How we make stoke

Big thanks to the crew over at IN THE HILLS for the following quote:

“Mulling it over, I couldn’t articulate it fully but definitely, 

I knew I had become lazy, really lazy. 

A spectacular sloth by the standards of shooting film. 

Film is hard. 

Film is a stone cold unforgiving killing bastard. 

Film is once in a lifetime, no excuses. 

F8 and really, really be there: 

ready, steady, in focus, correct exposure, 

and pressing the shutter in synch with life.”

Doug Menuez 2.0 Go Fast, Don't Crash

Photo: Hughie

Add to the quote above, the following for summertime surf shooting elements - salt air, sand and extreme heat. All natural enemies of film. Oh and hard light, blue bottles and skin cancer. Which makes this image even more special. Nana Brine and GfG ripping on their coolites at Kirra about 1963.

How stoke is created.  Start the journey as a toddler in the brine with your folks on a little hunk of foam. Get the feel for currents and moving across the wave. Graduate to "borrowing" your older brothers' boards when they are out chasing girls. Save up your pocket money and buy a second hand dinged up tanker that you can call your own. Then you purchase your first new board and the stoke of putting on that first layer of wax. 

And so it continues - custom boards, surfaris, close encounters with fear - until eventually you're too old to carry your own board and you return to bodysurfing again. Back where it all began. Still in the brine. Still stoked.