The Lowdown is a roundup of surf travel and industry advice from some of the best in the business, kick starting with a true Dream Team of special guests. Introducing, Lewis Harrison-Pinder, the Editor of Wavelength Surf Magazine.
Lewis Harrison – Pinder
Top tip to get into the surf industry: These days the surf industry can seem a bit like an over subscribed private members club. There’s a lot going on behind that velvet rope, but if your name’s not the list, you ain’t getting in. With surfing being a somewhat idealistic lifestyle choice, the thought of earning your bread and butter being involved in something you love is rather appealing. My tip? Get ahead of the pack. Look at what’s on the horizon. Remember life before social media? Nah, me neither, but at some point in the last eight years Social Media Manager has become an actual job you get paid for. If you knew your engagement from your reach back then, laughing. Ten years ago shooting a surf film meant dragging an eight person film crew around the planet. Now you can get cinema quality footage from an off the shelf DLSR and in front of millions of people before your hair’s dry. A few years guys on the beach with (relatively) cheap stills cameras were getting HD, slomo highlights online before the WSL, what do you think they’re are up to now? Some guy called Bob once said “The times they are a changin’” and if you can position yourself in the right place, at the right time, ready to offer something that people didn’t know they even needed last month, that’s how you’ll find yourself in the inner circle of surf industry. Knowing what’s going to be the next big thing? That’s the tricky bit.
Top surf photog tip: Make friends. All those good surfers you see in the mags literally HAVE to go surf. It’s their job. The other part of their job is to get people to shoot them. They want it to happen, they NEED it to happen. Once you’ve got to a level of photography where you’ve had a few shots published or you’ve been racking up those Instagram likes, give the pro’s a shout. A Facebook message here, an email there, wait for a decent swell and arrange a shoot. Most of the time these guys will be surfing somewhere anyway. Before you know it you’ll be living the surf photog dream and find yourself squeezing into the back of an overweight estate car with 14 boards and four surfers en route to the Outer Hebrides.
Favourite app: Podcasts. Travel, shooting, sleeping, sharing rooms and having several hours of downtime everyday requires entertainment and if you’ve exhausted your Spotify playlists, there’s podcasts on all sorts of random stuff. From learning some new photography techniques to boring as hell essays on the history of the Ottoman Empire. They all have their place, subscribe to a few and rack up several hours of the spoken work on your iPhone ready for when you’re bored out of your mind in the eight hour of your layover or to drown out the “how do you even make noises that loud” of your room mate’s gravel-in-a-bin snoring. And you might learn something.
Top Travel Hack: Airport lounges. Every time. A couple of brushes with long haul business class flights have changed the way I treat the airport routine. See all those people sitting around in departures? Fools. See those sheep crammed into the bars and restaurants dropping coin on over priced beer and nachos? Idiots. Obviously the kind of tickets that let you take a left on entry to your next Airbus jaunt do fall into the crazy money category, there’s other ways in. Check your bank account extras, for £20 or so a month I’ve got full travel insurance and access to Airport Lounges the world over. But what’s so great about a lounge? Sounds like a room full of chairs and TV’s? Well, I’ll tell you. Free booze. If you like a beer or six before your flight then you’ll make the money back in one visit. There’s also free food, beds, showers and sometimes massages, spas, cinemas and pools too, if you’re into that sort of thing.
You can muse at more of Lewis’ ramblings by subscribing to the beautiful Wavelength Surf magazine.