I'm a photographer and I mainly focus on motorcycles and the love I have for motorcycles.
You know, my very first bike that I built with my own two hands is now in the Harley
Museum. It was just something unthout of me. I'd say I started taking photos at
about 2002, 2003. It started out as more focused on jewelry and metal smithing and
art in a 3D sense and it wasn't until my third year that my mom had got this film
camera and I kind of was like hey can I borrow that for this class and I don't
think she'd ever taken a photo with it. I kind of took it over and then fell in
love with photography ever since. I graduated from Columbia about 2005 and
then I just hit the road and I didn't have a bike then but I met a lot of
different people that were like hey hop in the van or I got this bike for you to
ride we're going to Mexico we're going to Florida and I would just I would just
kind of tag along and document their journeys and I was using my camera as a
tool to learn essentially so if there was something I enjoyed I'd be able to
put myself in a place where I could document a process and then I would learn
that process just through documenting it. So then that kind of turned into okay I've
got this pile of parts and it's all I can afford because I was broke and then
just kind of sculpted this bike and I took what I learned in the jewelry
classes and the metalsmithing classes and kind of incorporated that into the
bike I ride today.
I got into motorcycles because my dad had always had motorcycles. He was into
shovel heads mainly and maybe maybe that was what sparked my love for older
Harley Davidson but I've always been into older things classic cars is kind of
where I started and then got into motorcycles and it's it's always been
always been interested in and stuff from a different time period. The bike I
ride the most is a 77 ironhead and like I said I I got that in crates. I didn't
have a clue about how to fabricate anything or build anything but you know
after I built that first bike from ground up by myself that was my goal I
didn't know how to weld I didn't I'd everything that went into the bike I
did myself and that was my goal I didn't want any help from anybody it was just
a learning experience. The whole the bikes that I choose to ride or that I'm
into kind of stemmed from just growing up and like I said my dad had shovel
heads and photographically I like to take a photo that's timeless so I've
always been into taking these photos that maybe it was an old car with a
building or architecture that kind of fit the same time period so I leaned
towards building a bike that that fits a different time if I were to take a
picture of it would would kind of be timeless like you wouldn't quite know
exactly when the picture was taken. When I graduated college I was shooting for a
lot of different publications and over a few years of doing that it was like a
lot of running around I mean I wouldn't trade it for the world but it was it got
it got hard it got hard to get paid so I started doing my own blog and I was
posting my day-to-day life and now people could see what I did every day and
between building the bikes or riding the bikes or doing trips or or whatever I
was doing so during that time I wasn't making a penny but people started
following it and I started getting a large following and then some people at
Harley started following it my work kind of got seen a little bit more and more
around the Harley corporation so to speak and one guy that kind of been
really helpful to me is Mike Launey and he's the one that kind of pushed me
into having an exhibit at the Harley Museum and that went great I couldn't
know what better and it was really stoked for that and they put my bike in the
museum I feel like I'm a very fortunate person like I've been able to just do
what I love it scares me to think like well this could end tomorrow you know
like what do I do then you know but it's always just kind of worked and I
think if you keep a positive attitude and if you're a good person to other
people you you get that back
I'm Josh Carpius thanks for watching VKS
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