If Thoreau Surfed

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, 

perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. 

Let him step to the music which he hears, 

however measured or far away."

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Week - 5

"A ship in port 

is safe

but that is not 

what ships 

are built for".

Anon

Quote Week - 6

"Travel is the only thing

you buy

that makes you richer"

Anon

Windsong

Some days 

you just want to lie on the deck 

and soak up the rays

and others

well

you feel the pull of the tides

 and the caress of the wind 

on the waves

and so

you unfurl the main

check the stays

check the larder

and let go the anchor.

Sunday Drive

Aloha Nikonos

If I count my phone, I have nine working cameras and one car to chuck them all into. 

My absolute toughest, go anywhere, quasi indestructible little light trapper is my second oldest camera, the hard working 35 mm Nikonos V which is 30 next year. 

It's taken a lot of beatings in the impact zone and never botched one exposure. While I've tumbled across the bottom of Granite Bay screaming quietly for a breath of air, not a drop of moisture has gotten inside.

This pic courtesy of Wikipedi

So I figure it deserves a little holiday over in WA with Margaret River surfer big Corey from the TooMuchFunCollective. Aloha little orange marvel and BIG thanks.

Film x film

A roll of 35mm film 

and 

a single shheet of 5x4" film.

One in a controlled studio environment.

The other at the whim of the ocean

and the talent that 

occasionally glides across it...

Something Borrowed

Continuing the bridal theme - "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" 

Today I'm borrowing a few old film shots from my first blog, Brine Time (all 793 posts are still able to be viewed).

GfG at Granite riding the ancient Joe Larkin pig mal with no leggie. It was old even in 1984 and weighed a ton - an epic to carry around all of those points. Didn’t used to see many mals in those days. A couple of guys from the Alex Headland crew, but that was it. The Larkin is awaiting restoration.

GfG at Granite. Probably same session as the other shot. We’d backpack around to the outcrop overlooking the furtherst cove. Surf. Shoot. Come in and scoff down a Mars Bar and a Coke and go out again, eventually returning for a massive pancake and maple syrup lunch and game of Space Invaders (20cents in the slot machine) at the little shop at the entrance to the National Park called The Noosa Wave.

The second shot above is one of the ones that accompanied a story I wrote about Noosa that was published in the Switchfoot II book.

Something Old

This week's theme (as endorsed by brides around the world): 

Something old, 

something new, 

something borrowed. 

something blue 

Today's contingent consists of 35mm films scans from last century ie OLD.

 California dreaming. Huntington Beach Pier, January 1978. Handheld. Manual focus. 200mm. Kodachrome 64. This guy was getting barrelled and hanging five and having grown up with short boards, I had never seen anything like it - nobody was riding longboards anymore on the Sunny Coast.

Mooloolaba Rivermoth. Sunset late 1980's. These pilot boats had twin Rolls Royce engines and were quite a sight heading out when there were large swells. Somehow they would pull up beside a monstrous tanker and the "pilot" would scamper up a ladder and then guide the newcomer into Moreton Bay and the Port of Brisbane.

Hand held slow exposure with a Metz strobe that still works fine today. This was our local evening stroll on a sunday evening, when we lived about a kilometre south. A couple of times the rivermouth silted up and you could surf from Point Cartwright down the river, whilst avoiding boats.

Kings Beach, late arvo. Nikonos V 35mm Kodachrome. This was the camera I used to shoot from the water with and must have had a frame or two left on the 36 exposure roll. I quite like 35mm focal length on a 35mm camera -  little wider than normal but not too distorted.

I was never much good at street photography, but quite like this one. Of course the Kiosk is long demolished and replaced with some sort of bland structure.

The Clutter

I was smiling the other morning. 

The Spring sun was poking through the industrial jaggness that is the horizon here in the burbs as a huge garbage truck pulls up outside, grabs our rubbish bin with an evil mechanical claw, hurls it into the air and slams it back onto the footpath.

I'm smiling at the surreal nature of this weekly ritual.

I'm smiling at the fact that I go to work to earn money so I can pay somebody to take away clutter that I paid for with money I earned. 

I'm smiling because I'm stupid and I know it.

If I bought less clutter, I could spend less time working and more time surfing or shooting surfing or writing about shooting and surfing and clutter.

Simple.

Not.

My clutter habit is deep seated, beginning with a childhood where money was spare and luxuries non-existent. Add to that a lifetime of exposure to advertising with luscious photography promising an illusory life of wonder.

And so The Clutter creeps back. A shirt, a lens, a fin on sale. A DVD, a CD an MP3 here and there. Some new wine glasses. A bottle of red. A bottle of white. A bottle of authentic Canadian maple syrup for those pancakes only eaten once because I'm trying to get healthier and fittier. A bunch of film in the refrigerator past it's use by date for a variety of cameras busted out once in a while.

Clutter.

And so I do the Spring Clean again.

Until next year.

Most Heroes Are Anonymous

 "Most Heroes Are Anonymous" the shoe slogan read, back in the day when I actually ran (as opposed to this morning's uncoordinated puffing shuffle).
Clever. Had me hooked. Still like it.
As a concept anyway, but not as a sneaky advertising gimmick designed to vacuum more debt out of one's "credit" card.

In the greater scheme of things, most of us would be lucky to know a couple of hundred other souls traversing Life.
To the rest of the planet, we are anonymous. Randoms. Faceless. Without a story.

But heroes no less to those we care for, to those we inspire, to those we love.
And that's enough.

Game Changer

The photo above was taken with a Nikonos 35mm film camera.

A lot of people get excited about film.

But not me.

It costs money and time waiting to see if you got the shot. And the camera above is manual focusing, manual film wind on.

Film does have it's time and places, depending on the light, the emulsion (affordable digital still can't replicate infra red mono film for my money) and the intended final use. 

I still use four film cameras including a 1936 6x6 and a 1980s Nikonos with two different lenses to shoot out in the water with. However, I mainly shoot water surf using a bulky DSLR in a robust professional housing.

But today, one can now buy a digital version of the legendary underwater Nikonos, complete with interchangeable lenses, small size, large resolution and 10+ frames per second. It's a game changer.

Hot Buttered

It starts with a young fella travelling up to the Gold Coast to learn the foam mowing trade under the guidance of the legendary Brian "Furry" Austin (RIP) at the back of Kirra.

Along the way, it intersects with the brains trust that was Hawaii in the 70's and the air brushed surealism of Martin Worthington. It now spans two generations of surfing and includes movies to boot.

It is Hot Buttered Surfboards.

Beneath the eyelids

Monochrome Monday (onshore)

Buddah, books and upselling

Tip of the sanding planer to Torsten from the Wood Buddah blog. If you can spare ten minutes have a read of the amazing work he's doing in the middle of suburbia, taking a high tech approach to wooden surfboard building. 

I'm hoping to have another surf or three with you sometime, mate.

Speaking of suburbia, my book of the week is George Saunders' collection of short stories called Tenth of December about a fictional world resembling the bleak underside of the American Dream - folks just hanging in there from pay check to pay check, in dead end jobs while hoping, wanting and ashamed that they don't have More - meanwhile their cars break down, their kids are unhappy that they're they don't have jack and all manner of distopian dysfunctional disharmony besets the protagonists.

Why is such a bleak reverse-Disney milieu so entertaining you ask? Maybe it's cathartic. Maybe it's strangely satisfying that despite the wondrous, desirable reality presented in TV makeover shows; Fakebook "status" updates (even the taxonomy has an elitist air) and TV "reality" shows, our own humdrum existences and daily struggles don't seem so bad.
Maybe there's lots of other folks like us losers out there.
Maybe it's a reminder that we don't have to buy things we can't afford, with money that we don't have... to impress people that we don't like.

Maybe I'm overthinking it and it's just blues music for the eyes.

Saunders is just such a great writer - observing the bleak, post-Afghan War,  post-GFC landscape but with dry, cracking humour and after all, those with the Power can take a lot from us but they can't stop us from laughing despite it all. They can't stop us from making jokes about them.

It also reminds me of the futility of comparison or as Theodore Roosevelt said: "Comparison is the thief of joy". Have agreat weekend.

Doublers

Before I saved enough pocket money for my own second hand crate at age 10, we had one large men’s bike to share amongst the six of us kids.

We younger kids couldn't reach the peddles, so we became adept at "doublers" where one of us would sit side saddle on the main horizontal bar and the other would sit on the seat and steer.

It was a real trust exercise and luckily we never had any major accidents or "neckers".

Today's post is dedicated to my siblings. I still can't believe one of you used to ride over the rest of us Evil Knevil style!

Spring, baby

Continuing the Spring theme, here's a surfer born in Spring.
This is a combo Kodachrome slide sandwich of GfG via a cumbersome rig consisting of manual focus, manual wind on 35mm Nikonos with an external dive strobe.
Now don't blink or run me over in the dark, brother.

Losing One's Marbles is Optional

I've known my best mate since he moved into our street when we were both nine years old. Unlike me, he's a goofy footer. I have archives of classic shots of him and although this old shot is not him, it reminds me of the wave of the trip my mate scored in the Maldives. As I'm paddling back out at Sultans, I get caught inside as he comes screaming across the reef at high speed on his bright orange Southcoast longboard. 

The sight of him way above me as I duck dive is etched deep in the memory bank. We rate our surf sessions in marbles, as in "that was a two marble surf".  If you don't surf enough, you'll lose your marbles (go crazy). I'm pretty sure that Sultans session was a three or four marble surf.

For some reason, foggy mornings like today remind me of an epic day when my best mate and I were teenagers editing our sociology video assignment at university. We thought our "mockumentary" parody of Academia was pretty awesome after one whole day of editing. The lecturer, a famous person from The Film Industry, deemed it "unfit for human consumption". We took that as a compliment.

Happy holidays, buddy and get some marbles back in the barrel.