This shot is part of a a tongue-in-cheek protest project. Water companies have been failing UK citizens with its responsibility to keeping our waters clean and safe for local wildlife and those with a connection to the water.
Each subject in this project has a connection to the water. Here, Kai, a local surf school teacher, represents the surfing community and their need for our waters to be sewage free and safe to swim in.
This photo is exactly as it appears, without any camera trickery or editing. That is a real 15kg porcelain toilet upon a surfboard surfing a wave. I'm actually currently waiting to hear back on my application from Guinness World Records, with this photo as proof of concept, to do a WR accept for "Furthest distance surfed on a toilet".
This was a very hard shot to pull off. If anything, I had the easy job of wading into waist deep water with my Nikon Z8 and 24-70 f2.8 lens and taking the photo.
Poor Kai, with his girlfriend holding the board steady, had to repeatedly retrieve the toilet from the water, heave it onto the surfboard and climb upon it, ready for an oncoming wave. Then he had to actually balance upon it once a wave took hold. Of course, he and the toilet would eventually fall off and the process would repeat.
This shot was actually achieved in the first successful run. But with the effort it had taken to get there, with a glorious sunset and perfect conditions, we spent another 40 minutes in the cold water trying to best this shot, which we didn't manage.
This was shot at 35mm, f3.2, 1/400s, iso 720.