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surfing lifestyle is more about exploring new frontiers and appreciating the beauty and power of nature than performing radical manoeuvres.

You've got to be fit and con­fident enough to dive under and swim through waves, and not get held under for to, long. You have to be careful that you don't actually get sucked out of there by the wave, you don't land on the surfer, and that the surfer's board doesn't hit you. You're got be really alert about a lot of things when you're swim­ming in the ocean.

When you're shooting with a wide-angle 20mm lens; in the barrel, you've got re be able to time exactly when the surfer's coming towards you and inside the "tube. You've got to be able to position yourself with the lens facing him so that when he comes past, you fit him and the wave in the frame, and crop it correctly. So often Von have the lens positioned wrongly.

It takes years of practice to be able to time the exact moment to photograph a surfer cruising along a wave. Surfing photography requires great discipline to wait for all the right conditions to come together

Most photographers shoot from the land with a huge telephoto lens using a converter, but sometimes the surf's too far out so you've got to swim to it. You have to make a decision: whether it's better to be swimming or standing on the land. On a surf trip, you've got to make the most of it as soon as you have a good day because quite often you might only have one good day. Then again, you might get and every day might be good — but always got to think and work as if each day could be your last and only day.

You have got to make sure the surfers realize the importance of working with the photographer, so that they don't just do their own thing. There's no use them doing all these great manoeuvres but not doing them in front of the photographer. So you've really got to talk to the surfer,

you have got to be giving him an idea. Even give your camera so he has an idea of what distance from the photographer he need to be when he makes his various manoeuvres.

You have obvious problems when swim­ming with a water housing — you don't want water droplets on the front port when you're shooting. Every photographer has to learn little tricks on how to keep the water off, like the coating of car wax on the front of the perspex port and then pol­ishing it off with a cloth. The other prob­lem is your equipment fogging up with condensation. If you don't seal your water housing correctly you can swim out and then realize that it's leaking, and you'll have condensation fogging effect. You also risk the chance of drowning your equip­ment which happens quite frequently.

Regarding light, one way of shooting a surfer running a backlit wave — where the sun shining through the back of the wave makes the colour grain and the surface very dark — is to have a water hous­ing where you actually have a flash. The other way is to just expose for a full grain back-lit wave so that the surfer will be silhouetted out. This gives a totally different feel to a front-lit photo where you have beau­tiful colours and the wave fluid on the surface.

With experience you will learn to solve most problems yourself. because most of Surfing photographers don’t give away what they know. So if you want to learn. You have got to get out there and watch what the guys are doing.

Some photos you want to look dramatic, whether it's the wave that makes the image look dramatic, or the surfer falling off his board or falling off the top of a wave. Sometimes you go for the beauty of the surf and the sport itself, meaning the style, the position of the surfer's body, his arm, the position of the surfboard.

Sometimes a beautiful portrait will convey a feeling. You want a portrait to convey something about the person. Like, when you get a nice portrait of the surf­ers who normally look very mean — of­ten it's hard to get a picture of those guys smiling or laughing. But then you get your surfing characters who are really funny guys, comedians, so that you can do some­thing a little bit crazy with them.

Another part of surfing photography is the landscape surfing shots, where you might have a big cliff in the background and you'll have one wave peeling perfectly and a surfer just paddling towards it. Or you'll have a fisherman sitting on some rocks in the foreground and behind him you'll have a surfer riding a wave. The essence of a good surf photograph varies from one image to another.

The top surfers always provide plenty of exciting manoeuvres for photographers to capture, but often surfers and photographers work together to ensure that the moves are performed in the best place for an exciting picture. Professional surfing photographers are also interested in capturing the power and beauty of the wave, part of the appreciation of nature that's so intrinsic to the surfing lifestyle

Surfing is not a sport, it’s a lifestyle , so that’s one thing you are always looking to communicate. Surfers develop a special understanding, a special closeness with the environment. In your surfing photos you always want to convey the beauty of the ocean, the beaches and the landscapes because it's something very special. Quite often atmospheric shots convey the beauty — like an image of five waves taken from a cliff top, five waves all peeling perfectly and in synchronization with each other.

Some places are better than others for conveying the actual power of the ocean. The Waimea Bay shore break is one of the most photographed waves in the world. The swell there gets huge, and the waves that break on the shore are amazing. But every beach is different, every wave is different. There's always a different feel­ing, a different vibe that you're trying to show in your photographs.

Padang Padang in Bali is the favourite palace to capture the adventures of surfing. It's an amazing wave in that it can be photographed from so many different angles, and in every photo it can look so different. You can stand on the top of a cliff looking down on a surfer, shooting photos that look like they've been shot from a helicopter. You can walk out on the coral reef and look front-on at the wave and the surfer, be very close to them and get a totally different angle. You can swim in the barrel with the surfer and get an action shot, with the cliffs in the back­ground. Or you can photograph the guys from a Zodiac — a rubber dinghy you position right where the waves are break­ing. Padang Padang is one of the best places in Indonesia to surf, and probably one of the best waves in the world.

What's really important — probably the most important thing — is that you learn to surf first. You also need to have a good Understanding of the ocean because surf­ing photography holds a lot of dangers.