The Radavist

Two Years on a Bike With the Fuji X-Pro1
Words and Photos by Kevin Sparrow

A follow up to: Kevin Sparrow Discusses the Fuji X-Pro1 and Cycling

It has been over two years since I switched over from Canon DSLR to the Fuji X-Pro1 and I haven’t looked back. I’ve traveled all over the world with this camera. I rode from Paris to Lausanne with her slung around my back. I’ve shot photos for commercial clients and for publications. This little camera has more than met my expectations as a professional use camera.

Ride Along: Henry Mesias of Send It Courier
Words and photos by Chris Lee

Let’s face it. We bike messengers are trying to keep a dying industry afloat. Please don’t ask us how long its gonna last, because we don’t want to think about it. Some cities have tried (successfully or not) to unionize to help make conditions for messengers on the road better. But this is a long and grueling process that often leads to a lot of fired bikers.

Back in the early 2000’s, here in Austin, a guy named Whitney Moyer headed to a mecca of hopeful framebuilders in the US, UBI. Upon returning with all the experience needed to build frames, he was looking to commission a local project. This was that frame. Moyer’s first…

Ride Along: Leah Hollinsworth
Words and photos by Chris Lee

I first met Leah Hollinsworth a few years ago in Chicago, a couple days before the Stupor Bowl. I decided to meet her and a handful of other couriers in Chicago to ride the AmTrak to Minneapolis. What was supposed to be a 6-8 hour train ride turned into something like 14 hours because of winter blizzards and other mayhem that comes with obnoxious snow accumulation in the Midwest. Needless to say, I got to know Leah well during that train ride.

Fast forward to the first weekend of May, 2014: I just crossed over the border into Canada on my way to the 5th annual Mayday alleycat. Mayday is the biggest race that the Toronto courier community throws. It brings racers (courier or not) from all over Canada and even the United States. In addition and even more importantly, this race is a fundraiser for the Bike Messenger Emergency Fund, or BMEF for short. After the race and the parties were all said and done, I met up with Leah to talk a little about her involvement with the BMEF and the Mayday alleycat.

The Messenger’s Guide To New York City: The West Village and Midtown
Standby with Hiromi/Ghost stories and local comfort with Stoned Tone
Words and photos by Chris Lee

In the second installment of The Messenger’s Guide To New York City, I got a chance to have the man behind Boda Boda, Hiromi Bruni show me around. Hiromi was born and raised in the West Village and knows the neighborhood like the back of his hand. We payed respects to the remains of Gray’s Papaya, a hot dog joint that was a fixture in the neighborhood and got some desert at Rocco’s. We went by Dave’s Work Wear, the local’s only one stop shop for work wear. And finally chilled at his favorite midtown standby spots.

If you love something, thrash it. That’s exactly what Kenny has done with this bike. When he picked up this frame off local Craigslist, he was looking for a classic steel workhorse. It just so happened that he snagged a De Rosa… for a song. If you’re going to spend all day on a bike, it might as well be a great ride, right?

Using mostly spare parts and some swap-found components, he built it up with SRAM force, Profile hubs to H+Son Archetypes, trigger shifters on riser bars and kept the vintage 3T stem. A Wald Basket helps out in light and easy carries while Kenny still wears a backpack throughout the day for the bigger hauls.

This bike has character. The chain lock and u-lock bite marks on the Columbus decal alone do it for me!

What I’ve realized over time is that I end up with a lot of bike portraits of riders in my film rolls. This sparked an idea: a “ride along” interview series. We’ll start this off with Chris Lee, in NYC, where he interviews Brean Shea, a bike messenger and track cyclist.

Monster Track. The world’s most infamous, dangerous and in my opinion, most significant alleycat. In the 15 years it’s been thrown in New York City, it never ceases to surprise its contenders. There are only a few rules, the most important being two words: NO BRAKES.

Typically, there’s a weeding down process, at the hands of multiple manifests. Everyone starts with one, but only a select few make it to true completion by filling up to three. This year, mother nature smiled on the event, delivering somewhat favorable conditions (when compared to previous years being riddled with rain and snow). At the end of the event, the winners of Monster Track XV were Cooper Ray and Hannah Todd.

On the scene at the event and working the Williamsburg Bridge checkpoint was Chris Lee, who provided a few photos from the event. Check them out in the Gallery!