"This was supposed to be my winter to really shine," says the water photographer, who snapped his wrist mountain biking in Canada shortly before the start of the North Shore season. "I thought for sure I would lose my contracts and would be stuck shooting from the beach all season, getting the same boring photos as everyone else. The week or two doped up on pain killers was playing a big roll in my emotions because once I got off those things, I snapped out of my funk, quit my bitching and started training my left hand to hold that heavy water housing." The upshot? New angles! Here, John John Florence, Backdoor. | Photo: Brandon "Laserwolf" Campbell/@laserwolf.photo

How to: shoot Pipe left-handed!

By Derek Rielly

8 years ago

Pipe water shooter snaps wrist prior to season. Photos improve!

Imagine this. You shoot water for a living. It’s a perilous game, sure, but enough to keep the damn wolves away from the door. And it’s s a great life. You swim and you’re front row to the best in the biz.

“I’m not stacking paper but my bills are paid, my kids taken care of and I’m travelling the world doing what I love while calling Hawaii base camp,” says Brandon Campbell (aka Laserwolf) whom I claimed, yesterday, had taken the best big-wave shot ever. “I wake up every day and do whatever I want. Surf when I wanna surf, shoot when I wanna shoot. No one telling me to shave my face, tuck in my shirt, where and when to be.”

This year, howevs, his craft was imperilled when he went mountain biking with his thrill seeker pops in Canada just before the start of the North Shore season.

“The old boy is such an animal when he gets on a bike so I was just doing my best to keep up,” says Laser. “I had work contracts lined up and I didn’t want to risk getting hurt. But I didn’t listen to my instincts so I went on the trip and ended up snapping my hand half-way off my arm and doing a ton of ligament damage,” says Laser. “I flew home for surgery and my hand is still held together by a metal bridge plate and a bunch of screws. I can’t bend my wrist in any direction and it took a while to get control of my fingers. It wasn’t just your typical broken wrist that heals in a month. I was going to be one-handed for the entire season.”

The dazzling hand-surgeon Dr Aimee Perreira got Laser back into the game with a toolbox of screws and wires.

Laser says he sank into a depression. “My shooting hand! My only means of providing for my family! A baby on the way. The high cost of living in paradise.” Also, he says, “This was my winter to really shine. I thought for sure I would lose my contracts and would be stuck shooting from the beach all season, getting the same boring photos as everyone else on the beach.”

Once he binned the painkillers, howevs, Laser got his old hustle back.

“Once I got off those things, I snapped out of my funk, quit my bitching and started training my left hand to hold that heavy water housing,” he says. “I kept the injury under wraps and, fortunately, none of my contracts started till November so I had almost two months to adapt. By the time everyone showed up to the North Shore, I was 100% with my left hand and just sort of played it off as a minor injury. I was still in pain and was risking doing long-term damage if I smacked my injured hand on the reef or even if I just got tossed around too much in the water.”

And the effect?

“It was a blessing in disguise. I’m getting different angles and now I can shoot with either hand! My photos went up a notch! Blessing in disguise? Yeah, it was.”

Balaram Stack Pipe — “I kept the injury under wraps and, fortunately, none of my contracts started till November so I had almost two months to adapt. By the time everyone showed up to the North Shore, I was 100% with my left hand and just sort of played it off as a minor injury.” Balaram Stack, Pipe.

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Noisy fireworks from a frizzy blond!

Crème: John John’s Salute to 2016!

By Michael Ciaramella

8 years ago

Surfing you must see to believe!

This video affirms two long-held beliefs.

1. John John is the best surfer in the world (sorry, Dane).
2. Competitive surfing is soooooo dull.

The contrast between the front half of this clip and the back is startling. John wins Haleiwa surfing to maybe fifty percent of his abilities. He then loses at Sunset with aggressive, committed surfing and flunks at Pipe because of poor wave choice.

But the second half of the vid… by gosh some of the best surfing I’ve seen. Better than Dane in Sampler, better than Jordy in …whatever his movie was called. It’s just fantastic! Full speed, full-rail, full commitment in waves of power and pain. No one looks more comfortable on a surfboard than a jersey-less John.

At the end of the clip he states, “I’m gonna go after another world title, one-hundred percent.” While this thrills part of me — for I want nothing more than a decade-long duel between John and Gab, wherein the white man eventually reigns supreme — another part can’t help but wonder what we’re losing in that pursuit. I know I’m not alone in that.

For instance, Albee Layer had this to say after being asked about his and John’s battle to land the first backside 540/720: “[John] showed me a clip of him over-rotating a backside spin, and I showed him one of me doing the same thing. So it started a bit of a battle. I mean, I think if he put half the energy I did into it he probably would have made it, but this year he just shifted his whole focus onto contest surfing. Which personally, I just hate [laughs], thinking about the progression he could do for surfing.”

John is great for competitive surfing, but he’s an even greater barometer for what’s physically possible in the sport. If he’s working towards titles, that means he’s at least partly forgoing the pursuit of progression. Woe is me.

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"I like how you can feel the raw and beautiful energy of the ocean. It's like the image is alive," says the Hawaiian photographer Brandon "Laserwolf" Campbell. "My friend Casey Decotis, who got me into photography, once told me that a good photographer can bring anything to life through a photo." | Photo: Brandon "Laserwolf" Campbell/@laserwolf.photo

Is this the best big-wave shot ever?

By Derek Rielly

8 years ago

Has a drone reshaped the game of big-wave photography?

Have you seen this photo of smallish Waimea Bay doing the rounds? It was shot a week ago by the North Shore-based photographer Brandon Campbell (aka Laserwolf) and posted on the website Surfline. I saw it and felt a twang and I ain’t felt since the daring Rosy Hodge wore underwear for a Stab shoot three years ago.

Best big-wave photo?

Yeah, I can’t think of anything remotely as filmic, as textured or as spectacularly dramatic. When I asked Laserwolf about it, turned out it was only the second time he’d ever flown a drone (“Call it beginner’s luck,” he says), that he used to think drones were a tool of oppressive governments (“I was convinced it was a government conspiracy to get us used to the idea of them buzzing around all the time before Big Brother really gets in our grill”) and that there’s actually a hierarchy in the sky among the drone operators, something he found out when another photographer’s bird flew under him.

“I’ve put in my time and earned my spot in the hierarchy at Pipeline but what about the air?” he says. “Am I a newbie all over again? Will it be another five years before I’m established and can bark at invasive droners?”

Laser says he got into the drones after seeing the former Surfing magazine gun Corey Wilson’s skill as a pilot.

“Corey Wilson was getting some really cool photos this winter,” he says. “He definitely inspired me to mix it up. A photographer like myself can’t just be posting the same beautiful, blue tube shots all the time on Instagram. Also, a lot of the brands I work with have been asking If I can shoot drone stuff. I think it’s becoming the new standard to have in your arsenal. Full on weapon of mass creation. I broke my hand really bad back in September (Editor’s note: more on that tomoz!) and have to go in for one more surgery so I’m stoked I’ll have something to keep me occupied while I’m out of the water.”

What kinda drone gets you a photo like this? Laser got in close to the entry level with a the DJI Phantom 4 Pro. With a stock 20 meg camera, a few batteries (they last 25 minutes each), a screen and a controller, he spent two-and-a-half gees. A good investment? Yeah, he’s thrilled.

If you look real close at the photo, you can see Mike Ho, Reef McIntosh, Ross Clark Jones, Eden Saul and “the usual Waimea suspects,” says Laser, adding, “I just really like how you can feel the raw and beautiful energy of the ocean. It’s like the image is alive. My friend Casey Decotis, who got me into photography, once told me that a good photographer can bring anything to life through a photo.”

How big is it? This is where the drone angle deceives.

“It wasn’t huge, maybe ten-to-twelve feet, but still plenty of energy,” says Laser.

Not that he’s claiming it deserves to be in the pantheon of greatest big-wave shots. “I’m honored you like it,” he says, “but I think the best big wave photo ever taken was of Sion Milowski by Daniel Russo at one of the outer reefs here in Hawaii. Sion was on a big, vibrant blue gun shaped by rhino chaser extraordinaire Bret Marumoto. The wave looks one hundred foot and Sion is absolutely sending it. I surf that wave a lot but I’ve have never scored it bigger then twenty feet and I don’t think I want to either. I can’t even imagine it any bigger then that. It must have been such an incredible thing to witness in person.”

Sion Milosky Daniel Russo — Maybe this shot of Sion Milosky at Outside Himalayas in 2010 is the best big-wave photo ever?

Laser thinks for a moment.

“Wait, I take that all back,” he says. “The best big-wave photo ever taken was that iconic shot of Greg Noll standing on the beach in front of a pumping Pipeline, shot by John Severson.”

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Sockie, Biggie and Sabre Norris. Startling! | Photo: Campbell Brown

BeachGrit TV: Sabre Norris’ Sugar Dreams!

By Derek Rielly

8 years ago

Come visit the family who defeated ordinariness!

It was two days before Christmas when an eleven-year-old girl called Sabre Norris gifted me the true nature of family. While my own house of cards was collapsing in a welter of sorrow, the foundations made rotten by poor husbandry, hers was exalting in each others’ complexities.

The mother of the four remarkable kids, Brooke, looked at me at one point, maybe we were talking about home-schooling or maybe it was when I walked into the backyard and was in the shadow of a mega skate ramp and three other smaller half-pipes, and said, “We’re actually very straight. We’re not alternative at all.”

In the surf, I’d asked Sabre, whom you’ve seen on Ellen, Today Show etc, what grade she was in.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been to school. I don’t even know what it looks like in a classroom.”

For the Norris kids, Nazzie, Biggie, Sockie and Sabre, family is a shelter, the walls steeled with respect and love. Each kid has a role, each parent has a role (Brooke is the firm matriarch, pops Justin the juicy clown), and the pack just… succeeds.

My spirit was lofted into the air when Sabre wrote her own version of our day together.

I figured a story on Sabre would make a slight diversion in our Like Bitchin‘ TV series. I brought along the director Luke Farquhar and photographers Stefan Hunt and Campbell Brown to spotlight, in documentary form, the path the family has taken, and Sabre’s virtuosity at everything.

Watch!

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Gerry Lopez: Rekindling the Flame at Uluwatu!

By Michael Ciaramella

8 years ago

Thirty years later, a surfing legend returns to an entirely different Bali

Gerry Lopez is a living legend. He was a Pipe Master before that was an official title, was one of the first Americans to surf the storied Indonesian reefs, and he’s Bendier than a day-old Twizzler. That was an obscure dual reference to his yoga proclivities and current place of residence in Oregon.

Back in June of 2015, Gerry took a trip back to Bali — his first time in thirty years. As you can imagine, much has changed since his initial sojourn to the Spice Islands, wherein the Bukit Peninsula was only sparsely populated and surfers had just began to discover the wonderful waves on Bali’s southern tip.

Gerry’s return was sparked by a yoga convention that would be held atop the cliff at Temples and led by Gerry himself. The program was presented by Project Clean Uluwatu, an initiative that encourages local people to keep the sacred temple immaculate through proper sanitary and waste management techniques. So far, they’ve succeeded in construction bio-septic systems and creating wastewater gardens for the Uluwatu region.

The More Things Change (below) was made possible by Patagonia, a company that seems to do everything right — ethical manufacturing, maintaining stringent environmental standards, donating copious cash to charity and providing exemplary customer service — and still manages to stay afloat. I’m not sure how they do it, but more power to them.

The film is beautifully filmed and produced, and offers direct insight to the mind and body of a surfing hero. Take a half hour out of your day and give it a watch. Regret this you will not.

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