Board Shaping

Florida Shape Off at the 2011 Surf Expo in Orlando, FL. This was a competition between Floridian shapers to replicate a board shaped by Joe Shriver. The shapers were in a plexiglass box where everybody watched them and took photos. I've been wanting to shoot shapers for a long time and this was a great first attempt. The winner is Mike Whisnant out of Jacksonville.

Pahokee County

My friend Thomas Rahill goes to North Carolina School of the Arts, one of his professors is shooting a documentary and needed some footage of a small town in southern Florida. The documentary is about Alphonso Smith, a kid who grew up in the small dirty town of Pahokee County but is now an NFL player and plays on the Detroit Lions as a cornerback. The town is surrounded by sugar cane fields and is on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, the town is all project housings and is so small that you can drive from one end to another in less than ten minutes. We drove down there and only had an hour or so of light left to shoot. We did a lot of drive-by type filming because this type of footage was needed for the documentary. These are a few video stills from our adventure.

Marathon Key Turtle Hospital

Around 10 years ago my family and I stayed at this motel with a turtle hospital connected. We went back this winter and the motel isn't for the public anymore, instead it's used to house staff for the hospital. We went on the public tour which brought us to the pools and tanks where the turtles are in rehab and are recovering from surgeries where debris may have been pumped out of their stomach or where their shells are being repaired and weighted if they got damaged.

Winter in the Keys

I went on a family vacation to the Florida Keys during the coldest week in Keys history. It was too rough to fish so we did plenty of tourists activities and this gave me an opportunity to practice shooting more film. I shot in the No Name Pub which is a dark pub with thousands of dollars on the walls and I tried some long exposures and did my first double-exposure on film. These were all shot on a Minolta x-700 35mm with either Ilford HP5 400 or Kodak Gold 200.

Myakka

Driving home from Sarasota to Ft. Pierce on a foggy morning. I drove by this at about 70 mph but I quickly turned around and stood on my truck to shoot this. It was around 11 am so the sun was out but the fog was still so thick it made the whole sky white.

Tommy Tant Surf Classic

The first weekend of November was the 11th Annual Tommy Tant surf Classic in Flagler Beach, FL. It was a two day event and I shot both days in the freezing cold weather including at night for the Red Bull Night Riders session. I shot film and digital and have too many photos to post on this blog, you can look at the rest of them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dylanjohnston/sets/72157625393238641/

Special thanks to my cousins Justin and Jen Wilmot who let me crash at their place and to Braddigan from Dispatch and the entire Tant family.

Ice in the Studio

These are shots from my studio lighting final. The concept behind these photos is the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I used objects that are from the Gulf or represent the Gulf and froze them in water until they were solid chunks of ice. This is my way of telling people to preserve what is left.