Throwing it back to Mexico here with this video I shot/edited in July 2011. This was from a trip I did with PJ Raia and Tyler Vaughan. We ran across a heavy crew of East Coast chargers south of the border getting their fill. Not only were all the boys paddling, but Rob Brown was soul arching in some big barrels, wtf!
I just watched this and got really psyched! Is that ok to say about your own work? Click play, you won’t be disappointed.
So I’m going to stray away from explicit surf scenes and share some portraits, lifestyle and people for this whole week on my Instagram account @ryanstruck. Here are today’s first three, Jonathan Mincher, Fergal Smith and Rob Brown. These are some of my personal favorites from the archives. Be sure to follow along on Instagram to see everything including Mexico, the New York Quicksilver Pro, Nicaragua and more.
Come on out next week to Picture Farm in Brooklyn for the opening of Within Sight a photo show to benefit Waves For Water. Participating photographers include: Dane Peterson, Nick LaVecchia, Todd Glaser, Chris Burkard, Zak Bush, Ryan Struck, Matt Clark and Chris Pfeil.
Eastern Surf Magazine put together a collection of my images along with audio captions in their newest Behind The Glass photo feature. Make sure your volume is on (or OFF haha). I’m stoked! Please click the photo above or here to check it out.
Here’s a roll of black and white 35mm I shot while in Tahiti. So many times I feel the need to “get the shot.” With digital you can shoot everything and have the selects at your finger tips 2 minutes later and uploaded and emailed 10 minutes from that. Digital makes the photographer physically feel like he’s getting the shot, “Bro I just filled like an 8 gig card, I got the shots brah. 10 frames a second, yeahhh.” It’s important for me to step back from that, slow down and take my time.
I was slacking a bit on developing a few rolls I had sitting around but once I got the negatives back I really can’t explain the excitement (only a photographer knows the feeling). While shooting film your mind is tuned into a different place, your thoughts are whimsy but focused and your photos are imperfect. With a digital slr and a large memory card you can shoot something to death until you really nailed the moment you think best represents the scene. With film, well, you hunt and peck and almost press the shutter. And then youuu, almost press it again. Sometimes you will just downright let that moment pass. You find more raw scenes as a film shooter and once you see the negatives (not the back of the camera) you see the beauty in your candid shutter finger. Something just out of place, the falling lip a bit too behind your rider, an improperly exposed image. Everything that’s wrong are things of beauty and these are the moments that are real. Digital isn’t an accurate representation of reality, it’s perfect. The pixels are smooth, the colors are ripe. Life isn’t.
It may be kind of sacrilegious to shoot film and scan it for digital consumption but really shooting film is about finding a different space in our photographer brains. It’s inaccurate to say film is for hipsters and their lomo cameras, though I may agree with such prejudices tongue in cheek. Film is dying definitely and sometimes I wished I was working solely in the medium, however, I cannot shoot on film and pay the bills. I can do that with digital though. So you see it’s an interesting take on an art I’m still trying to understand.
On that note, I think maybe I’ll Instagram one of these. Yeah I just threw up in my mouth a little too.
Ryan Struck Photography 