Joni Sternbach's vintage Surfer Portraits

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Surfer and board; human and landscape; photographer and subject; surfer to surfer: in her latest book, Surfland, photographer Joni Sternbach has collated her incredible portraits of californian surfers in situ at their local breaks, created using the vintage technique tintype. As if pulled from a museum's long lost archive, documenting another epoch, Joni's portraits are striking, timeless and utterly beautiful - but the tintype technique hasn't changed much since the 1850s.

According to Wikipedia, images are made by: "creating a direct positive on a sheet of iron metal that is blackened by painting, laquering or enamelling and is used as a support for a collodion photographic emulsion."

One of several projects that Joni's working on with these vintage, creative but cumbersome cameras, she's also working on documenting seascapes and ocean details - which have an eery, otherworldly feel.