We've had riders getting back-to-back covers before, but it's rare. Ydwer van der Heide is the first photographer to do it in Kiteworld, and then went one better this year nailing three covers back to back, from issue #62, #63 and #64. Here are his background stories to each cover.



We came to this crazy idea of shortening his lines. He was riding 20 metre lines and the fastest and easiest way to shorten them was just to double the lines, making them ten metre lines. The shot would now be more interesting because the kite would fill up a bigger part of the frame. The position I was in relative to Bram was very important to get the kite sat behind the action. As we were shooting straight into the sunset we used a fill flash to freeze the action, but because of the flash we only had one shot attempt per trick attempt which made timing crucial.

The extremely short lines made it very difficult for Bram to complete his rotation but his trick was still very consistent. We wanted to see how consistent he really was, so we took off his leash. We took a couple of shots but somehow they weren’t the best. Was there something in his mind about the leash? Then that one out of ten failures came along, he just missed the bar, got stuck in his boots and the kite went off. Luckily we had Bas Koole who was assisting me with the flash run after it and grabbed it before it went into a tree............