One seriously chilled dude
Being a surf photographer is tricky enough, but chooses to shoot surfers riding the waves in freezing Arctic seas…
For me, photography was a natural transition from doing art at high school. I grew up hiking and climbing, but didn’t just want to be an observer. I wanted to record nature, and my interest in photography developed from there. I didn’t study photography at college or anything, I am entirely self-taught, and started taking photography seriously when I was about 20. No, not at all. I started shooting on film. Most surf photography was taken on Ektachrome or Fujifilm Velvia film when I started, because it enabled you to really push the greens and blues. I switched to digital because I was just losing too many images when I was shooting in the ocean, compared with other photographers. My first digital SLR was the Canon EOS 20D. Yes, but I was more into the body boarding side. I grew up in Pismo Beach, a beach city in southern San Luis Obispo county, in the Central Coast area of California. I had always been drawn to nature as a kid, and originally wanted to be a landscape photographer, and studied large-format landscape photography. It just seemed really hard to make any money from it though, especially for a kid starting out. So I decided to combine my interest in landscape and nature photography with my interest in surfing. I think my interest in landscape photography has given a different perspective to my surf work and enabled me to get in the ‘bigger picture’, if you like.