Surfing is a way of life in the South Bay. For Sammie Hall and Sam Brecker, this has been one of their “favorite” activities for many years.

Hall was inspired to start surfing at the age of seven because of her dad. Her dad enjoyed surfing, and seeing his passion for surf made her want to give it a try.

“My dad surfed for fun, and just being around him made me want to try surfing. My main sport is club swimming. Just growing up by the beach and around a lot of people that do surf made me more interested in it,”  Hall said. 

Brecker and Hall both wanted to create an Instagram account to showcase their photography and surfing skills. They both had a camera, and they wanted to show these talents where anyone can see them. 

“We started the account because Sammie and I both had cameras. We wanted to keep taking pictures because we like taking them, and one day we just thought, what if we started an Instagram account to just put all of our photos somewhere?’” Brecker said.

Over Thanksgiving break, a lot of the surf team—mainly the sophomore and freshman girls—went surfing every day. Hall and Brecker started to take pictures and realized that they had a talent for photography.

“Sam and I decided it’d be a great idea to create an Instagram account to showcase our photos. We realized a lot of the pictures were pretty good, and we really had no way of getting them out there without, so it was just a good platform to use,” Hall said.

The girls mostly photograph members of the surf team. They also take photos of people they see surfing near them. 

“We started off just taking pictures of girls on the team, but we ended up branching out to just random people to get those really good shots and high performance maneuvers. You really want to be photographing really good surfers, so it ended up being a lot of random people. And some of the boys on the team as well,” Hall said. 

Brecker and Hall realized that there were photography opportunities all around them. They took pictures of surfers around them at the beach. According to Hall, these are some of their “best” photos that they have taken. 

“Our Instagram helped us find some of the surfers we took photos of, because sometimes you don’t know who it is you’re photographing. By having an Instagram you can get it out there and contact some of the people you take pictures of. Since some of the photos of the strangers are the best shots we’ve taken on our Instagram, this helps us get our Instagram more popular, so we can eventually start charging people for surfing photos,” Hall said.