A history of POV tube footage!

Words by Jed Smith

George Greenough
How smart was Greenough? Pink Floyd, the biggest band in the world at the time, were so moved by his underwater opus, Echoes, they gave him an original score to go with it. Though it was his intergalactic opus, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun that really corrupted a generation. After months of stalking a perfectly angled Lennox swell, Greenough strapped a 17 pound camera to his back and rode a blow-up surf mat through the green dream to capture one of the most groundbreaking aquatic sequences of all time. This Pataongia short captures it perfectly. Definitely watch it.

Warren Bolster
Born on the east coast of America to an American diplomat, Bolster cut his teeth in the Sydney skate and surf underground of the mid-sixties. He would go onto become one of surfing and skating’s most recognisable photographers up until his death at 59. “I want people to see and feel what a surfer is seeing and feeling, to understand why it’s so amazing to ride a wave,” he explained of his method, in which he used a remote control unit from a boat in the channel linked to a mounted camera on the back of a surfer’s board. His shot of Manoa Drollet at Teahupoo in 2000 was considered a major breakthrough in water photography. He was also a well regarded water-photographer.

Second Thoughts
Equal parts Greenough and Bolster, the great American Indo ferals Travis Potter, Timmy Turner and Brett Schwartz used camera mounts on the back of their boards to take us into the tube at the bone dry One Palm Point as well as Apocalypse. Long before the GoPro epidemic, they also paddled waves with a clunky water housing dangling from a leash in their mouth. Once in the tube they’d grab the camera and hand film popping coral heads through long psychedelic tube sequences.

Brian Conley
Pure tube-rotted, vision-corrupted, salt-doggin’ hellman. Brian Conley took inner-pit exploration to another level with his nomadic South Pacific and Central American wanderings in the late naughties. A San Diego-born, longhaired, speed-dealer-wearin’ vegan, Conley boasts proudly of his “tubular addiction” and power to him. There are worse addictions in this world.

Team Go Pro

– #1 Mikala Jones
This ingenious piece of technology has thrust us into a brave new world of tubular exploration. Indo expat Mikala Jones gets freaky with tube lighting and camerawork.

#2 Anthony Walsh
Someone had to do it and that someone was Anthony Walsh. The Lennox Head-born, North Shore of Hawaii-livin’ tube-pig stuffs an endless Desert point drainer on camera.

Koa Smith
#3 Go on. You’ve got three minutes up your sleeve. Sink into Koa Smith’s Skeleton Bay dream sequence, with its nod to the original psychedelic tube master George Greenough with the Pink Floyd score.

Laurent Pujol
Former French Pro, Laurent Pujol earns his place among the great psychedelic tube explorers the hard way. When the French beach breaks begin to whomp! at six to eight, he links up with the likes of Dorian and Slater, tows in behind them and gets fucking obliterated. But he gets the shot and the results, you’ll agree, are amazing.

Mark Mathews and Taj Burrow
Take Laurent Pujol’s best effort, add a couple tonnes of water, a rock-slab bottom, the threat of being eaten by a great white, and you’ve got Mark Mathews and Taj Burrow flying the Stab flag at The Right. Mathews took home a ruptured eardrum and a torn up face for his efforts, but also some of the craziest footage ever captured.

John John and Jack Robinson
You’ll have to wait until December first – when the most fucked up film of all time is released to the world – to see the results of this. But that’s John John Florence there holding his very own, very expensive, and very heavy RED Dragon camera behind West Oz prodigy, Jack Robinson, at The Box. It should tell you everything you need to know about John John’s head. The shot was attempted while awaiting the resumption of his semi-final to resume at the Margaret River World Tour event earlier this year.

Leroy Bellet
And the latest sensation, 16 year old Aussie east coaster, Leroy Bellet. Not content with whipping in behind surfers over sand, the grom has upped the ante surfing behind local tube pigs atop the pointy rocks of the east coast’s many slabs. They breed ’em tough down here on the convict isle with Leroy taking home two split heads and a torn knee ligament for his efforts. “To some degree this type of imagery reflects my own emotions as a teenager; I often think of the barrel as the only place in the world where nothing else matters,” he told the SMH recently.