Lately I’ve had the urge to shoot some new outdoor and active lifestyle images and decided to start with a little surfing, something I’ve shot relatively little of aside from my Still Stoked series on older surfers. I knew I wasn’t going to get great action shots around here that could compete with all of the amazing images you see of big wave surfers screaming down the face of Mavericks or Waimea Bay, so I decided the action would be secondary and set my sites on creating some very natural, photojournalistic images that conveyed the feeling of being out in the water. The first person that came to mind at this point was Vanessa Yeager, a talented and enthusiastic longboard surfer I met while shooting my recent Far West portrait series in Venice earlier this year, and whose daily surfing activity I’ve followed on her Instagram. So I messaged her and a couple weeks later found myself treading water at Blackies, a popular break by the Newport Beach pier.
When I first arrived the waves were small and mushy, the light flat. I wasn’t sure how things were going to go and was beginning to worry I’d made the 1 1/2 hour trip for nothing. Vanessa and her husband knew better though, leading me up the beach past a couple jetties where we found a decent swell. Around that time the sun started poking through the clouds and I knew we were good to go. Although the waves were a bit fast, for an hour or so things were pretty near perfect. Best of all, since the conditions had been poor only moments before, there were only two other surfers out there with us, creating the feeling that she had the whole place to herself. Rare circumstances these days anywhere on the California coastline. After an hour or so of shooting the scene darkened as sun dipped behind a wall of clouds on the horizon. Just then the after-work crowd started showing up and we knew it was time to call it a day.
It was a short, but successful outing. These are some of my favorites from the shoot.
