Commentary: Long before GoPro, Surfoto documented wave riders in Newport and Huntington Beach

Decades before GoPro, the eponymous action camera was created, or years before Nick Woodman, the company’s founder was born, my best friend since third grade and I created Surfoto.

Our surfing photography business wasn’t launched in a garage near Stanford, like H-P or Apple, but rather in a VW bus on Lido.

It was 50 years ago, and Bruce Lyon and I needed to find work between our sophomore and junior years in college. We both had boxed groceries the summer before, so we wanted to work closer to the beach this time around.

After a series of hits and misses, we came up with the revolutionary idea of randomly taking pictures of surfers and selling the 5 x 7 black and white photographs an hour later.

There were no cell phones or other similar devices on the market back then, so most surfers never had seen a photo of themselves riding a wave.

That is, until Surfoto was created. Surfoto was the combination of an East German camera, a Japanese telephoto lens, a blacked-out Volkswagen van and a Sears generator. Combined, these provisions became the first “paddle in and see yourself surfing” action photography business.

Here’s how it worked: Each morning at 9 o’clock, Bruce and I would drive our bus to Doheny or the Huntington Cliffs.

Soon 20 or more photographs would be taken of “anyone who happened to be in the water at the time,” my former Surfoto partner claims.

By 9:30, we would be in hot pursuit of our subjects with Bruce developing the negatives and yours truly paddling out to spread the word.

“Hey, I’m from Surfoto. In an hour we’ll have a photo of you surfing,” I would say.

News of Surfoto’s arrival would spread like wildfire. Thirty minutes and a few waves later, the two of us would trade places. Bruce would paddle out while I enlarged the negatives. It was no easy chore.

While Bruce developed the negatives in a hand-held box, I had to enlarge the photos in a three-solution bath inside the bus.

With the generator providing both the necessary power and unrelenting noise, Surfoto’s prints soon were ready for sale.

How do Bruce, a recipient of a special Academy Award for technology and the founder of Integrated Media Technologies, and I, now a retired corporate communications executive, remember Surfoto?

“The energy around Surfoto was incredible,” Bruce said. “Denny would be frantically throwing the prints out the window of the van, as surfers mingled around. I would pin the photos to a piece of cardboard and ‘push’ them like there was no tomorrow.”

Sometimes Bruce would sell the wrong print to the wrong person, but no one seemed disappointed because, “How many times could you go the beach, surf, and return home the same day with a picture for your scrapbook?”

For my part, I also have fond memories of that special Surfoto Summer of ’68.

As long as I live, I’ll never forget our first print. I could hear Bruce talking to people around the bus for about 10 minutes. Every few minutes he’d shout, “When’s it ready?”

Everyone was joking and waiting to see the first photo. When I passed our first photograph out the window, everything became quiet. No one said a word. All of a sudden, all hell broke loose. Someone recognized his picture. Surfoto was a reality.

In writing this piece I asked Bruce, “Was Surfoto profitable?”

“No, not in terms of dollars and cents,” he said. “Business wasn’t exactly what we had anticipated. But Surfoto did prove profitable over the long run.”

We thought Surfoto would take off like a rocket. While interest was sky-high, money was tight. We expected surfers to be poor, but not that poor.

“Surfoto was the first real opportunity to express myself in a visual manner,” Bruce says. “Home movies and pictures aside, Surfoto helped me realize people responded to my visual thinking. Ultimately, it laid the foundation for my work in animation and digital media.”

As for me, Surfoto taught me one really good lesson. No matter how great an idea appears to be, you need research to back up basic assumptions. Without this data, you really are flying blind.

Today’s technology renders something like Surfoto obsolete.

“Unless, of course, you believe there still is life in that old bus of ours,” Bruce said.

At that we look at each other and laugh. Both of us are happy to point out, that Surfoto Summer of ’68 really was a lot of fun.

DENNY FREIDENRICH lives in Laguna Beach