Photos and words by Chris Peel (as told to Gra Murdoch)

My old boy Shane always had a camera in his hand – photography was always around when I was a grom – so I naturally picked one up, but what lit the flame for me, when I was around 17 or 18, was that I really wanted to go to all the beautiful destinations that I’d seen in surf movies. 

I didn’t have the cash nor the surfing ability for people to pay for me to go to these spots, so I kinda put two and two together and figured out that if I went as a photographer, I could get access to these amazing locations and get to experience all the epic stuff on offer, just by having a camera in my hand. 

So, really, I started off using the camera as a tool to get to these places, and still kind of do. I’m 29 now so it’s been getting me around for over a decade now.

For Chris, photography started as a means to an end, and here he is enjoying the 'end'.

I guess I came into surf photography pretty much at the same time it was becoming less and less viable as a way of making a living, so like many of us I’ve adapted along the way. Photographing guests surfing up in PNG morphed into becoming a surf guide, surf coach, and dive master. You put the time into an area, as well as study for your qualifications, and it opens up more opportunities, like guiding on super yachts and what have you. 

I’ve spent a lot of time in PNG, Sumatra, and all parts of Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, central America, Panama. COVID’s sure as hell put the brakes on that for now though.

I’d spent a big chunk of time in the South Pacific on a 23-metre vessel, so when COVID hit, it was like, “Hey, I've got all this sea time, time to go back to school.” I spent four months in Tassie at the Australian Maritime College - and hanging out a bit with Stu Gibson and some of the Shippies crew - and got my Master 24 and Marine Engine Driver qualifications, which means I can I can commercially skipper vessels less than 24 metres in Australia. 

But it’s really all branched out from photography, and for me it comes back to photography, which I really love, and want to improve on and diversify.

For now I'm just riding out this COVID wave, getting all my qualifications tied up as much as possible. I'm surfing a heap, hanging out in Oz, and trying to expand my photography knowledge as much as possible, and find new angles of interest in it.

If you’re up that way, Chris is hosting a photo night at the Noosa Festival of Surfing, Thursday 20th May: exhibition, Q&A, beers etc. Introduce yourself to this top fella and say Swellnet sent ya!

This was in July in Bali. We’d just had a week of really uncommon and extreme rain. Waterfalls were pouring off the Ulu cliffs. With all that atmosphere, you know when the sky breaks, there’ll be some good light. This was captured in a brief ten minute window one morning where Mt Agung popped out, and for a while it all felt like 1978.    

South Pacific. We’d just discovered this spot. We’d been surfing another wave (that’s about ten minutes away) for years, and this had been under our noses the whole time. The first thing I like to do when we get to a new spot is to get ashore and pay my respects to the locals. In this case I’d been in to say G’day and was just about to head back to the boat, and snapped this. The kids out on the reef had actually been belly boarding. They've lost their belly boards and are retrieving ‘em. They were catching the in-between whitewaters – hadn’t figured out how to hold a line in the pit there just yet!

A lot of people think this is an afternoon shot but it’s super early. We rocked up and knew the surf was pumping. I sent Andrew (Captain Andrew ‘Undies’ Rigby) out in the dark and told him to wait for the perfect time, and that it had to be a bomb set. You should've seen him, like a kid with a bag full of lollies he’s not allowed to tuck in to. Anyway, the light turned on and a bomb came through, and Andrew went. 

This is Andrew again – he was basically my model / crash test dummy for a few years – at a really clear water location we have. It’s REALLY heavy, shallow, and tricky. You either make ‘em or you get swallowed whole. I had the shot in my head where I wanted to get a hand drag so made him pull into a bunch of closeouts. He’s actually bleeding a bit by the time we got this one.

South Pacific. We found a wave and everyone on the boat was pumped, going ‘We’re the first people to surf this spot’. Twenty minutes into the session, this fellow comes out along the reef, a wave approaches and he does this duckdive. I'm like, 'Holy hell, we're not the first surfers here, hey!' The guy didn't speak English so we had a yarn in Tok Pidgin. He told me that he actually hadn't seen other surfers and this was just how he rolls. He was intrigued by our fibreglass boards. We gave him a go at one. That was a really special day for me.

The lovely land of Java! It was huge and terrifying. I'm not going to name the break just in case I put some people off, but anyway, it's got fire coral all over it. Anthony Walsh was the only guy on it, and he got some hell ones.

This about three years ago. We had a very bizarre swell, and headed north for it. This was one of those days where by the end of it we were just all surfed out, sunburnt, beers open, and old mate’s just fishing, setting the scene. He’d been hanging out all day pretty much, watching us surf. 

This is Beau Young on the mid North Coast. I had this shot idea in my head for quite a while where I wanted a surfer on the nose in the barrel, but not showing the body.  This image is a bit of double-edged sword for me because the surfer’s not sharp. But I dig it. We've got a few variants of it.

Another of my bread and butter shots. This would have been about my second year in PNG. This time Andrew wasn’t allowed to surf because I wanted an empty lineup. I didn't actually think too much of this shot initially, it was a bit dark, but after lightening it up a bit in post, it’s ended up being one of my most popular images. 

This is a WWII Japanese torpedo bomber – a Nakajima B5N, known by the Allies as a ‘Kate’ Bomber. These guys allegedly ran out of fuel and had done a water landing – that's why the prop’s still intact. The poor fellows, we're guessing they survived the landing, but they landed just in front of a leper colony, so all up it would have been a shitty day. This has still got live ammunition and oxygen tanks on board. It’s spectacular. Three seats. The guy in the front pilots, the guy in the middle drops the bombs and there’s a tail gunner.

This spot actually only breaks once in a blue moon, but when it does it’s both epic and super heavy. Mega Semadhi makes it look easy, but the consequences of error are severe

This was in British Columbia, about five years back. A fairly full-on four-hour boat trip in, and the coldest conditions I’ve camped in, but worth it. And Pete Devries is a legend.