What is Aquabumps?

Aquabumps is a website and daily email dedicated to early morning beach life. Aquabumps depicts images of waves, surfers (good and bad), swimmers, sunrises and whatever happens in the wee hours down the beach every weekday. Which beach? Bondi mainly (we’re based there) but quite often Italy, Rio, Hawaii, Tahiti, Maldives, Indonesia, and Fiji feature.

We’ve been doing this since 1999 (that’s 24 years kids, well before blogs became popular).

It’s free to subscribe to our daily photo newsletter and 40,000 people happily exist on our mailing list. (Some readers have been on there for 12 years!) You can join our list by entering your email address in the box provided on the homepage. Around 10:30am each weekday, the images are emailed directly to you in an HTML formatted newsletter…so you don’t have to open any annoying attachments, just scroll down through the highly crafted images, read a short (hopefully amusing) paragraph or two and then back to work! Yes, a little reminder of what’s happening outside your office cubicle.

The idea came about in 1999 when Eugene Tan, a frustrated Creative Director combined his three passions: photography, surfing, and the web. In the nineties, blogs hadn’t evolved yet, but Eugene, better known as ::uge (yooj), thought he’d provide a nice daily break for his mates to see a bit of surf at work. The daily updates started flowing more consistently and the first handful of friends became thousands of people logging on from all over the globe. Even Aquabumps’s Facebook page is a hive of activity with 107,000 followers (June 2015).

All of the images are taken by ::uge. Shooting at daybreak has become his morning ritual. He’s had a camera in his hand since he was 9 years old and a keen surfer for 26 years. Uge is constantly seeking unique angles for his morning images, whether it’s shooting from underwater, in helicopters, or from a cliff in South Bondi. If you like the images and want to see more, the Aquabumps Gallery in Bondi displays the images blown up in their full glory. Aquabumps opened its first gallery in 2004 and we send artwork all over the world. All artworks are signed by the artist and available in various sizes, prices, and framing techniques. We take great pride in our artworks – the top quality materials used in framing and printing have been well researched by our team over the past decade. Aquabumps was the first gallery in Australia to adopt the new metallic prints, acrylic face mounts in 2002 and acrylic blocks in 2009.

Read our full history timeline here