here fishy, fishy, fishy

a couple of images from my recent shoot with my friend Cher.

i don't want to ramble on about this too long so i'll just be brief and say Cher is truly a living legend and i enjoyed my time photographing her and listening to her stories more than i can say in a blog post. we shot on a day that was even too cloudy for my taste, so more images and photo shoots with Cher are soon to come.

i'm not crazy about these pictures but these boards have an incredible history that i had to show you. i'm afraid i'll get things wrong if i go too much into detail (my memory is poor to fair at best), but i'll try to sum it up:

the board in the middle was one of the first fish ever shaped (it's a Lis for those of you that follow shaping) and cher was one of the - if not THE - first women to surf a fish. i believe it was made in 1969, and it is the board in this picture. It was originally intended to be a kneeboard.

the board on the left was shaped by Cher and her friend pretty soon after Lis's fish; you don't hear about too many women shapers from those days! Sweet.

the other two boards are special for sentimental reasons: Cher's husband Steve shaped her the Garibaldi board for a special occasion, and the balsa board was shaped by a group of friends over 10 days in Hawaii. It's called the Firecracker because it caught on fire in the shaping room, and survived.

Cher is an author and also a very talented artist. See more here.

You can learn more about Steve's innovative surfboards here.