Instead of just bickering about them being bad, let’s do something. 

If you’re reading this, you’ve seen enough surf photos to understand it:

Surf photo captions are dead. In content and style. We need to reinvent them.

Captions have a formula: A witty one-liner, usually built around a pun, followed by surfer-comma-place, and written in what’s called the historical present tense, as if someone were live-sportscasting a slideshow.

Julian racks up frequent flier miles in French airspace. Frontside stalefish, Hossegor.

With so many cameras on the North Shore, sometimes a barrel is the only place to find privacy. John John Florence, Backdoor.

Pat Gudauskas won’t say where this spot is — he just lets his surfing do the talking. Massive fin-drift in the Caribbean.

People don’t talk this way.

Other times a caption isn’t clever. Sometimes it’s self-consciously profound, as if its writer discovered an eternal human truth while contemplating the image.

Sometimes you have to go back to the source. Ian Walsh taps in. Java.

No one said it’d be easy. Gabriel Medina with the world on his shoulders, Tahiti.

These examples are made up but if they appeared verbatim in next month’s Surfer, that would shock no one.

Photo captions suck because they’re easy to write instead of great to read. They’re designed for the supplier instead of the consumer.

So rather than something useful or entertaining we get clumsy surf wordplay, because it’s cheap and easy to phone in from a SoCal office park. I would rather a caption tell me that the king of hearts is the only one without a mustache (or another random, unrelated fact) than read some version of “Chippa slams the brakes for a South Oz pitstop” for the thousandth time.

Let’s make something better.

How could we redesign the surf photo caption? What could improve or replace it?

Tweet or Instagram your ideas, suggestions or great captions we must see to us with the #wycaptionredesign hashtag or email them to us at [hello@whatyouth.com] with the subject: “Caption Redesign.” 

We’ll do a follow-up post with some of your best solutions and a few of our own. Thanks for your help.

*Our favorite 5 entries will get a What Youth gift pack of free stuff for sure, and we’ll probably try to hire you for a terribly small salary.