Aaron Chang

Aaron Chang (August 9, 1956) is an American photographer specialized in surfing and ocean photography. He spent 25 years as a senior photographer at Surfing Magazine; he was an early photographer to practice the act of shooting waves with a wide angle lens from the water.

Chang later focused on fine art photography. He owns two art galleries that feature his work in San Diego and Solana Beach, California. Chang lives in Carlsbad, California.

Chang was born in 1956 in Tucson, Arizona, the eldest of Howard and Marilyn Chang's two children. Aaron's father, a math teacher, introduced him to photography at age 9 when he gave him a Bellows camera. The family moved to Imperial Beach, a region of San Diego, California when he was 11. In high school, Chang swam competitively, surfed and worked in the lab developing photos at the high school where his father taught. He graduated in 1974 and after moved to Oahu.

Chang worked in Waikiki taking pictures of tourists at luaus at the Royal Hawaiian and on boat cruises. He then moved to the North Shore, where he worked as a photographer shooting postcards. Three years after, Larry Moore from Surfing Magazine saw Chang's photography and put Chang on staff at the magazine in 1979.

In the 1980s, the photography industry saw new motor drives, improved lenses and higher-quality film stock. Chang applied these techniques to shooting the sport of surfing. He was one of the early photographers to use a camera in the water to capture surfing photography. Chang's most significant contribution to early surf photography was the use of an ultra wide angle lens in the barrel in big waves, something that no one had tried before in the 1980s.

Chang was a senior photographer for 25 years at Surfing Magazine; his photos were selected for 38 magazine covers. His shot of an arcing wave at the Banzai Pipeline appeared on the cover of Surfing Magazine in 1985; it was the first significant empty wave shot with no person featured.

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