There is something incredibly special about being a photographer and living near the ocean.

It took me 100s if not 1000s of hours to edit down all of my photos for this book. This is partly because there are so many, but also because I have ADD and have a really hard time organizing my pictures. Haha. I remember well developing my first roll of film when I was 9 years old. My mom had given me her old Brownie camera, and a roll of film. It had 16 exposures on it and I shot a couple pics here and a couple there. It took me months to shoot the whole roll, but when it was done my mom took me down to the Kodak store and we turned it in. They said it would be ready in a week. When we picked it up something crazy happened. The photos themselves were nothing special from a photography standpoint, but the way the pictures triggered my memory and brought me back to a specific moment was crazy! Seeing something so clearly that happened 4 months ago was nuts! It was then that I realized the importance of photography and freezing moments in time.

I think this is partly because we are chasing something so valuable to us (waves) which hold almost no actual value to others. It's like we hold the secret. The feeling of scaling a cliff at the crack of dawn and paddling out into the Ocean is something so indescribable, only a surfer knows what that feels like. I absolutely love taking pictures of the Ocean and specifically surfing. I like how everyone has their own style and surfs each wave differently. These are some of my shots from around the World that I’ve taken over the last 25 years.

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"It's like we hold the secret." 

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Some years later (when i was in my 20s) I started shooting water photography and I was hooked, I loved how different every image was, the way the water shimmers in the sunlight, and the way each image could never be duplicated. There was nothing else i wanted to do. That was it! I had found my passion. This is a compilation of pictures from 25 years of waking up early and swimming out into the sunrise.

Love the ocean!

Nelly