Radical Wedding, Dude!

We met Melissa and Taio through some friends on the North Shore. Melissa and Taio actually met out surfing at Sunset Beach, while Taio was working as a lifeguard, and Melissa had just moved to the Islands. We photographed their beautiful wedding at a private home at Velzyland, near Sunset Beach, which was a lot of fun. It wasn't until some time later that I came up with the idea of shooting a wedding couple in formal attire on a surfboard, and immediately thought of Melissa and Taio. They are both good surfers, they're naturals in the water, and they are so attractive that it's hard to take a bad photo of them.


Melissa loved the idea, but she was a little worried how her mother might react to trashing a new wedding dress that took a lot of time to find, and considerable work to customize by hand (not to mention the not-so-insignificant cost). To her credit, her mother told her to go for it. She said Melissa would never wear the dress again, but the photos would be a great keepsake for them. Taio didn't think twice about wearing his classy new three-piece suit in the salt water. He never liked suits anyway.


We had a blast with the shoot at Laniakea, in beautiful clear water with nice little waves. I rode a big stand up paddle board alongside the wedding couple. The timing was a bit hard, and there were several out-takes, what with hanging onto the camera, paddling, while shooting, and riding the board. I found that kneeling gave me a nice low angle, and was fairly stable. The deck pads on the paddle board are great for setting the camera down while paddling.

Most of the surfers in the water tried to ignore us (surfers are just too cool), but one surfer did say, "That's a first!"

Taio shot back with "We're looking for the preacher...you haven't seen him out here, have you?"


Check out the "making of" video below, which gives some idea of what it took to get these shots, as well as being pretty good comedy.

Music for video: "Island Style" by John Cruz
(used with permission)

Thanks to John Cruz for allowing the use of my favorite song, to Melissa and Taio for an incredible job, and to Melissa's Mom, for being so cool.

Click here to see more wedding images by Tor Johnson Photography.
Click here to see a previous wedding blog entry.

A New Twist on Surfboard Building

Local legend shaper Eric Arakawa is starting a new surfboard company called Arcomi (a modification of the Greek archomai, for "beginning"), in the Waialua Sugar Mill.


It's a different sort of board company in that it's based on the craftsmen involved. There are no "ghost shapers" here. Each person involved in the process has a name and a face.


With the current trends toward the "pop-out, made in China" and the "pro-board-stretched-to-your-size," Eric and his crew are going back to basics, back to a time when you knew your shaper and glasser, and they made you a genuine custom board for your style of surfing that made you really want to go out there and surf.


The idea is that these guys all work together to develop new ideas as a group. They are making some unusual designs, and doing some classic work like old school glassing and pin lines. I've been shooting quite a bit of material trying to document the creation of their project.


Eric is a very creative guy, and he came up with some interesting ideas for photographing the surfboard building process. I liked his idea of light coming out of a resin bucket so much that Eric and I ended up taping a Speedlite to the bottom of a paper bucket and shooting his glasser, Fermin Lagonell, pouring magenta-tinted resin onto a board.


Since the resin has a very short working time, we knew we'd ruin the glass job, so we used a reject board and just kept pouring resin onto it. I think we came up with something unusual, a new twist on the theme. Now if I can just get this resin off my camera gear....