The greatest surf photographer of all time?

Art is subjective. Isn't it?

Brian Bielmann is a legend. He is the oldest photographer shooting from the water right now. He has seen technologies come and technologies go but he is still there. In the water.

“I first started shooting water at Pipeline,” he says. “I remember moving out there in 1978. I surfed that Spring and thought, ‘ok next season I am going to be on every single swell!’ I was doing photography at the same time but I’d always say, ‘I’m gonna surf for an hour and then shoot. I’d never come in.’ And so winter came around and I paddled out on a bigger day at Rocky Point. I got pitched over and hit my head on the reef…basically almost died…and so I was sitting in the hospital with all these tubes coming out of me and that was it. It was gonna be photography.”

Brian Bielmann took his camera and his long lens and made his own housing and started swimming fearlessly. Capturing Gerry Lopez and Shaun Tomson and Marvin Foster and getting them famous. Getting famous himself.

The years passed and digital cameras became popular on land and Brian Bielmann thought, “enough of this film garbage” and switched over to a Canon Mark II. Nobody else was doing digital in the water. He swam and shot and captured an image of Andy Irons 3x world champ flying above the lip in Indonesia. The image was made into a billboard and everyone saw it and everyone switched to digital.

Maybe too many switched. Brian says, “Everybody started shooting digital and everybody started shooting fisheye. I never really liked shooting fisheye. I like shooting long lens where you see the whole wave. The roof of the wave and the ceiling of the barrel. You can see how big it is. Back in the day I remember Ted Grambeau yelling at guys shooting fisheye to go in because it makes everything look the same. It makes a four foot wave look four foot and an eight foot wave look four foot. Some guys are great at it and get amazing angles but too many people are doing it. I love the long lens look…”

And so Brian shoots long lens but he also loves to shoot underwater shots. Is getting even more famous because of it. “I love the underwater stuff,” he says. “It keeps me going and keeps me doing something really different. There are all those shots of surfers in the tube, which are really cool, but I’m also shooting different stuff. My wife is really pretty, I’m happy to say, and I do some mermaid shots with her. There is this thing called Flotilla in Waikiki where there are hundreds of surfboards, boats, legs and I swim underneath and capture all of that…I still love my backlit Pipe days but the underwater stuff gives me a new direction and allows me to stay in the water. I definitely don’t swim out on those crazy north days anymore.”

Since he has been around so long, knows the past and is the past, where does he see the future? “I think a lot of athletes are going to start getting into photography and put themselves places that we haven’t been. It’s just like surfing. People are taking off differently at Pipe, doing things that wouldn’t have been possible in the past. Now there are guys like Russo who, he definitely has a screw loose but is pushing the limits…”

And Brian Bielmann’s future will continue to be amazing underwater images and long lens amazingness. His future is beautiful.