Croyde Session

Posted on November 7, 2011

The new issue of Carve is out and I have been lucky enough to have a few shots published in the issue (thanks uncle Roge). Amazingly they are all from the same session, a nice three foot day at Croyde in September, which is quite unusual (for me). There are a myriad of reasons why a shot gets published and it is often difficult to explain to surfers and amateur fotohogs why their ‘shot of a lifetime’ does or doesn’t make it. For surf mags the first prerequisite is the shot must be big enough to publish and be correctly exposed, (ie shots from your phone are no good for a dps – double page spread). Shots must be well lit and framed as well as containing awesome surf and/or mind-blowing action. However it doesn’t stop there, very few stand alone shots are used in the mags, because most of them are telling a story as part of a feature, a report or a travelogue, so they need to illustrate some key points in the text (the winner of a comp getting the wave of the day, or the guy or gurl on wave of the day, for example).

Magazines are expensive to staff and publish, the cover price barely covers the cost of distribution and profit for the newsagent, so most mags rely on advertising to survive and therefore have to form a partnership with the regular heavy investors. It might not be pretty but it is a fact of life. In normal speak that means that the advertisers get coverage of their team riders in editorial. Lastly magazines aren’t thrown together, they are a balanced entity and for a mag to ‘look’ right it has to have a mixture of lefts and rights, airs and carves, line ups and lifestyle – to be a complete. Plus most pages have the nose of the board pointing towards the crease in the centre of the mag, it just looks right. Lastly most of the shots published in UK magazine are taken by a handful of jobbing pro surf fotohogs, they have the rep and are struggling to earn dollar from one of the most difficult careers to pursue in this country of the most difficult light. If your shot is up against one of theirs then they will get the page everytime and rightly so. Anyway, there are more factors conspiring against you getting your shot in the mag than just a getting a pic of you screaming through a bullshit barrel. Have a look at the ‘best’ shots from the September session at Croyde and then checkout Carve to see which ones made it, then try to figure out why.