Some living surfers are still from the time when there were no cameras shooting wave-riding.
Imagine a world where there was no one capturing the timeless beauty of a well-ridden wave. Hardly believable, right?
No surf photographers, no mainstream interest in the sport of kings. Nothing. Just humans elegantly dancing on unbroken ripples and magically walking on water.
Everything was "in the moment." No gadgets to encapsulate the present so that, in the future, we could relive the past.
And then, there was an opportunity for a periodical surf-related publication, which featured black and white images of people - like yourself - doing the things you loved.
Slowly, the first book about surfing gave way to one, two, three magazines.
And colored pictures made the dream as blue as the most perfect waves a surfer could be blessed with.
Surfers realized they could pause their best moments. And then giant waterproof cameras got closer to the action.
TV, movies, and surf cams
The time of iconic surfing photos had been born at the heart of the 20th century, a few decades before mainstream television discovered a potentially interesting audience for live broadcasts or hour-long coverages of prestigious surf contests.
Movies followed. The ones shot by surfing enthusiasts and featuring surfers ("The Endless Summer," for example) or planned by Hollywood executives in air-conditioned rooms ("Gidget," for example).
In 1996, Sean Collins, the founder of Surfline, debuted the world's first live surf camera for the US Open of Surfing.
From that moment on, if you were a surfer on a popular break, the chances that you were being watched by hundreds of thousands of people were high.
Action cameras and YouTube
The following visual disruption took place several decades later, when the first attempts at point-of-view shooting allowed non-surfers to witness surfing's most glorious moment - the barrel - from the surfer's perspective.
Onboard cameras were the next step.
The world's first wrist‑mounted camera arrived around 2004 and revolutionized amateur video content making.
Suddenly, we could shoot our own surf and proudly share it with friends and family. If bragging was not enough within surfing, these tiny portable waterproof cameras made us all stars. Or not quite.
But your closed circle of friends would soon become the world.
In 2005, YouTube made it possible for a weekend warrior to showcase their average-ridden waves to the planet.
Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions of short or long videos saw the light of day.
The same person who had started surfing in the black-and-white photo camera era was now being shot riding their longboard in idyllic surf breaks.
The advent of the robot cameraman and drones
Are you already thinking about drones? Chill out. There's still an important chapter in between.
Remember the robot cameraman? It was a tripod on which a regular video camera would sit. And then a tag strapped to the surfer's arm would make it follow you and track your rides.
The first consumer market drones marked another important stage in transforming surfing into one of the most striking sports to watch on screens.
And nearly anyone could easily become a surf filmmaker.
They put several aerial filming helicopter services out of business.
The social media era
And as the shooting resolution of affordable portable action cameras increased, social media kicked in and made anonymous surfers who had never put on a jersey or ridden anything above six feet, kings of content and following.
You could be a kook and steal the attention from pro surfers. You could be silly and have more people watching your chewing gum pop, surf-related content than Kelly Slater or Andy Irons' best ever rides.
Social media platforms made 10-second clips of surfing as vulgar and bland as the difference in taste between a McDonald's hamburger in America and Indonesia.
Stories and reels became synonymous with videos of waves without the paddling and the whitewater finish.
In other words, surfing with preservatives for attention-deficit individuals and spectators whose patience is ultra-limited.
AI-powered video capture
But the levels of self-centeredness and vanity, a characteristic inherently associated with surfers, still had more room to grow.
The age of constant recording reaches its peak in the artificial world of surfing, where chlorinated water-filled wave pools feature giant LED screens playing your latest wave.
All thanks to the latest human obsession: artificial intelligence (the world's second AI after Andy Irons), the so-called trillionaire new world that promises to cure all diseases and prepares to design an unemployment planet where we can all... surf.
So, while you're still taking off your wetsuit after an hour of waves that are an exact copy of themselves, you already have available - not for free, obviously - the complete video collection of your session's rides at the surf park.
And for a few extra tenners, you may very well have AI (the non-human robot) analyzing and telling you what you did well and what could be improved.
We're reaching the peak of the age of constant recording where even the soul of a soul surfer will be captured - from above, from the side, from under and within, and made public to the world, whether they want it or not.
Congratulations: you have been televised. You are now immortal before even being dead.
Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com
por Surfing | News, Headlines and Top Stories https://ift.tt/kbLqTCt