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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Photography Culture

Joey Tichenor Documents the Surfer Lifestyle

Chris Gampat
No Comments
03/27/2015
3 Mins read

Last Updated on 03/27/2015 by Chris Gampat

Wet like a dog

All images by Joey Tichenor. Used with permission.

“In 2011, I was getting tired of the work I was shooting in Minneapolis both professionally & personally. I wanted & needed to create a fresh body of work to help stand out a bit in my midwest market.” says photographer Joey Tichenor about his photos of surfers. Like every photographer, Joey goes through dry spells of creativity and needs to evolve to become better. For some of us, that means shooting a totally new type of work.

“A lot of the guys that I admired shot environmental portraiture & documentary work which is where I wanted to focus my energy towards rather than the work I’d been doing. I decided that the best place to do this would be out west in California. I also wanted to see if I could build a network of photographers, agency & art buyer contacts out west in hopes of moving there one day.”

Joey tells us the story in his own words after the jump.

Tony & the Spyder

I arrived in LA in 2012 with just a few contacts & a friend of a friend who was awesome a let me crash at his pad for a few months. The house I stayed at was in Woodland Hills, just over the canyon from Malibu, so all I had to do was get up early, ready my gear & hit the beach to meet people.
The first times I went out, I hit Topanga beach in the morning and didn’t have much luck (flat surf), and in the afternoon I went to Venture up north. When I got to Ventura, I took out my lighting gear and walked the beach with a beauty dish on a C-stand looking for folks willing to allow me to make a portrait. Thats where I met two awesome folks who would become great friends. Julie & Clayton. Clayton is originally from Vancouver BC and Julie was from Detroit, Michigan.

Load em up and hit the road, leave Montana buired in the snow

It was easy to make a connection with them being that I’m a Minnesotan (were practically Canadians eh, and Michigan is one of our college rivals) It was thru them that I was connected to this larger community of surfers and given the opportunity to follow them around the beaches of SoCal.

I started out this project with a very loose idea of what I wanted to shoot. I knew very little about the actual culture of surfing other than what I’d seen on movies as a kid. I did know that I was looking for a niche within this culture to document. Thats when I heard the term “Dawn Patrol” from the guys at the morning surfing sessions and it stuck in my head. The Dawn Patrollers are the die hards who seek out the first waves of the day, and to me that means the most dramatic light for a series of portraits or action shots. Just the niche I was looking for. Many of the images were shot between 5:30-7am when the light is naturally amazing.

Venice Beach AM Surfer

When I got back to the midwest and started going through the work, I tried to group it all into one project I called “Into the Ocean”, but the work had a varied look to me and I decided to break them into two different portfolios.

Beach Characters

One was the lit beach portraits that became “Dawn Patrol” and the other one was the more hip shot, natural light type shots that you see in my lifestyle portfolio. I returned again in 2013 to shoot more of the surfing work & fine-tune the previous work. My new friends allowed me to stay with them so, for example, if they were going to Manhattan Beach at 5am, I was there to follow and tag along and be right in the action. The other images of Venice, the skate park, Joshua Tree and such are to show a broader scene of SoCal. There’s so many characters out there you could shoot for a lifetime and not even dent the surface. My goal with the current images is to make books that I show to local agencies in effort to shoot more documentary lifestyle work commercially.

Drop in

Meditation & waves

JT_ManhattanGulls2RE_gallery

Las Virginas

JT_KissB42015_gallery

Jeff Ho

The meetup

JT_ClayMan13_gallery

Tribute to Phil

california documentary Joey Tichenor Photography surfers
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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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