I’ve been preparing a bunch of images these past few days to enter into the now very prestigious
RedBull illume. I know that the competition is going to be very, very intense this year, to win this event, so I’m not by any means, getting my hopes up. Just simply entering what I have and see
what comes out the other side. :) This portrait here of Jamie Obrien is one of my entries.

Jamie Obrien - poker face

I’ll feature more in coming posts

Jamie OBrien just took out the 2010 Volcom Pipe pro surfing event right here at Pipeline, on the north shore. This is just a quick report right now. I’ll file a more detailed one later. The results were:

1st Place: Jamie OBrien
2nd Place Anthony Walsh
3rd place: Mark Mathews
4th place: Danny Fuller.

I grabbed a few more clips and threw ‘em together on iMovie. Nothing too fancy, but its entertaining…

Sean

Wow, what a crazy few weeks, it’s been here on the north shore lately. There’s been so much going on round the place. Finally Christmas came around we got the north shore back all-be-it for a week or little more. So quiet round here at the moment, even with a Waimea swell happening today too. Most out of town surfers have left already, but there will be more waves of surfers here before you know it. The season’s only half way through right now. Lot’s more come yet…

Just thought I’d take a look back over the week that was chaos, ridiculous traffic, countless barrels, a world championship, a couple of total Pipe legends, another back on the rise. Life on the north shore mid December. Doesn’t get much better. Here’s a glimpse into not necessarily the Pipe masters. The focus is more on what was going on around the Pipe Masters, with this report. Enjoy

Aloha

Sean

Jamie Obrien pretty much rules Pipe at his leisure these days. He just go’s out there and does stuff with such effortless ease, that just baffles you. He paddled out to Pipe on our first big day of swell for this season and caught this ridiculous barrel just half an hour into his surf. Enjoy!

Sep 25th was quite the opening day at the Pipe. The swell had come in mighty strong the night before and ploughed out a decent amount of the sand which so often ruins the early season at Pipe. By daybreak, there were bombs to be had, all be it with weird lumps and double ups thrown in for good measure. Just before the sun popped it’s head over the hill, Jamie pulled into one mighty deep, intense pit and made it back out by the ultra slimmest of margins. Pretty amazing ride for anyone, let alone your first wave of the season, after only just paddling out. Siiiiiiiiick!

I shot this one of Jamie Obrien a few years ago, using an assistant, swimming with a remote flash. The concept is simple. My camera has a transmitter on it and the flash has a receiver attached so that when I fire my camera, the flash will trigger at the same time. Most photog’s who have used this technique tend to fill the frame with the action. I wanted to show the beauty of the sunset, so I made that the main feature of the image with the flashed subject small in the image. The surfer is non other than modern day Pipe master; Jamie Obrien.

Got down to Jamie Obrien’s front yard in front of Pipe at “a sparrow’s fart” this morning. For those of you, not familiar with Aussie slang terms, “a sparrow’s fart” is “the crack of dawn”. It still wasn’t looking epic or anything, but there were sporadic moments of greatness happening, so I set up my rig and proceeded to document the proceedings.
Jamie Obrien interestingly enough surfed while wearing a helmet with a camera on it, as well as a backpack with the recording gear in it. He kinda looked like an extra from oneof those cheap space super trooper movies, ya know…. Film Maker Freddy Malone decked him out with the camera gear for Jamies new production which is rumoured to be called “Who’s job?” Anyhow, he went out there and proceeded to catch the best wave of the day. I consider myself pretty familiar with Jamie’s radical and talented approach to surfing, so even I was surprised when he took off on a bomb and got super deep to the point where all’s usually lost and I said “Oh, I wish he was gonna come out of this one” and then…… he did. Amazingly, my hands had more faith in him, because I caught the whole sequence. ha ha. Both Michael Ho and his son Mason were out and getting amongst some decent set waves. Michael not showing any signs of slowing down at all. He was ruling out there this morning. It was good to see Randal Paulson back amongst it and he didn’t disappoint either with some of the best waves of the day. Pipe resident surfer/lifeguard; David Wassel”-hoff” scored some pretty mean waves at both Pipe and the door and Matt Gorman got probably the best pit at Backdoor. yew!

It’s another one of those “too big for everywhere except 12 foot windblown Waimea” days, so I’m going to show you a handful of the images which I had in the new book about Pipeline. Surfline recently published a large coffee table book, simply called “The Pipeline”. It’s an amazing 200 page package that covers everything Pipeline. Quite a large number of my images made it into the book. Here are just 11 of them. enjoy.