Behind the Shot
"Born and raised in California, seeing the sunrise over the ocean was totally strange to me." Max visited the mostly landlocked New England state of New Hampshire in the middle of August. Ranked 46th in size at 9,000 square miles, New Hampshire has only 13 miles of coastline. For those brave enough to handle the cold, fall is the best season for surfing. Between the occasional late-season hurricane or the more-frequent nor'easter, there is some quality surf to be found for those patient enough to wait for it.
Being this was August, though, conditions were a bust. "There was no surf, and we wanted to surf so bad! We had short boards, and there was just no way to surf without long boards there. The sun was coming up and there was this one surfer out there. Waves would come and he'd let them go by. This dude was super relaxed. One hand on his thigh, sitting on this 10½-foot longboard, totally chill. I was running up and down the beach trying to find the shot. There were five or six other surfers out there and I wanted to get them out of the shot and get him lined up with the sun. He was a lot farther out than anyone else 'cause his board was so big.
"This shot is just so cool to me because the sun is rising up over the water. And yes, that's a duck out in the water. I just love this shot. It's one of my personal top five favorite photos. Unless you knew, you wouldn't know that this was sunrise. The sky was just going crazy, a lot different from what you get on the West Coast at sunset.”