Digital Artist Robbie Crawford

By Chris Van Leuven

A recent self-portrait using the GoPro Fusion.

Thirteen is an impressionable age. Itโ€™s that time when adulthood is creeping up and decisions are being made that can affect the rest of your life. To Robbie Crawford, now 43, those were the days he found the local surf break near his home in Huntington Beach called the Wedge, a surf location that contains such beauty that heโ€™s been photographing there for decades. The Wedge is โ€œone of the heaviest shore breaks on the planet,โ€ the former professional bodyboarder says. โ€œPeople break their necks there all the time. People die there too. It gets really shallow at the end of the waveโ€”two-inches deep.โ€

As a teen, Robbie bodyboarded there obsessively and made it on the cover of Bodyboarder International Magazine when he was 16. Heโ€™s since been on half a dozen covers. But there was more to the barrel than just perfect curves and a perfect ride. During sunrise and sunset it fills with light.

โ€œItโ€™s like a photo studio,โ€ he says while driving from San Francisco down to Southern California. โ€œIn the morning and evening light goes into the barrel and it lights up with these crazy colorsโ€”purple and pink. Being able to capture that is what got me stoked on photography.โ€

Then comes the punch: โ€œIf it wasnโ€™t for that wave Iโ€™d probably be living inland and cooking meth. Who knows? That waveโ€”itโ€™s been my life since I was 13.โ€

โ€œBack in those days, my mom once guilt tripped me into threatening local drug dealers into giving her heroin. Or Iโ€™d call the cops. She thought she would die without it.โ€ From there it only got worse.

Born in Long Beach, when Robbie was 14, two weeks before Christmasโ€”right after his mom nearly burned the house down from a lit cigaretteโ€”he walked in on her shooting heroin in the bathroom while her new husband smoked crack next to her. Robbie had enough and he walked out. He started his life on his own right then. His mother already had a history of alcohol abuse and was a drug addict for six years before going clean.

To make a living, Robbie lied about his age to get work in construction and manual labor jobs, eventually taking a job at Penguinโ€™s Frozen Yogurt, Subway, and Round Table. Meanwhile, he continued to improve his craft as a bodyboarder.

โ€œI knew not to ever fuck with drugs that were addictive. But I did mess around with hallucinogens and went to raves and did ecstasy at parties until 6 a.m. Those drugs took away fear and made people talk โ€ฆ it helped me heal a bit and it made me want to be a better person.

โ€œI decided I wanted to learn to be this person I discovered, to live without fear, and to do it soberly. I got what I needed from them and I havenโ€™t done drugs in 20 years.โ€

As his teens came to a close, Robbie began to teach himself skills. He learned all the programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, starting with Illustrator. HTML and Flash came next. He says without developing these skills heโ€™d likely still be banging nails or working at Round Table.

By his early twenties, Robbie found himself on the tail end of his bodyboarding career. Then he blew out his knee. His mother, now clean and sober and working in network engineering, helped him get a job at her company, where he worked for two years before he quit over differences with his boss.

Around this time he and girlfriend, Michelle, fell in love and have remained committed to one another for the past 15 years.

From there, in 2008, Robbie went into freelance multimedia development, which he continues to do today, but not full time.

One of Crawfordโ€™s first GoPro selfies from many years ago.

In 2010 Robbieโ€™s friend convinced him to buy a GoPro camera and mount it to the front of his stand-up surfboard at the Wedge. When Robbie saw his footage he was so unimpressed with his surf style that he decided to start shooting his friends instead. Thatโ€™s when he started holding his breath underwater and poking the camera up through waves using a piece of PVC pipe. By putting the camera on a stick, he could poke the lens out the water like a submarine periscopeโ€”and the results looked great. From there he began uploading the images to social media and tagging GoPro. Soon the company called him out for photo of the day on their Facebook account and they approached him with free camera gear.

In 2012 Robbie earned $2,500 from GoPro for winning their photo contest. He took the money and went to Hawaii and kept shooting with what he had instead of upgrading to a full-size DLSR. โ€œI donโ€™t call myself a photographer, I call myself a digital artist,โ€ Robbie says. โ€œI just love that camera, I just love it.โ€

That same year he scored his first magazine cover with one of his shots. The following year GoPro hired him on as an ambassador. Today, โ€œWhen I wake up Iโ€™m either shooting, editing my Instagram, educating people, or answering questions on Instagram. Iโ€™ve taken probably five days off over the past six years.โ€

By posting habitually to Instagram with his vibrant and colorful shotsโ€”almost surrealโ€”his audience grew quickly. Once he hit 10,000 followers, Instagram put his images on the Popular Page bringing him in hundreds of new followers a day. Soon his following grew to 100,000. And it kept growing.

Then tragedy struck. In 2015, he got the news that his mom was sick and dying of pancreatic cancer. โ€œI remember the doctor said she had two weeks to live,โ€ he says.

Robbie watched his mother slowly wind down in the hospital. For nine months Robbie and his wife were there every night. โ€œWhen she passed away I went through a lot of being pissed offโ€” thatโ€™s a heavy process,โ€ he says. โ€œGetting through it was way more gnarly than I thought it would be, but I made it through.โ€

He continued: โ€œDuring that time I couldnโ€™t shoot surfing because I didnโ€™t want to be in the water and away from my phone.โ€ To keep his followers entertained he captured skateboarding instead, but that didnโ€™t help his online presence. Soon his audience engagement dropped, but his core followers have stayed the same. The daily or weekly messages he gets from those trusted peers keep his stoke high: โ€œground-breaking footage,โ€ a friend wrote him recently, โ€œInsane.โ€

When we talked recently Robbie had just returned from a week in Waco, Texas, where he was capturing wave pool surfers for a GoPro athlete video. Next, it was San Francisco at the surf shop Proof Lab where he gave away cameras to kids through a raffle and other games. It was also during this event where Robbie shared his first virtual reality edit using GoProโ€™s latest camera called the Fusion ($699), the companyโ€™s most expensive model.

โ€œIt captures the world around you in a way I have never seen before. For sure this is the future of photos and video.โ€

For the last six months, Robbieโ€™s been compiling footage with the Fusion at spots like Wedge with the goal of making a true 360-degree film inside the barrel of a wave. Recently he got special glasses that allow him to view ocean footage in virtual reality. Adding to the experience, integrated headphones amplify the waves.

While watching his video recently, Robbie thought back to his mother in the hospital and he wished that he had the chance to show her his world one more time before she passed. Though theyโ€™d reconciled their differences, she had never experienced what Robbie felt in the water. He wanted to share with her the feeling of standing on a board in the Wedge with the barrel closing out behind her.

โ€œI also wish I could have put the camera in the center of our living room on a family night when she was healthy and strong. This way we could have captured those moments and relived them forever.โ€

The Wedge, in Newport Beach, is one of the best known shorebreaks on the planet and has been Crawfordโ€™s local surf spot for the last 30 years. This shot of Rudy Palmboom was taken about a hundred yards north at the less popular area of the beach nicknamed Cylinders for the spiraling cylinders of water that spin down the sandbar, breaking in just inches of water.

When photographing waves itโ€™s the subtle intricacies that make certain images stand out above the rest. โ€œIn this case, what my eyes were drawn to were the surface lines wrapping perfectly around the exit of the barrel complimented by the Champagne colored light.โ€

This was Crawfordโ€™s first time experimenting with slow shutter drone photography. โ€œI really didnโ€™t even know if it was possible as the drone would need to be still enough so that the static elements would remain sharp and only the movement of the breaking waves would reveal a slight motion blur creating a sort of dreamy effect. The concept worked better then expected and I really liked how the two children were standing in the shoreline creating a feeling of surreality.โ€

Itโ€™s fairly rare that we get water with this kind of clarity in southern California, so itโ€™s not often that waves look like windows into the sea.

Cory Juneau frontside flip at a short lived spot … the pipes are now in the dirt.