Behind The Scenes

17 . 08 . 14

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that some new (and particularly summery) images have been appearing on our website and social media feeds over the past few weeks. But what goes into getting these shots? Unfortunately it’s not always as simple as just heading down to the beach to get some waves; we have to wait for a number of elements to come together, including a nice small swell with light winds, sunshine, surfers who are willing and able to wake up very early in the morning, and the right tides for the breaks where we want to shoot. We try to avoid crowds and do our best to surf at dawn so that everything is front-lit with a lovely soft light, so you can imagine that we end up spending an awful lot of time in the run-up to these shoots feverishly checking various surf and weather forecasting websites.

Thankfully, though, everything came together in mid-July and (with a little bit of burning the candle at both ends) we managed to surf on three consecutive mornings with our friends Rebecca Pepperell, Chris Brunt and Sarah Bentley. They were joined by James, Chris and also our friend Luca (who was visiting to build his own surfboard with us), which meant that the line-up was full of wooden surfboards and that Becky, Chris and Sarah could swap and change to ride whichever board they preferred. Mat swam around with his DSLR in a custom water-housing, and on the last morning we were also joined by Simon his camera and a long lens to shoot from the beach (we’re extremely fortunate to have two photographers available to us here) so that we had two angles of each wave to choose from.

Rebecca Pepperell waxing up the 9’6″ Pier before the sun has had a chance to properly get above the horizon…

And gliding serenely through the early morning mist on her way up to the nose.

We think that Chris Brunt has buried about 6 feet of his inside rail here, which is a remarkably powerful bottom turn for a wave that is only chest-high!

If he wasn’t riding a wave, then Chris was paddling hard hunting down peaks.

Sarah is an incredibly stylish surfer and has a killer roundhouse cutback. Here she uses the extra planing area of the 5’10” Fetch fish to flow through a really nice turn on the sort of summer wave that most surfers would struggle to generate any speed at all on.

It’s always worth a bit of extra paddling to get a peak to yourself.

We are lucky to have such a wonderful group of good surfers willing to meet us at the beach so early in the morning who will paddle their arms off in order to get as many waves as possible and ensure that we get the shot. We are incredibly grateful to them, and hope that they are as stoked on the photographs as we are. Take a look around the site (particularly the homepage slideshow) if you haven’t already seen the new imagery, and hopefully, the few extras above will have you setting your alarm clock early next time there are waves on the horizon.