Chris Duczynski shoots Sharkeys from a drone

It’s never too late to pick up something new. Chris Duczynski started surfing at 50. And now he shoots waves with drones.

TWAM-20151114 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 14 Nov 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Waves at Coledale Pic : Chris Duczynski

Coledale 2515

It’s never too late to pick up something new. Chris Duczynski started surfing at the age of 50. A country boy who’d moved to the coast, he got sick of hearing about all the fun his mates had catching waves. “So I bought a board, withstood all the taunts for six months, and learnt to surf.” Ten years on, it’s one of his great joys in life.

You’ll have seen Duczynski’s work before, without knowing it. He spent 16 years as a cameraman and producer for Qantas, making in-flight entertainment – destination pieces, “Welcome aboard” messages and the like. He filmed everything from Julio Iglesias’s Polynesian hideaway to Parisian perfume creators (known as “noses” in the trade) and interviews with Qantas ambassador John Travolta. Even better, it’s how he met his wife Tanya, a flight attendant.

Duczynski was born in London to Poles who’d fled the war (his father spent two years in a Siberian work camp), and they migrated as 10 Pound Poms on the SS Strathmore when he was seven. They settled in Cooma when his dad got a job on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Heart of our nation

These days, Duczynski runs his own firm making corporate videos. A couple of years ago he got into aerial shooting with drones; he loves to capture abstract landscapes like this shot of fizzing water after a wave has broken over the reef at Sharkeys, one of his go-to surf spots.

The taunts from his surfing mates stopped long ago. Not from his two sons, though, who he catches waves with at home and on trips to Hawaii. He rides a longboard, which is unbearably daggy in their eyes. “Basically, they reckon I’m crap,” he laughs. It’s galling, really. “They’ve been doing it half as long as me – and they’re twice as good.”