I can't sleep…
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
— Susan Sontag
“Getting tossed around by shorebreak and slammed into the sand day after day is a rough go; Clark Little wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, for the North Shore local, it’s all in a good day’s work. But the Waimea addict didn’t grow up snapping shots with his father’s camera like so many photographers do. He instead set out to capture his longtime stomping grounds when his wife came home with a framed photograph of Waimea shorebreak, an image he figured he would be able to easily replicate. Having never owned a camera, he threw a cheap “waterproof” casing over a cheaper point-and-shoot and headed out to the beach. Since that first attempt, Clark has not only emulated his wife’s purchased wall art, but — with a gallery in Haleiwa and international recognition — has become a heavily respected fixture of wave photography.”
Check out his images on Clark Little Photography
Thank you Evelyn
Don’t quit on this short film…
Darren Jew: “I’m fortunate enough to have spent the last 30 years of my life capturing and sharing the marine environments of the world. Of the things that I have photographed in my life, I enjoyed photographing the ocean the most. It’s my love. It’s my passion. The creatures within it. The way the light falls within the sea. To be able to capture that and show people what can be achieved with photography under the water is one of the things I love to do. I’ve been in the water with people that have seen whales for the first time, and their mask has been filling up with tears. It’s been that powerful of an experience. Every swim with a whale is different. I’m still in awe of their power and their grace and their acceptance of me when I’m in the water and what they offer up in terms of photographic opportunities. From a young age I’ve wanted to do exactly what I’m doing now. Every time I get in the water, I remember how lucky I am…I am trying to show images of the moments that are most important to me. The ones that have touched me. The ones that I feel are the most descriptive of the experience that I have when under the sea. Whether it’s 8 or 10 animals dancing in the beautiful sunrays. Or intimate moments with a calf interaction. Being able to share intimate moments with these animals is a real privilege…The thing about the Sea is that it is usually pretty silent. So, to have the sea full of whale song is like nothing else. There is no other experience that I could think of that is like it. It vibrates through your body. Literally, you can feel the sound. It is probably one of the most poignant experiences you can have in the ocean. The best encounters with whales are the ones where they are interested, curious about the swimmers in the water. And they’ll come up – look you in the eye. And that’s quite a profound moment. It’s like no other feeling that I’ve had before…Even after 30 years of seeing these amazing creatures in the ocean, sometimes I still have to remember to take pictures because I’m too busy of being in awe of what’s in front of me.”
The Wall Street Journal: Photo-Op: Color Field:
“Everybody dreams of soaring like an eagle, but few consider that they probably wouldn’t be alone in the sky. The 200 photographs in John Downer’s ‘EarthFlight‘ offer the exultant wing-to-wing camaraderie enjoyed otherwise only by fighter pilots and birds themselves, juxtaposing graceful avians aloft and stunning landscapes beneath. To infiltrate the flocks, Downer and his team used…hang gliders, ultralight aircraft and the ‘vulturecam,’ a miniature remote-controlled plane disguised as a bird. Even more unusual were the tiny cameras they mounted on the backs of trained birds, such as a bald eagle that banked and wheeled above the Grand Canyon…Six continents and all four seasons are represented: A squadron of barnacle geese cross wintry fields on the south coast of Sweden, the pale shading of their feathers mirroring the snow cover below; a common crane (above) surveys the bright stripes of a Dutch tulip farm in the spring…(and) Hovering over the roofs of Rome, a cloud of starlings forms a dark calligraphic blob like something from a painting by Miró—a startling reminder that birds are always there, whether we notice them from the ground or not.”
