Point Break

“Everything is exaggerated to a point of disbelief. You look at the sky and it’s bright blue. You look at the earth and it’s bright red. You look at the foliage and it’s bright green. And it excites you to no end.”

“I got excited by photography in high school when I suffered an accident and couldn’t go surfing,” says Aaron Chang, a photographer with a long association with Surfing Magazine and one who has done much to revolutionize the art of surf photography. “My friend’s father put a Super 8 camera in my hands and I started shooting movies of my friends surfing. We processed film through Kmart and two weeks later the film arrived in the mail. That day when I looked at that roll of film with my friends changed my life.”  

Chang and his friends were in the habit of watching 16mm surf movies. It was a revelation to him that he could make one himself. Soon he was playing around with waterproof housings for his movie camera. “I went to the hardware store and bought silicone and started sticking stuff together. For the trigger, I drilled a hole in the Plexiglas and glued a balloon over it.” His tinkering set him off in the right direction. His experience as a surfer and his contacts in the world of surfing, combined with an original vision—the up close and in-your-face perspective—all helped to launch his illustrious career.

But it didn’t happen quickly. After graduating high school he found himself embarking on the surfer’s equivalent of a pilgrimage when he went to Hawaii with his father. “I fell in love with Hawaii. As a young kid and a surfer, you are going to Mecca. Everything there is exaggerated to a point of disbelief. You look at the sky and it’s bright blue. You look at the earth and it’s bright red. You look at the foliage and it’s bright green. And it excites you to no end.”

Though Chang now has a thriving apparel line and a gallery in Solano Beach, CA, which opened in February 2009, he has certainly paid his dues along the way before attaining his current level of success. His first job in Hawaii was taking pictures of tourists at luaus. Chang first felt he could make a go of it as a photographer when he began working for Impact Images, a company that was raising the level of postcard photography while at the same time using improved printing technology. Chang shot a variety of imagery for them including many landscapes.

Along the way, Chang paid a visit to Surfing Magazine to show the staff his surfing films. They challenged him to see what he could come up with in the way of still images. He accepted the challenge and soon was earning a $75 per month retainer. Eventually he became the magazine’s senior surf photographer.

Chang points out some of challenges that a surf photographer had in the late 70s to get a good image. Color films were still new and the choices were limited. Kodachrome 25 was the choice for professionals, as Kodachrome 64 did not even exist yet. Today’s wide array of fast telephoto lenses was just something a photographer could dream about. Chang says the standard lens was a Century 650mm f/6.7, a movie lens he had converted to accept a Nikon mount. Of course, there was no such thing as autofocus. And, besides contending with slow films, slow lenses and manual focusing, he had to custom-design his own housings. Now he happily embraces what digital camera technology offers, not the least of which is no longer having to get out of the water and change film after every 36 clicks of the shutter.

A favorite image of his exemplifies his style of surf photography (see above) and at the same time highlights the importance of Hawaii to him and to his photography. It’s an image of renowned surfer Kelly Slater at the world famous Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu. Chang describes the spot as the epicenter of the surfing world. It’s a shot he had imagined on previous visits. However, he had hesitated to attempt it until all the elements seemed to line up perfectly, as he knew he was placing himself in a position where he could easily get hammered by a wave.

Chang worked closely with Slater, so closely that you might call this kind of image the result of aquatic choreography. Both photographer and surfer are aware of what their relative positions need to be with respect to the breaking wave and the setting sun for the image to work. Chang says that a top-notch surfer, such as Slater, can control his speed and hold back if necessary so that everything lines up perfectly, as it did in this image with the wave towering over Slater as the sun reflects off the water in the foreground, backlighting the wave and creating a fiery glow in the sky.
While this image captures a lot of what Chang is about, an image of surfer Flynn Novak, also taken at the Pipeline (see right), highlights how precise the choreography needs to be. Both surfer and photographer need to intuit an imaginary line to be traversed by the surfer so that Chang can be close enough with his wide-angle lens to capture the surfer and the tube of the wave and not have a collision. Chang will often use a fisheye lens for such a photo and says he is often just three or four feet from the surfer as he goes by.

“It’s a three-dimensional choreography,” says Chang. “You have to move into the prime position in the water so that as the surfer arrives within three or four feet of you, the wave also arrives at its optimal position.” Even with a great deal of experience, luck and perseverance are essential parts of the process and Chang may well need to make dozens of attempts to get the shot he needs. And a few of those runs may even entail a desperate dive to avoid a collision and a bit of pounding by the waves while he’s at it.
Chang’s resourcefulness extends beyond imagemaking. He discusses the circumstances that eventually led to his successful surfing apparel company. He had photographed a romantic image of a couple. He went to the print shop and copied the image to heat transfer paper and then transferred the image on to T-shirts with a hot iron. His friend went to an apparel convention—The Magic Convention in Las Vegas—with six such shirts and returned with an order for $30,000 worth of them! From that fortuitous start Chang’s apparel company now supplies surf shops with T-shirts and swimwear.

As I spoke with Chang, he was preparing for the inaugural exhibition of his new Solano Beach gallery. He mentioned that it was a busy time as finishing touches are being done on the gallery, prints are being made and framed and promotion of the opening is in high gear too.

Chang says he is enjoying seeing so many of his images blown up to four or six feet and in some cases as large as 10 feet. Some of those large prints originated as 35mm slides while others began as digital files. He shared his secret formula for getting such a huge print from a 35mm scan—successive up-rezing in Photoshop. He says sometimes he up-rezes in five small steps to get the file size he needs and gets a better file than if he had done it in a single step. I asked about his digital files too. He mentioned that he had been shooting with a Canon EOS 1D Mark II, an 8-megapixel camera, and is yet to find a size to which he cannot enlarge an image.

He also mentioned that a two-step up-rez usually does the trick with a digital file. Chang is using Fuji LightJet prints in his gallery and is also experimenting with a new capability—image-wrapped surfboards—and hopes to be able to offer them at the gallery.

While Chang’s big break was quite literally the broken ankle that temporarily sidelined him as a surfer and caused him to pick up a camera, it has been Chang’s ability to find opportunities and make the best of them that has allowed him to successfully navigate a career as a photographer and a businessman.

Chang’s name recognition is a great asset to the photographer. As his apparel clientele discover his photography and his photography clientele discover his apparel, it creates a synergy between his endeavors, which will help his work move to the next level when his gallery opens. Another project that Chang is excited about is also in the works: his first book, which he is writing, in part, for aspiring photographers, who often contact him wanting some advice. Also in the works is a series of online tutorials that will be available on his website—www.aaronchanggallery.com.

Writer/photographer Larry Brownstein is based in Los Angeles, CA. He has authored several photography books, is represented by Getty Images, Alamy and California Stock Photo and has a growing wedding and portrait photography business. His website is www.larrybrownstein.com.