Tag Archives: surfing

As I was cleaning up my web sites image archives I found some older images I took years ago of surfing contest in Sebastian Inlet Florida in 2007

Canon G10 & Underwater enclosure…

I was out at 2nd Light Surf Spot with my Canon G10 & underwater enclosure, working on my shooting technique from the water. Shoot from the water is a much greater challenge than shoot with a big lens from the beach. I learned a great deal from my first attempt. I need to use a boogie board and or scuba fins.

The G10 is pretty good camera with 4k and 4k news, since I am shooting full sun light I don’t have to work about high ISO noise. What would make it better would be an external aiming system that would allow better subject tracking, the LCD is no match for full sun light. I wish the frame rate was higher. I also getting the subject closer is key, which is hard since the environment is very dynamic.

More Surfing at 2nd Light

This is the 2nd set from Thursday, I was there for a few hours shooting with my friends from Globo Surf, I have been working on my technique for shooting land based surfing. I used the Canon 5D mk II and the 2.8f L 400mm lens with a 2X Teleconverter. The 5D mk II doesn’t have a fast frame rate, but with a full size sensor and 24 meg a pixel sensor I can crop half the image away and still have a plenty of image quality for printing images. I use Apple photography program Aperture. The first thing I do is down load all the images to my computer. Then I start to grade the images, Apertures auto stacking makes this a very fast.

The surf was good this afternoon. I head to 2nd Light and drug out the big lens and did some shooting. I was using a 5d mkII and a 2.8f L 400mm to allow me to get a bit closer I used a tele converter to push the focal length out to 800mm. This allowed me to get even closer to the action, most rides where at the first break.

(NOTE: If you don’t see your self, drop me a note jonsl at sluder dot net and tell me the day and what you where riding)

National Kidney Foundation Surf Contest

The mission of the NKF of Florida is to prevent kidney and urinary tract diseases, improve the health and well-being of individuals and families affected by these diseases, and increase the availability of all organs for transplantation.
The NKF Surf Festival began 24 years ago as event to benefit chronically ill dialysis patients. It was the heartfelt commitment of former professional surfer, Rich Salick, of Cocoa Beach FL, and his twin brother Phil, who put his life ont the line in 1974 by donating a kidney to save Rich’s life. All proceeds of the event go directly to dialysis patients. Come join the fun and make a difference in people lives. Let’s have some fun!

I tossed my gear in the truck and headed up to Cocoa Beach. Shoot before 11-12ish on the east coast of Florida presents back light issues. Shooting in mid day is great light but better have a bucket of sun screen and water. I was shooting with the 5D mk II and 2.8f L 400mm lens. The lens has the range and sharpness to really get close to the surfer in the water. I shot from 8am to 2pm, I was cooked and tired by this time as well as the surf had flatten out. Over all the images are good, I need to tweak a few more settings.

I shot using aperture priority at f8 and ISO 100 because of the very bright light, I was getting shutter speed with enough speed to stop the action. I had the auto-focus set to AI servo because to the constant movement of the subjects. I also used burst mode to allow continuous shooting so I can go back and pull the best action shot of the bunch. I found this technique to work better that single frame shooting. I would miss the peak action shot. Apples Aperture has a great feature called staking which can group shots that are very close in time to each other. This makes finding the best of an action sequence easier than hunting by opening and closing files in Photoshop.

Surfing Pictures

Hurricane Bill produced some big waves for Brevard County. I when out to 2nd Light and drug out the f 2.8 L 400 mm lens and added a 2x Tele-converter on a Canon 5d MKII. The first thing I can say is the day was over casted and the angle of the sun light presented less than perfect likelihood for get great surfer mag quality images. The main problem was the angle of light, I think switching metering from average to spot I would had a better exposure. The surfer in front of the wave was shaded from the sun on the back side.