finish that last year at Brooks on crutches, dragging myself through classes on adrenaline and denial. Nights belong to court documents, not creativity. My classmates are building portfolios. I am building a case. I show up to critiques with my leg throbbing and my head wrapped in fog, pretending everything is fine. It is not.
Graduation should have been a reset, a clean break into the life I thought I was earning. I launch my photography career and point my lens at life instead of the wreckage behind me. I never forget gear on shoots. I never lose files. The work itself, the images, the creativity, they hold the line. What does not hold is everything around them. The business side starts to fray. Invoices slip. Emails sit too long before I answer them. The organization, the follow through, the mental overhead of running a one person operation take the hits my photos never show.
It is not just me. The bike industry has a way of confusing passion with structure. People show up because they love it, not because there are systems in place. That lack of professionalism gets treated like culture. Quirky. Authentic. But if you are the one trying to make a living in the middle of that chaos, the cracks open wider. You fall into them faster.
Being self employed means no sick days, no backup plan, no pause button. I do a shoot with a one hundred four degree fever because there is no one else to send, no safety net if I stay home. I am a professional photographer and an entrepreneur, wrestling a business into existence while my brain occasionally short circuits. My main client almost never has a creative meeting or preproduction call. I get a message the afternoon before a shoot four or five hours away. No brief. No plan. Just, “Be there, be ready for anything.” It is nerve racking. Stack that on top of an untreated TBI, and growing a client list starts to feel like climbing a mountain with missing steps. But I always show up. I always deliver what is asked. The cost just comes due somewhere else.
The seizures do not start with a bang. They creep in. A second gone here, a missing moment there. Time skipping like a damaged tape. Then the grand mals, the full body betrayals, make it impossible to pretend this is just stress or exhaustion. Once, I come to in my own living room with broken glass on the floor and no idea what has happened in the last half minute, muscles aching like I have been in a fight I cannot remember. At first you lie to yourself. You say you are tired, overworked, stretched thin. Eventually, the gaps get bigger, the violence harder to ignore. A neurologist finally gives it a name and, with it, the verdict that I have been walking around for years with an untreated traumatic brain injury. My brain has been rewired without my consent. Memory. Balance. Patience. Mood. Some days, it feels like I am narrating my own life from a few seconds behind.
Before the crash, I have plans. I am going to keep racing after school, go deeper into cycling culture, live in that world where people mark time in miles and meters climbed. I keep riding because quitting never feels like an option. But out on the road, something has shifted. Drivers grow more aggressive, more distracted. Their eyes are on their screens, not the street. Their addiction to smartphones turns every ride into a coin toss. The roads become a zero trust environment. You assume no one sees you. You ride like every car is already drifting toward you. That is why I do not just talk about bike lanes. I talk about enforcement. About distracted driving. About hit and runs that get treated like weather instead of crime. Every close call, every hit and run, is not just bad luck. It is the result of choices written into law and ignored in practice.
Moving back home to Redding, I see a different kind of gap. People want more bike infrastructure, on the road and off. There is hunger for it. Energy. But the follow through is missing. No one is connecting the dots between desire and reality. That gap bothers me. So I step into it. With Ride Redding, we push. We help the city secure roughly twenty million dollars in projects, real money turning into actual pavement, lanes, and paths. Protected lanes. New trails. Real concrete and dirt where there used to be nothing. We model something that feels almost radical in this country, backing city hall when they get it right instead of only showing up to scream when they get it wrong. In any community, your values are written in your budget. You can say you care about safety all you want, but if the money never makes it to the street, it is just noise.
As a cycling culture incubator, we do not just shout into the void. We help other things grow. We help incubate the Redding Trail Alliance, a crew of locals who build, maintain, and advocate for trails, bike parks, and singletrack around the region, working with land managers instead of just complaining about them. We help incubate the Redding Composite Mountain Bike Team, a coed youth squad for sixth through twelfth graders that races in the NorCal league, giving kids coaching, structure, and a way to belong to something that does not end in a parking lot. Those efforts take root. They keep going. They change the shape of what riding in Redding looks like for the people coming up behind us.
Now the city itself leans into the idea that Redding can be a place where you live, work, and play by bicycle, not just drive through on your way to somewhere else. New bikeways, trail connections, and hubs are knitting neighborhoods, transit, and trailheads together. Three mile trips by bike are starting to look normal instead of reckless. That does not happen by magic. It happens because people refuse to shut up and go home. Because people are willing to sit in meetings, read the policy, learn the codes, push for the right language, and hold enforcement to a higher standard.
If you zoom out, my story is not special. A driver looks down at a phone and goes home. A young person without insurance gets stitched up and pushed out the door. A court discounts a life because an imaginary insurance company might have shaved a few dollars off a bill. A brain gets injured and nobody checks, because checking costs money. This is not a glitch. It is the operating system. The policies, the laws, the way they are enforced or ignored, all of it adds up to the same quiet message. Some lives are optional. You learn quickly which ones.
A decade later, the wreckage is still with me. My back shifts at night like the bones are whispering to each other. My knee swells after long rides, a reminder that the road gives, but it also takes. My hand locks up when the weather turns. I manage it with therapy, with deep tissue, with the most basic form of endurance there is, the human kind. The kind that just keeps going because there is no alternative.
I never really walk away from that crash. It rides with me, every day, like a ghost in my slipstream. I know I sound angry. I am. You do not get hit at fifty five and come back as a well adjusted optimist. Maybe that is why I keep speaking up. Not because I think I am noble. Not because I am looking for applause. But because I know exactly what silence costs. I know what it is to be treated as collateral damage on a sunny California afternoon. I know what it is to still be alive when, by all rights, you should not be.
That kind of knowledge changes you. It teaches you that the road, like life, does not care if you are careful or deserving. It just keeps moving. You can lie down and let it roll over you. Or you can get up, drag your scars along with you, and build something out of them.
That is why I started Ride Redding. Why I started Ride Broomfield. Because when you have fallen out of the trees and slammed back into Earth, you owe the world more than silence.
Friends, countrymen, cyclist, send me your POV footage!
A rencent YouTube video out of New Zealand and DropBox's new 1TB of storage upgrade has prompted me to start a new project. I want you to upload your video of close encounters, hits and what not from your on bike camera or iPhone for a compilation video. I only wish I had a POV camera on my me when I got hit! This is all leading up to a documentary project I have an idea for, but for now just a compilation video. Watch this video then consider submitting below.
Why New Zealand Cyclists Need Helmet Cameras If you were still wondering why, the answer is to expose the cop scum that allow this behaviour despite being paid to stop it. This video is almost entirely made up from reported dangerous behaviour that the Police bothered to reply to me about, and is obviously only a small sample of the dangerous behaviour I have been subjected to.
If you have any ideas or want to conspire and or fund, "On the Road" my documentary/cycling PR project, simply email me below. Please make sure the files are trimmed down pretty tight as not to overload the DropBox. Please fill out the form below to get a link to upload your file and tell me about your incident. Please name files: YYYYMMDD_locaiton_your-name or provide the info in your eMail.
Specialized Win Tunnel Grand Opening
Fight back with POV Cameras
in Blog, News, Riding with Carson
Today rolling across the social media landscape was 'Atropelamento na California' a video in where two guys, one wearing a POV camera filming the other in the Berkley Hills. Then they got hit, and the car ran. The footage is pretty hard to make out on YouTube but I think the raw footage was handed around and analyzed. They are currently narrowing it down. I think everyone should start wearing these and reporting, at $300 they are a cheep investment for proof of what went down. I have recently started riding with one and and I feel the way to go is 0.5sec time-lapse, because its easier to make out plates. Also battery life can be extended, but I really would like to see manufactures make a unit for cyclists for this purpose that is an easier system.
My current configuration is a GoPro Hero2 with a Battery BacPac mounted on a K Edge Big Pro Handlebar Mount I want to add an additional Hero 2 mounted on the Go Big Pro Saddle Mount as well.
Here are some resources:
Specialized’s Turbo e-bike & 360 Bike Photography
in Blog, News, QTVR / 360
e-Bikes have been around awhile but none really feel quite right, most are some abortion of a bike or a strapped on system on a geriatric looking machine that even my old Navy salt of a Grandpa wouldn't be caught dead on. Specialized has defiantly changed the game when it comes to looks and functionality with the new Turbo. I was lucky enough to be able to get my hands on one and shoot it, let me tell you it is a fun ride! Also featured in:
- http://turbo.specialized.com/
- http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/video-specialized-turbo-the-worlds-fastest-electric-bike-33568/
- http://www.gizmag.com/specialized-turbo-ebike/21981/
- http://www.bicycleretailer.com/news/newsDetail/6631.html
- http://www.eta.co.uk/2012/03/29/specialized-turbo-electric-bicycle
- http://www.velonation.com/News/ID/11477/Specialized-launches-Turbo-electric-motorized-bike.aspx
- http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/29/uk_government_says_e_bike_too_fast_for_roads/