My first "shop" was a garage on Alvarado Street in Oceanside, CA in late 1983. The designs were there but the production was slow due to the limited space. This was a part time job, I was going to Palomar College full time.
My "seat" in this photo was a device to hold an electric drill to make grooves in plastic for rubber 'O' rings. Behind me on the bench, a heater is set up to cure fiberglass on a camera housing. I'm holding a camera housing being made for a flash unit.

I was meeting more of the small worldwide group of water photographers. Sonny Miller was one of my first customers. We worked together on many projects and became good friends. Sylvain Cazenave, a hard working French waterman, sailboard and surf photographer, was also one of the photographers who came to the small Alvarado shop and became a good friend.

The photographers I was working with were doing good things and most of my business came from word of mouth, which is the best kind of advertising for any business. Photo editors Jeff Divine of Surfer Magazine and Larry Moore of Surfing Magazine recommended me to people who were looking for camera housings.
In the era before computers and cell phones, just after the dinosaur extinction, all information about the camera housings was exchanged by telephone and "snail" mail. Below is one of the pre computer product brochures.

Below is a "promo" calendar from 1983. I was working as a darkroom technician for a printing company, a job Sonny Miller would later inherit. I was able do the print layout and pre-press work, my co-worker Ronnie printed a bunch for me.
The calendar featured the latest camera housings and shots from photographers using my housings.

I hadn't really intended on starting a business, but it was time to move out of the garage if that's the direction I was going. The neighbors, mostly retired people, were probably wondering what was going on with the guys lugging Pelican cases up the driveway.
A small shop on State Street in Carlsbad was available so I decided to make it a real business.It was next to Breakout surfing magazine and would become a regular stop on the worldwide surf photographer tour.

I had a good product and good customers who were doing great work. Things were happening and the Carlsbad shop was in the middle of it. That part of the business was exciting. The "business" part of being in business sucked. All the licenses, fees, taxes and paperwork took a lot of time away from housing production. This was not the best part of town, and in the middle of a multi billion dollar tract housing explosion, the City of Carlsbad treated the businesses in this part of town poorly.

The first couple years in business were a fine line. Without any loans or startup funds, every month was a race to pay the bills. Anything left over went back into the business. I took cash advances on one credit card to pay off another. I ate a lot of Top Ramen and wore the same clothes for years, but got to the point where it wasn't life and death every month.

The photographers and people involved in surfing were creative and full of energy. In these ancient times, there was no internet and the major form of communication in the surfing world was by surfing magazines. Every surfing country had at least one magazine. For a photographer to get a photo in a magazine was a big deal. To get a full page or centerfold photo was even bigger. The biggest prize of all was a magazine cover shot. When a photographer who got a cover shot using on of my housings, I had them send it to me and I posted it in the showroom of the shop. I did this as long as the shop was open.

The 1980's were big in the surfing world. There were advances in equipment and technology that brought imagery of surfing everywhere in the world. Surf photographers and film makers, no video yet, traveled to the extreme ends of the earth looking for waves.
Make no mistake, jumping into the water to take pictures where most people would be drowning is not something everyone does. It is difficult and, most of the time, pretty dangerous. You must be an excellent swimmer and be comfortable in large waves, shallow reefs and rip currents. Then, you have to be a good photographer.
In the photo below, there is a "helmet cam" made with a 16mm movie camera that was previously the wing camera of a fighter plane. Also on the bench is a light meter. Most photographers today have never seen one of those. I'm holding a 16mm Beaulieu movie camera housing. These housings are for Alberto de Abreu Sodre from Brasil. Alberto and I did not spend a lot of time together, but we became good friends. More on Alberto coming soon.

Lots of surfers passed through the shop, so did a lot of other people involved in what are now known as "extreme" sports. Mountain biking and snowboarding were new and growing fast. Jet Pilot, a popular Personal WaterCraft company was nearby, as was Hobie. Known mainly for Hobie Catamarans and Hobie surfboards, they had started making fishing kayaks. There was always something going on.

Unloading the mountain bike on a damp looking November day, perfect for riding. In 1988, we would ride from the shop on State Street, along the railroad tracks to Palomar Road, through fields of vegetables on ranch roads out to Lake Calavera and other places that are now endless tract homes.

Kicking back in the shop showroom on a January 1990 afternoon. Behind me is my custom Klein road bike I built myself. Full Dura Ace, a really sweet bike. In the corner is my GT Karakoram, aka "The Lead Sled", my first mountain bike.
On the wall are six cover shots from my hard working customers, a big photo of Steve Scott's 5k World Record he set a couple blocks away and a photo from the Long Beach Grand Prix. Next are two photos from the 1986 Los Angeles Olympic Games, gold medal winners in both. Above the mountain bike is Sonny Miller's flash fill shot of surfer John Glomb, a big step forward using flash for surfing photos.

In the showroom holding a 16mm movie camera with an aluminum lens support for the long telephoto lens.

More coming soon

I may have been the CEO, but I was also the janitor. People who think that owning your own business is a way out of "real" job are delusional. You work more and since your reputation is on the line, you never really "punch out" and there are no days off. My business wasn't like any other business in town, but when you are sending expensive camera gear from Hawaii FedEx overnight Saturday delivery, you're not playing games.

1998 brought a big change when I bought a Dell XPS Pentium II desktop computer. A 450MHz CPU with 128MB RAM was just under the top spec model. I'd worked with computers since high school, but they weren't much use until the internet came along.
I built a website pretty quickly and before long nearly all my business was email and the website. I was one of the first businesses on the street to have high speed(at the time) internet service.

CLICK HERE or on the photo above for the final Photographic Support Systems website at watermanatwork.com.

The photography and film industry was going through huge changes from analog to digital. Photography went from film to digital computer files. Motion pictures went from film to video tape to video memory card. All of this required computers. From 1998 to 2007, the shop was part camera housing shop, part digital production center.

Business was good, things were happening, but I was learning the harsh reality of government corruption. Crime was increasing rapidly while the City of Carlsbad doctored the crime statistics to keep real estate values up.
Break ins and robberies were regular events, covered up by the police and city government. I was sleeping on the floor of the shop with a shotgun to keep burglars out. The property went from no fence, to fence, to fence with barbed wire, to fence with barbed and concertina wire. And me sleeping on the floor with a 12 gauge.

Attendance at Carlsbad City Council meetings or letters to the local newspaper resulted in visits from the Carlsbad Police. My shop was broken into, I had a life and death fight with a tweaker pumped up on meth that destroyed my shop and broke my arm. No police response. Crime was a daily occurrence, but according to the manufactured Carlsbad police reports, there was no crime at all.

In 1995, a commuter rail line; "The Coaster" opened a station a block away from my shop. The already rising crime, which didn't technically exist, was out of control. A city of RVs and vans sprung up on the roads and alleys leading to the train station. Drug users, tweakers, or meth users, roamed the streets looking for anything they could steal. My landlady planted flowers in the flower beds in front of our businesses, they were stolen in a couple days.

The Carlsbad City Council repeatedly promised to the local businesses the downtown Carlsbad streets would not be used for all day commuter parking. From the day the Carlsbad Coaster Station opened, commuter parking was allowed. Commuters parked in business parking lots, filling them before businesses opened. Fences, locked gates and concertina wire went up.
Of course this was a big hit to local businesses with no available parking. In addition to no parking, businesses had to deal with daily conflicts the Carlsbad Police and North County Transit District Police refused to recognize or address.
If I went surfing before work, by the time I got to my shop at 0800, there was not a single parking space for a block or more each direction. Usually, I got up from armed guard duty about 0500 to move my truck into the street in front of my shop to make a buffer zone for my customers from commuters and the car repair businesses who parked outside. Arguments and commuter rage were a daily occurrence, right outside my front door.
Here, the work day starts with one of the local business owners and a Coaster commuter having their daily battle on the front door of my business.

There were a number of auto repair businesses that had very small lots and basically conducted their repair business on State Street itself. Tow trucks would drop disabled vehicles on the street and in neighboring businesses parking lots. Whatever street parking not taken by commuters was taken by broken down cars by 0800. Vehicles were also parked on the sidewalk and in front of business' driveways.
One day, one of the owners of one of those businesses took exception to the photographer with a camera standing in front his photography shop that had been there for twenty years and busted out the window in the front door of my shop.

Vehicles leaking various automotive fluids and oily pollution washed into the gutter and into storm drains. The auto repair shops washed their driveways directly into the storm drain. This untreated pollution was discharged, untreated, directly onto Carlsbad State Beach, three blocks away.

My friends and I have been surfing and swimming at this stretch of Carlsbad State Beach for years, I was not happy watching these guys use the local beach as a dump. No response from the City of Carlsbad on this matter except visits from the Carlsbad Police.

One early Sunday morning in 2007, I watched the owner of one of the repair shops dump two fifty five gallon drums of used antifreeze down the driveway and directly into the storm drain.
I was outraged and called the City of Carlsbad and the State of California(Carlsbad State Beach). No response until a couple days later when my landlord came in and told me I had to move out. I asked him man to man, "just like that after twenty years"? He told me if I didn't move out the City of Carlsbad would terminate his union contracts.
It turned out the repair shop that was doing all the illegal dumping, illegal parking and busting out windows did the repair work for the Carlsbad Police Department and the City of Carlsbad and that's the end of the story.

After twenty years, bringing photographers and film makers around the world to Carlsbad, never missed the rent, never had to issue a refund, I was run out of town like a common criminal by the criminals.

There is more to this, much more, but this is not the place.

More to come