I am happy to share with you my exitement about an interview published in one of the biggest Serbias’ daily newspaper “Blic”. Every new experience has its own magic, and I want to bring with me something that other people have not seen, and maybe will never be able to see in their life.
Predrag Vučković (35) is the only professional extreme sport photographer in Serbia and one of small number of “Red Bull’s” photographers who follow spectacular and wacky sports events worldwide. His photos (taken in as many as 70 countries), which leave you breathless, have been published in more than 50 world magazines.
In mid-August, I shot one of the most difficult moto-cross races over the Roumanian Carpathians. I was speeding along with them on a motorbike for five days so as to intercept them. And in March, for the first time in the history of sports, one Russian guy decided to jump into an active volcano of Kamachatka. All world agencies bougth the photos straight away – says Pedja Vuckovic, who is at the same time the owner of one prestigious gym in Belgrade and has been publishing the magazine X-Fitness for eight years now.
His acrobatic stunts with his BMX by the end of the 80s, when nobody in Yugoslavia even knew what that sport was, made people clasp their head, and then he tried his hand at skateboarding, rollerskating, rollerblading, then at water sports…
I have never spent my time sitting at home in front of TV, I have always been seeking for adventures – Pedja says.
His experience in extreme sports, many of which he brought to our country through the back door, helped him to a large degree to carve out an unusual career and a great reputation abroad. More often than not, even the sportsmen themselves, the biggest world names in extreme sports, insist on Pedja recording what they have been practising for months and must be put in one second.
You cannot learn the skill of taking photos. You need to have an eye for that, and improvements are only about directing your talent. I work with more than one camera and I don‘t regret sacrificing them for the sake of the right angle, since most action in extreme sports takes as long as a blink of an eye. I lost my camera more than once, and one of them even fell from 142m height, but so far, I have always come back from the shooting session with the photos I previously intended to take – Pedja explains.
For every shooting, he goes through some special conditioning preparations. There is no room for bad luck.
Even in the ordinary life, it is no easy to know the limits, you simply either feel them or not. And they are the most important things when it comes to extreme sports. You simply feel how far you can go – our interlocutor reveals.
Every photo taken by this unusual artist conveys the breath of distant places and “sweet torture”, dangerous and unpredictable situations that climbing along cliffs and jumping from skyscrapers and TV towers carry with them.
The places for good and unique photos are often inaccessible and you can reach them only by means of ropes, carrying your full equipment at your back – Pedja says. Towards the end of the year, the shooting session on the island Palmelo in Colombia, thus far a strictly forbidden area, is awaiting him.
Every new experience has its own magic, and I want to bring with me something that other people have not seen, and maybe will never be able to see in their life.