MARK ONORATI
Dedication, patience and a never-ending quest for a different viewpoint create the dramatically unique surf photography of Mark Onorati. And he’s a classically trained musician as well.
It’s surfing photography like you’ve never seen before, but Mark Onorati’s unique supertelephoto perspectives capture the essence of the sport just as effectively as any widerangle shot. He explains to Bruce Usher what motivates him to shoot surfing from dramatically different viewpoints.
I’m not there to take lots of photos, I’m there to take one,” the enigmatic Mark Onorati tells me from his car while driving in outer Sydney, and he’s right. Some of his pitchperfect images have been gestating for years, others executed with surgeons’ precision. A lot of his inspiration and ideas come from the back of a truck, literally.
“Sitting in traffic is my inspiration.
There’s no view except this boxy back-end view of a truck, so my mind starts to tick over about a particular angle or a particular different type of photo.”
Some locations he was chasing for many years.
“The gods have to be favourable to me. Particularly the light, tide and sand, and then a wave that’s visually stimulating and a rider that can perform what needs to be performed in that situation. These are the variables that it takes to bring the photo together without it being pure luck.”
There was a perfect day at Palm Beach and he had the perfect rider too, but he wouldn’t go out there for Mark. The Palm Beach photo would – or could – have happened four years earlier. “I knew what I wanted, and it’s a lovely dreamy background, tight and close.”
Mark says he is always looked for angles and he is always wondering why other people don’t see things that way. “Isn’t it just about being self-aware? That’s what I’m seeing and that’s what I will capture… they’re little challenges that I set myself to see what’s achievable.”
Talking of seeing, Mark calls himself “a blind photographer” and the diopter setting on his viewfinder is maxed out on one side. He’s good with long distance, but anything close is actually blurry. How did the seemingly highly-trained artistic eye and the surfing come together?
“There was a Super 8 movie camera in the house at Drummoyne and a few photo albums,” he recalls. He tells me his granddad bought him a Barry Bennett twin-fin belly board in 1966 when he was five. He swam and competed into his late teens, but then started to draw and paint a little. But it was music that started to envelop him from the age of seven. There were music lessons starting at five in the morning, then musicianship at the Sydney Conservatorium until nine at night.
“I had two scholarships for musicianship and, as a 12-year-old, I was catching trains home at 9 or 10pm. I did the classical and the grades until I was 15 and got letters after my name, but I forget what they stand for… it was 40 years ago.”
At 17 though, he rebelled and went surfing full-tilt for a couple of years. From
21, he drifted in and out of the music business, working as session musician, playing keyboards for various bands. He wrote jingles for radio commercials and taught engineering. One studio band he played in was called The Young James,
and its line-up included Harvey James, who was the lead guitarist for Sherbet, and Paul Douglas, the the drummer from Rose Tattoo.
“We recorded five or six original songs together… the motivation was to get a record deal. Playing came second to engineering; my job was behind the console. It wasn’t a passion, it was an obsession.”
The Accidental Photographer
During 2002 Mark sustained several injuries from different incidents and these kept him out of the water. So, one day, he ends up on a boat full of surfers off the NSW Central Coast. They all have compact point-andshoots with at least a two-second shutter delay. “You had to guess in advance the moment you wanted to photograph.”
Then, on a subsequent surfing trip, a fashion photographer came along for the ride with his pro-level digital gear. He went surfing and said to Mark, ‘Here, use my gear’. Mark did and filled every memory card he had. The next day the pro called Mark and said, “You’ve got a lot of good photos here, you’re a natural”.
“It was a no brainer,” he says. “I bought a Nikon D100, which was six megapixels, and laughable now. Back then, action photos were supposed to be tight, crisp and all about how good your camera was… not about how good you were as a photographer or what you could do. You could have this exceptionally tight, boring photo, and the standard comment was that it’s a really clear photo.”
As a surfer, Mark says he wanted his photos to look like surfing and the visions he had while surfing. For example, paddling up the shoulder of a wave and looking back down to the surfer, but because of the various injuries – which included a broken foot – he couldn’t do all that. He turned to different ways of achieved his vision. Different ways of including foregrounds and backgrounds. “Turning a photo into a photograph,” he states.
“The funny thing is that I never emailed any magazine editors or art directors, as
I was simply taking photos for myself and had absolutely no plans to show them to anyone.”
However, that soon changed he was ‘found’ and subsequently first published in 2004 with 16 pages in the USA magazine Surfers Journal.
“It was a mish-mash of shots,” he recalls. Some were taken with the Nikon D100 and a borrowed Sigma 600mm mirror lens that could only be focused manually and had a fixed aperture of f8.0. Next he got a
Sigma 50-500mm telezoom and then, not long afterwards, secured “a sweet deal” on a Nikkor 600mm supertelephoto. “I got it for half the money, and I’ve still got it.”
However, he wasn’t quite so fortunate with his first underwater housing, which turned out to have had a faulty locking clip. “I rocked off at Little Narrabeen into a five-foot swell and, as soon as I hit the water, the clip popped open. I couldn’t believe it, but I managed to swim back up onto the flat rock. Normally, you wouldn’t
I learnt a lot about photography in that ‘light bulb’ moment. I’m glad that I was intelligent enough to realise the value of what he was telling me.
do that, but I got straight back up. Then there is another step up before you get to the safety zone, but a set wave was coming and I got to within five feet of the safe zone. I had my flippers on the slippery ledge and the set wave took me out and dragged me for 20 metres. I was grabbing the rocks with my left hand and trying to hold the camera housing up with my right. I twisted my shoulder and was basically in tears from the pain… didn’t cry though. But I did when I opened the housing and around a hundred mil of water came out!”
Mark wasn’t insured and thought he’d just destroyed a camera body and a lens. When they were checked by Nikon the next Monday, there was nothing wrong. No water got past the seals. These days Mark is using the 600mm with a teleconverter for even tighter cropping.
“The full-frame D-SLR bodies that we’re now using basically stole half my distance. However, the dynamic range is better so they end up making a good crop body again.”
Mark also has a 600mm set-up for hand-held shooting, using a 300mm f2.8 telephoto prime with a 2.0x converter.
The Above Angle
The rare ‘above angle’ is now no longer rare, but probably never really was. There was a famous Vogue cover from December 1938, photographed by Toni Frissell.
To get her shot, it was necessary for Toni to have a small framework built in the shallow water at Waikiki so she could to look down on surfers below. At the beginning of her career, Frissell briefly worked as a writer for Vogue but was fired for her poor spelling. However, Vogue’s fashion editor at the time, Carmel Snow, saved the day and suggested she take up photography instead. She did and was one of the
Sitting in traffic is my inspiration. There’s no view, so my mind starts to tick over about a particular angle or a particular different type of photo.
first photographers to move outside of the studio for fashion photography.
Mark says he could see the camera drone thing coming and did a whole lot of “climb and take photos” views, going overhead without going up in the air. Pacific Longboarder magazine subsequently published a ten-page essay called ‘ The Eyrie’.
“I’d seen a couple of his photographs, maybe in Surfing World magazine,” recalls long-time editor of Pacific Longboarder magazine, John Brasen. I thought, this guy takes incredible photographs – the light, the composition and the look. Everybody can point a camera, but some people have an ability to capture a moment, and Mark seems to get it!
“You can see an enormous amount of care and thought in what he does. I know you can use a motordrive and pick out the best of 15 photos, but he does something extra and it’s hard to put a finger on it!”
The closest lens to a telephoto on a camera drone may be a 50mm or something close to that, but Mark uses everything from 300mm up to 600mm and longer. And he has to find the climb which will give him the over view he wants.
Visual Stimulation
Another photo essay in Pacific Longboarder evolved from long talks with the editor.
“I got a tweak of an idea about Alice In Wonderland. The pretense of the essay was to take photos with nobody around, like you’d imagine as a kid, but 300 years ago.”
John Brasen later tells me that that
Mark read Lewis Carroll’s Looking Through The Looking Glass and Alice In Wonderland to find appropriate quotes for the Wonderland feature. “It became a very spacy and cool feature. I thought it was arty and adventurous for a surf magazine, and that was all him.”
‘ The Chocolate Sea’ was another
Onorati personal project that sat around unloved for three years until it was published in White Horses magazine. It started with a guy swimming in the dark with a $20 waterproof torch for fill light, and a rising moon.
“It was very difficult to do and needed a lot of the time, but you end up with art,” Mark says while laughing. “But when it comes off, it’s magic. I’m always looking for stuff that’s visually stimulating to surfers.”
In other words, the combination of a perfect ride, with an Onorati signature background.
“From an editor’s point-of-view there are heaps of guys who swim in the surf and take really good photos,” states John Brasen. “But Mark will think about where the sun is and direct the surfer how to surf past him. He knows what the light is going to do.
He knows where he can get a lens flare or a double reflection or extra light through the lip. He really thinks about his angles. I gave him the nickname ‘Angles’ after I dealt with him for a while, and they were better than anyone else’s. A lot of photographers’ angles seem accidental, but with Mark it’s all planned. Some of the surfers who work with him say he’s like a sergeant major out in the water. I’ve been editor of Pacific Longboarding for 18 or 19 years, and I think he’s probably my favourite photographer of the lot, and he’s a character too! A few years back he was getting ten or 12 pages in every second issue because I wasn’t seeing anything better.”
A Moment’s Encounter
One day, at Nikon’s Professional Service office in western Sydney some time in 2007, Mark met an elderly grey-haired gentleman who was a retired press photographer. They got talking about the G8 summit which was happening in Sydney at the time, and attended by the then US President George Bush. Mark said he was considering going in and trying to get a different picture with his 600mm and teleconverter set-up, shooting from a long distance.
The old press shooter said, “You wouldn’t have any a hope of getting that shot. The FBI and CIA would have all those vantage spots covered, looking for possible snipers. If you really want to get a different photo, go to the nearest and best hospital, because if anything happens that’s where they’re going. I’d go and wait there, if something happens you’re going to be the one to get that photo.”
Mark comments, “I learnt a lot about photography in that ‘light bulb’ moment. Another thing he said to me was to always be ready. He always had his camera set to 1/500 second at f5.0… if he couldn’t get anything, at least he would come away with something. It was a wonderful conversation that only lasted maybe fourand-a half minutes, but I now apply that advice all the time. I’m glad that I was intelligent enough to realise the value of what he was telling me.”
Light And Composition
Mark has worked with former Surfing World editor Vaughan Blakey from his first issue of the magazine to when he recently left… about ten years and 100 issues.
That’s all a photo is meant to do… make someone pause. I’ve nailed it. Somebody has stopped to look, and that’s what a photograph should do.
“They don’t build people like Blakey now,” Mark reckons. Blakey can’t recall when he first properly met Onorati, but remembers the first time he came across his work in an article about Narrabeen in an issue of Surfing World prior to him becoming its editor.
“I was struck instantly by two aspects of his work – light and composition. He had angles of the Northern Beaches I’d never seen before… which was no small achievement, considering that stretch of coast has been a hotbed for surfing since the 1960s and has been consistently pictured in magazines for over five decades.
“A lot of legendary surf photographers are from that zone, from Bruce Usher and Albe Falzon through to Bruce Channon and Hugh Mcleod. Then, later, guys like Dean Wilmot, Andrew Buckley and Nathan Smith. I mean, you’re talking heavyweights of the surf photography game and there are plenty more who I haven’t mentioned who are luminaries as well. That ‘Onnas’ was still able to find something unique and inimitable made him a photographer I was instantly keen to work with.
“If I brief Onnas on anything, he’s usually already had the same idea or a better version of it dancing around in his mind,” Vaughan continues. “So it makes the back-and-forth an easy discussion, and the end result is always on-point. Onnas is the kind of guy who can take direction and an idea, and improve upon it. When you pick up the phone and contact
Onnas, you know something epic is going to end up coming back at you. He’s an incredible photographer who also happens to be one of the best surf photographers I’ve worked with.”
Dedication To Art
There’s a grand piano in Mark’s lounge room that was bought for him in the year of his final music grade. Before this, he’d had a “…a beat-up, junk store upright with a split soundboard that dad had polished up… he was a French polisher. It looked a million bucks, but sounded like shit”.
Mark is currently playing in a band with some old friends and, for the first time in his life, he’s doing covers. The grand doesn’t get played a lot, though, because he says it’s too loud.
“There’s no way I can play it at night, which is what I would really love to do. I have to wait until there’s no one home and I have nothing else to do… so I only get on it a few times per year.”
“To have a discipline like classical piano as a hidden hobby is a perfect example of his dedication to fine art,” Vaughan Blakey contends. “But so, also, is his ability to keep secrets, like half the angles he’s worked out from random headlands all over the peninsula to capture something fresh.
He’ll often say stuff like, ‘I’ve been waiting 23 years for the perfect swell direction, size and wind to shoot that angle’. And the truth of the matter is, he’s not bullshitting. He’s worked out every nook and cranny on every headland from the Bower to Palmy. He’s obsessive on that stuff to the point of genius.
“I think his music and his photography relate in some way, but he never openly talks about the piano thing, no matter how much I’ve pestered him. However, he did play on our Scary Good sound track for a Surfing World film in 2017, when we shot surfing by day and recorded the soundtrack by night, which was a thrill.
“Over the past two decades, in particular, as the surfing talent pool has drifted away from Sydney and up to the Gold Coast, he’s been the one constant. And, in terms of capturing the moods, essence and even the performance of surfing on the Northern Beaches, he’s been a one-man time capsule. He smokes his Champion Ruby, shoots without a tripod, has a thermos of coffee always at his side and he makes you laugh endlessly. He’s a great character and an even better bloke, and I’m stoked we got ten solid years of working together.”
Recently, Mark Oronati was in a doctor’s waiting room and was watching somebody flip, flip, flip through a magazine… an issue of Surfing World. Then the person paused at one of his photographs and spent some time looking at it.
“That’s my job,” he states simply. “That’s exactly my job, and that’s all a photo is meant to do… make him pause. I’ve nailed it. Somebody has stopped to look, and that’s what a photograph should do.”