Meet The Winner - Tom Brune
2019 PHOTO COMP WINNER: Meet the winner of the Dropbox 'FILM' category - Tom Brune. From West Oz, Tom's film work is seriously breathtaking. His images are regular features in shortlists and finalists of the 'film' category in SV Photo Comps. This year, his epic image of Derek Ho charging a pumping Pipeline took the cake. We acknowledge the skill required to nail this shot - and Tom has it is spades.
Tom, firstly congrats again on taking out the Dropbox FILM category in the 2019 Photo Comp! Did this come as a surprise?
Thank you! Yeah definitely came as a surprise, so many good entries and all of the shortlisted photos were amazing. I've been a big fan of Anrielle's photos for a long time and thought she was going to take the cake, I really liked her image.
This photo was immediately a favourite for us. Tell us a little bit of background about this shot.
It was taken of Derek Ho who is an absolute machine and was 54-years-old when the photo was taken and still riding Pipe as good as any. I shot it on the Nikonos V with the 35mm lens and Portra 400 film. In the space of about half an hour he caught 3 bombs. One of the waves filmed by Igor Hossman can be seen here on Facebook.
Have you contacted Derek and showed him this shot? I bet he would be frothing!
No I haven't contacted Derek directly but he has liked the image on insta. I feel like that was just another day for Derek haha. If I see him over there this year I'll definitely stop him and have a yarn.
Describe in your words how difficult it was to take this shot.
It was a pretty big day out at pipe, there were probably like 10 photographers in the water and the crowd of surfers was pretty stacked with local Hawaiian pros. I pretty much tailed Zak Noyle the whole time and just watched wherever he went and tried to stay out of the way of others shots. A couple wide ones came through but managed to duck under them unscathed.
Rumour has it you will have a feature in SV Issue 4 – is this true? And how stoked are you?
Yeah, stoked to see some of my photos in print! We've got some stuff in the works so I'm excited to see what the final issue looks like.
What will you be spending the prize money on?
I'm heading back to Hawaii in a couple weeks, so I'll definitely use it to help fund the trip and film processing. My Dropbox is full and I keep having to delete files from it to make way for new film to be uploaded from the lab, so I'm looking forward to upgrading to a premium account as well!
Thanks Bruney!
Cheers guys!
