Yess! The latest issue of Submachine Magazine
..and there's a 8 page feature of PhotoCPL images in it!
Love the extra leg in this shot!
The future is bright
The Champs! Pia and Maya
And deeennn, virtually on Pacific Longboarder; a nice wrap up of the 10th Annual Loggerheads
Sadly there is no surf magazine in New Zealand anymore. We have a rich history of surf publications dating back to the 1960's. At the height of print we had two bi-monthly glossy titles, New Zealand Surfing Magazine and Kiwi Surf Magazine both successfully vying for readership and lucrative advertising dollars. They came out in alternate months, so effectively the NZ Surfer had a monthly hit of stoke. I was a part of this era, for 15 years I lived and breathed surf print creation. I worked for NZ Surfing Mag, starting as the advertising manager and staff photog, working my way up to Editorial Director/Senior Photographer. I loved my job. Fellow NZ surfers are always surprised at just how un-surfing the job was. They saw the glam side, which was less than 40% of the actual job, the photoshoots and travel. The other 60% + was story creation/curation, photo editing/selection, contributor wrangling, overseeing all aspects of production [design and layout, print runs and press passes], distribution, merchandising and marketing. When I left the magazine in 2008 we had an audited readership of 119,000 + readers per issue. But all that means very little now. It's not sad because I don't work for a surf mag anymore; it's sad because that lineage of print is broken. While I've done my time, I firmly believe there is space for some sort of NZ Surf Print to still exist, maybe even thrive.
Photographs are meant to be printed. A screen compresses and flattens the detail, to give you a guide; a digital photo is taken at 45 megapixels, then to get it down to screen resolution we have to sheer out 7/8ths of that information. The images above- they are under 1/8 the quality of the original file. It's quite shocking aye. I'd argue that online reading is the same, the articles we read online are grazings of the bigger picture, we consume soundbites. The printed image and word tended to be in-depth, long form, whereas online we know less about more stuff.
For print, television [live broadcasting] was always lorded as being what would kill magazines. It didn't, it never could, magazines were able to delve into being pieces of art themselves, kudos to our graphic designers. The inter web is killing both. Again it's super sad to see the axing of TV3's News Hub and the dicing of TVNZ's News Departments. It leaves the Kiwi Fourth Estate in tatters. Of course there are friends that would proclaim both these entities, and all mainstream media, are simply mouthpieces for governments, a hard claim to refute considering what's going on Gaza currently. Even so, there are journalists that were passionate about the independence of the Fourth Estate, that, did indeed hold politicians and corporations to account, that now sadly have fewer and narrower means to communicate that.
Jeez, that's a rant, simply brought on by getting a dozen images published- sorry.
FROM THE BOOK STORE
And me? Well, I'm highly evolved, I make books, since 2008 there have been 11 NZ Surf/Beach books made and reprinted. 2024 sees our most ambitious title being made, but I'm not allowed to talk about that- just yet. One of the constant slow burners is not a book, it's the second incarnation of the NZ Line-Up Print Sets.
