JonathanWeston

At Town & Country, he befriended Warren Bolster, a famous surf and skate photog who had fallen off the wagon and was boxing boards. He dragged Warren out to Diamond Head, had him take some photos of the boys and girls, and talked Surfer Publications into starting the new Sailboarder Magazine. He was released after his first day as editor because the boys at Windsurfing Hawaii said he did not even know how to windsurf, so they hired Bonnie Crail instead, a clothing marketing director.

Weston was one of the first to move to Maui, and noticed that the few visiting surf photographers struggled to stay in the shifting waves common at windsurfing breaks, so he built a water housing and gave it a shot. After drowning his camera, and getting a Luau waiter job, his first roll of photos was a success, published in windsurfing magazines worldwide, as well as on Neil Pryde product displays and even billboards in Europe and Japan. Windsurfing took a back seat, and he competed rarely, but still made the finals of the biggest pro event worldwide, The 1988 Aloha Classic.

As a photographer, Jonathan Weston has been published in American Photographer, Photo (France), Conde Nast Traveler, Playboy, and won the coveted “Sports Picture of the Year Award” (NPPA, Kodak, Canon) out of 36,000 entrants, as well as “Top Ten Pictures of the Year” in “Sports Illustrated”. His photos and words were published in three books: “Impact Zone”, “Maui: As Above, So Below”, and the “Hawaii Windsurfing Guide”.

Photography naturally led to filmmaking. Producing film credits include: “Impact Zone”, “Double Or Nothing”, “Windsurf The Earth”, and now, WIND LEGENDS.

Moving to Northern California, he also produced regional TV Shows for CBS including “NBA Orlando Magic” and 52 episodes of “Central Coast Sports”. In the corporate video world Weston Productions has produced 8 educational videos for McGraw-Hill, as well as for IBM, Xerox, Agilysis, and others. He was the first non-linear editor and AE motion graphics producer to create an HD program on computer, “NASA Space Station: Realizing The Dream.”

Currently, spends much of his time producing, traveling to Europe, windsurfing in Hawaii, Mountain Biking in Santa Cruz, and snowboarding in Lake Tahoe. Still, he always makes sure he finds time for his walking his family, and the dog.

RM: What inspired you to do what you do?

JW: In the beginning, I probably had a seed planted by my Dad. He had taken all of these WWII Concentration Camp photos as a liberator. Anything I shot would be something less significant, but on the lighter side. I actually wanted to be an oceanographer, but I couldn’t figure out which kind. I didn’t know there were different kinds, I just knew I wanted to play in the ocean. That did not earn very good grades, but somehow I got an A in this photography course.

So I switched to Art Photography at UofF, and did well. Then I went to a specialty photography school in Santa Barbara, Brooks. It was very commercial and I hated it, so I quit and went windsurfing. It wasn’t until years later that I picked up a camera again, when I saw some of Warren Bolster’s water photography. I wish I had held onto those pictures he shot of me and Pete at Diamond Head, but he recently passed away.

RM: How did you develop the gear you used?

JW: When I was in college I had a friend who did some skydiving helmet cam stuff. I never thought about it much, until later on I had a desire to show what windsurfing was like from a personal point of view, and then I just tried to get every angle from there. Board, boom, mast mounts, jet ski’s. Nobody had done it before in windsurfing. Actually, Pete told me he tried it and almost drowned. Today they have these miniature lipstick cams, but I used a full on movie camera. Didn’t have much luck with helicopters though like you did!

RM: Why film instead of tape?

JW: Well, I started out with tape, the old VHS tapes with the separate deck I wore in a harness Rob from Da Kine made me. Barry made me see through sails for the helmet cam. I went out on some really big days and would come back in and look at the footage, and it would be complete garbage from bouncing off the heads. So I got a gun camera from WWII, the kind that they placed on wings to trace bullet paths. My uncle died in one of those planes. Anyway, it was heavy and only held 30 seconds of footage so you had to be selective. One time I was in the path of a Tiger Shark. Wayno yelled at me to film it, but I only had thirty seconds and saved it for windsurfing. What an idiot. I didn’t have the camera turned on when the helicopter went down, either. Saved it for the swimming.

RM: Best “in-water” story?

JW: Probably the most challenging day for me was on the same day Fred got his famous big wave photo. I was down at Mama’s where I lived next door to Mike Waltze. I tried to swim out there and take some photos of Mike, Scott O’Conner and Mark Paul. I mean, what was I thinking? I looked up at the first wave and thought, this is not going to go well. If you can imagine swimming two lengths of a swimming pool, taking one breath, and repeating ten times, then getting drilled to the reef and getting the wind knocked out of you, that was how the first set went.

I really thought I was a goner, threw my camera and said, I’m dead. I can’t take this anymore. It was the last wave of the set! So I swam out past the break, which was like a mile out there. My talent was on the rocks breaking masts, but Mike finally came out and said, “What are you doing? The waves are breaking in there. You’ll never get a shot out here.” I tried to tell him they were breaking way out there, but after an hour and no shots, I started to swim in further. Just as I did, a set broke a hundred yards out from where I even was.

I just rolled into the fetal position and bounced along the reef, came up somewhere near the rocks. Not one picture, but when I think back on that day, I realize what incredible shape I was in to have survived it. Then that afternoon, I grabbed my windsurfer, drove down to Kanaha and had the best day of big wave windsurfing in my life.

RM: Where is the sport going?

JW: That’s a good question. I guess it’s gone Kiteboarding for a while, but hopefully it will bounce back. I just returned from Lake Garda and it sure looks healthy there. They just need to ban Kiteboarding on the best lakes and oceans and it will make a natural comeback. Or more people like me will suffer from a bad neck from wearing a camera on their helmet, so they can’t kiteboard at all. The funny thing is, that windsurfing really killed itself by going too hi-tech. People didn’t want to go slow anymore, but they can’t all afford to go fast. Cruising around on a lake became unfashionable. I was talking to Hoyle and Diane in a private interview. Hoyle had changed his mind about being interviewed, said he didn’t want to look back on the sport as if brought up some bad feelings from all the court battles. I wish he could look past all that to the great years we spent in the one design era at Lake Lopez, in Baja.

Just to get off track, I was driving down to Mexico completely lost, saw some windsurfers on the horizon and started driving across the sand towards them. Drove right into a lagoon where the ocean would soon rise and gobble up my tire spinning Delta 88. I ran like hell to the first tent I could see at 5am, woke them up to help me, and who was it? Hoyle. Anyway, that was before things got complicated for him, not that I feel sorry for Hoyle in his Maui beachfront house. Or you, Robert!

So back on track, I had a “private” interview with Hoyle and Diane. They asked me why I would want to share that interview, to tape it. And then Hoyle got out a camera and started interviewing me, to see how it felt. It felt okay, so he gave up on that. Diane started talking about visualization. I said, “I visualize Hoyle doing and interview with me, right now.” I was on my way out the door shortly thereafter, but I did have some cool things they told me, and their answer to this very question of where is the sport going (see, I can go way off on a tangent and snap right back!), they envisioned it completely dying out, and then one day, someone will walk into his lake house in Canada, find an old stock windsurfer in the basement, and the sport will start all over again.

RM: What was your first big start in filmmaking?

JW: Well, my first break came when Geoff Cornish hired me to make a rigging and tuning video for Neil Pryde. I  had two Hi-8 decks hooked up and pressed play, record and pause to edit. He kept changing his mind on the sequence of things, but after ten million changes, I showed him the first versions and that was the one he liked. To think that I kept doing it! My big break, literally, came with Impact Zone, filmed from 1984-86. That’s when I went to film.

Film really makes a difference. You just have to find a fool to pay for it all. I found one, and was almost done with the film when I crashed at night riding down Haleakala on my bike. Ran into a cow or something. While in the hospital with a broken leg and two black swollen eyes, I guess I signed away my directorship and profits.

They shot some scenics and then took my name off the main credits, but everyone on Maui knew who directed and shot that movie. While it was being made, I had clips hanging from every wall of my a-frame, and we had parties every weekend where hundreds of people would cram into my living room to see the dailies. I even finished the movie with some mounts where you can see one leg smaller than the other.

Contents | Wind | Surf | Turf | Snow | Auto | Reality | Ambient | Green | Support StableRoad | About us | Feedback | Advertise | Contact

RM: Why the new movie?

JW: It sort of started out as an effort just to get all my old footage onto DVD, edited the way I now am capable of after years of proper lashing in the corporate and major sports network editing world. Then I thought, why not go to Maui and interview a few old friends. Only a few of the old faithful showed up at first. Fred, Alex, Barry, Miki. I had to chase Matt around a bit, set up the whole studio at his house. As I would learn, a lot of people had interviewed him lately trying to make this History Of Windsurfing video, and he got a bad taste in his mouth from their line of questioning.

I guess I asked the right things, because he asked me afterwards if I wanted to do the History of Windsurfing. I had tried it before with Windsurf The Earth, but there was about a twenty-year hole of missing footage from the early years. I didn’t start filming until 1984. Matt said he had a vault of footage never before released, not even to buddy Mike, and he trusted me with it. Then I needed to film a lot more interviews, and the search was on for more early footage, as that vault of footage turned out to be mostly baby footage of the kids!

By pure luck, I was browsing a Starboard website thread and saw a blast from the past, Bruce Matlack, who I was good friends with in the early days. I flew to Florida and he showed me some old tapes that Paul Hengstebeck, Nan and Walter Herbeck had shot with their 8mm cameras, some real vintage stuff. Buncha Germans back then, you know, saved the day. Then I had a start.

Others like you, Robert, filled in the gaps with excellent footage of legends like Fred. I was Fred’s housemate. We trained together every day speedsailing down the coast, but I never filmed him much. My head was too much into the waves. I was Maui-centric!

RM: The greatest sailors - past, present, future?

JW: I always thought that being out in the water, I could judge a contest better than anyone. The best sailor that ever lived is Robby Naish, everybody knows that. But at Hookipa, his enigma aside, you would not know that. The best contest sailor, yes. But on a regular ripping day, there were and are guys better. However, Robby is a goofy footed guy, and the times that I have seen him sail on port tack at Diamond Head, well, I eat my words. He’s still pretty awesome, but there was a time when even though the equipment was heavier, he was far above us mortals.

I think if you look at my movie, you can see my legends list. I let the others roast the sailors. Mark Angulo, Jason Polakow: those guys, insert cliché, took the sport to another level of gumbyism. Gumby was a bendy toy, for those too young to know. Going way back, it was Matt Schweitzer all the way. I had tried windsurfing, and bought a windsurfer, but wasn’t really excited about it until I saw Matt doing his freestlye. Then I saw him at Lake Lopez get mysteriously sucked up into the clouds. That was inspirational to me. In the 90’s, of course Jason Prior and Francisco Goya were my favorites.

I feel like I sort of scripted their careers in Double Or Nothing, so I’ll take all the credit there. I also like Sean Ordonez’s loose style. Had nothing to do with that. Today, it really doesn’t matter. I’m kind of like Mark Angulo. You can impress me with the first whoopdeediddle on a wave, but by the second you’ve got me thinking, what’s the point? Even with Kiteboarding. Okay, four twists, take the board off, wiggle wiggle wag wag. Who cares?

I’ll take Polakow carving under a lip, throwing spray five hundred feet into the air any day. Speedsailing and racing is another story. Maybe I’ll come out of retirement and break that 50 naut barrier already. Or, kick back and read a good book.

RM: Regrets about the past?

JW: When I asked people that in my movie, not one person had any regrets except for Mark Angulo. I think Mark is an incredible person and just listening to his raw interview is better than anything you would hear in a house of worship. As for me, yeah, I wish I would have been more focused. That’s a hard thing to do on Maui! As a windsurfer, I could have gone so much further. I already had the racing skills from sailing, but I was always going with the same equipment during a contest that I would use on a perfect day at Hookipa – too small. I’m a big guy and there was only one slalom event where the wind really blew, and that was the Aloha Classic in 88. I borrowed Miki Eskimo’s stock Hi Tech slalom board off the beach, and kicked ass all day.

That training with Fred really showed. I regret that Paul Ehman held the finals the next day, without a breath of wind, and me with some newfangled high aspect rig Barry Spanier set me up with. I barely got off the beach. From a financial viewpoint, I wish that I had been a bit more commercially oriented and stood on shore firing off shot after shot or roll after roll like the other guys. I was always after that one hard to get angle, always placing myself as Drew Kampion put it, “between the hammer and the anvil of the Impact Zone.”

RM: Hopes for the future?

JW: I hope my movie makes it on TV and some of the old guys get back out there and pick the sport back up. I just went windsurfing for the first time in three years in Italy after a snowboarding injury did my shoulder in.

Even though I spend a lot of time racing sailboats, windsurfing was just such a blast, even without the waves.

Images courtesy Jonathan Weston

A Jonathan Weston Production

Turf

Other

Relaxation

Home

Surf

Snow

Auto

Green

iRadio

InPrint

Wind