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Swell Five and the Marathon Man

It was o dark thirty on the second day of swell event number five on the Gold Coast, in the middle of the El Nino 2009-2010 season. I was gingerly working my way down the spiral stairway which leads down from the aerie which is the loft bedroom that overlooks one of the beaches I shoot all of the time. Under my left arm was my Macbook Pro. In my right hand my cel phone. Quietly, carefully, I padded down the bamboo shod steps, and my right hand exploded in song. Deftly I snapped the cel phone open. Chuck Patterson

Swell 3

Just when we all thought we were safe and no more responsibilities would be shirked, the life of the California based surf community turned on it’s axis from the arrival of swell three of the 2009-2010 El Nino Season. The storm which spawned our most recent pulse, began in similar fashion to the prior. It was another early season storm. It began life as a series of somewhat unimpressive low pressures, which were all affected by a series of high pressures. The storm initiated at a latitude that gave it an ideal fetch angle for a 290 degree WNW swell

Rinse and Repeat

I have had to watch weather a bit more closely than I usually would this season, because Garrett MacNamara, K38 Rescue, and a few other pals of mine are involved in big wave events and have sort of sucked me into the preparation that goes into being in the right place on the right day. We are in the midst of an El Nino season. No doubt about that now. So when the murmers about a potential swell maker began to filter through, I forced myself to take a close look at available weather telemetry and began my process of

A Fall Fantasy

Nothing deep to share. Or is there? The past weeks have allowed me a lot of time and effort to delve into what many consider to be my forte, which is shooting surfing, nature, beach culture and lifestyle. So this blog is devoted to showing a few of the sights seen this last several weeks of Fall. It is a teensy sampling of over 1200 final images collected. The culmination of a huge number of commercial, editorial and personal interest projects. Thanks to the beautiful place that I live in, and all my wonderful friends, commercial clients and publications for

Wonder

It has been a very busy year. So busy in fact, that I have needed to learn how to recharge my creative battery while on the fly. Fashion, Video projects, TV projects, motion pictures, my penchant for documenting beautiful things, travel, new tech, literary projects, commercial imaging, social projects, community, and hopefully some of me for my wonderful girlfriend and family. All of these things have beat a tempo never experienced in the realm of my career as an image maker. It comes at a time when the economy is without a doubt at one if its worst places in

New, Bigger: Better?

I just spent the better part of the past week bouncing back and forth between post production and producing a richly diverse amount of new imagery. Multiple subjects, 7 days, in both motion picture and stills. I truly redlined my Canon 5D Mark 2, and utilized every facet of the camera learned from the last six months usage. Throttling back, yesterday I pondered my Google alerts. I set alerts on Google for new technology. So I get e mails which carry the keywords that I am concerned with. Here is the deal. For the first time ever, tech is working,

The Chase

Surfing is not a sport. Not in any conventional sense. It falls into the genre of life’s laundry list of activities, better described as a life style. So broad in scope, it permeates all facets of a participant’s cognitive and subconscious thought processes, to the extent that you are surfing, even when not actually riding a wave. One of the reasons for this life style moniker is The Chase. This facet of surfing dictates that the participants be die hard, or more accurately: die never, optimists. Finding waves, developing technique, expanding performance range, and increasing the difficulty level of ocean

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