Anyone Shoot Surfing?

What lense do you use? And do you have any problems with shooting

early, early morning or late evening? If you have a link I would

love to take a look at your pictures. Trying to keep my price under

$1500 Thanks....<div></div>

A tight crop and some overall lightening show this to be a pretty dynamic shot.

 

I tried a couple edits in Picasa (free software) and it looks nice. But can you afford the reduction in resolution?

If your not happy with that wait for the sun.

On the East coast, early morning is often the only time to get good waves and with the sun coming up out of the ocean it makes it hard to shoot straight out. We did more shooting with waterproof cameras and an old boogie board (always waiting). I wonder what you don't like about the shot. It sounds like you want to buy something to take better pictures. You can always buy a longer lens to get "closer" but you run into needing something long, fast and probably autofocus which can be costly. Renting one might be better. I agree that photoshop can help pictures look better. Using digital, if your not already, is a good way to check what you need to adjust before the day is done. I wish there were more surfing pictures on photo.net. Keep them coming.

Try at pbase and Fred Miranda, and Google searching, check "mavericks surf" or similar. The Mavericks contest was yesterday at Half Moon Bay in northern California, and that should get you some links to albums, etc. Most seem to be using some pretty long lenses to get the reach needed there.

 

Otherwise a generic "surfing" search on photo sites like pbase will help.

 

As it is, I may be the only southern Californian who never surfed so can't help too much beyond that.

These aren't mine, but check them out:

 

http://www.quiksilver.com/eddie_aikau_04/photos.asp

 

For more inspiration, rent and watch the video, "Riding Giants," synopsis here:

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389326/

 

At Waimea and other North Shore O'ahu spots, many shooters I see are using pretty big

glass, looks like 400 to 600 mm lenses.

Not too much wrong with this that can't be solved by Autolevels and

rotate 2 degrees. If you had a Nikon D70 instead of a 20D you might

have an easier time keeping the horizon straight, using grid lines.

I see chromatic aberration at the edges but what do you expect at 300mm

from a non-APO lens (says so in the EXIF).<div></div>

Hope you don't mind me tossing in an altered version of your picture. This one is a much closer crop. I added quite a bit of brightness too, but I think it could stand to use a little more even. Picasa isn't a very precise tool, so adding more brightness would have blown out all the highlights, but a more capable photo-editing software package could do a selective highlighting job that would look very nice.<div></div>

Thanks for all the input!

I replied in your other post about 100-400 vs 70-200, but you need a longer lense. Better/more light wouldn't hurt either, IS helps with the hand-holding, but your surfer is still moving pretty fast. I shot in the late afternoon in Hawaii, and there was plenty of light. There's another thread about 20 down, where I posted my link.

South Shore of O'ahu. 135mm plus 3x converter.<p>

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<img src="http://mysite.verizon.net/web23z6i/photo/surfer.jpg"><p>

I shoot with a 100-400 IS L on a tripod or monopod, sometimes with a 1.4 Kenko Pro 300 TC. I have shot with the 75-300 IS in the past and found that you have to get the lens stopped down to f8 or smaller and keep your shutter speed above 1/1000 in order to get sharp images. Of course less wide open on a long lens (even the primes) is generally not the sharpest part of the lens - though the primes are much better then most telephotos wide open. There are a few other tricks I have learned such as locking on to the surfer and tracking for a second or so before tripping the shutter, this gives the predictive auto-focus time to "guess" where the right focus will be when a subject is moving. Here are some recent shots from the Matix Pro/Am a couple weeks ago... <a href=http://www.pbase.com/webrx/matixproam>Link</a><div></div>

I've used my 80-400 and got okay images. I used to use a canon ae-1 with a 500mm f8 reflector lens with 400/800 speed film and i seemed to like those photos better. Then again, now that I can see my images up close, I'm finding I want a serious lens like a 300/2.8 but can't justify $3k, either. Maybe an 80-200-esq lens + 1.4tc will do it for you....I'm in the same quandry.

I use a Canon 600mm f/4 IS USM. This lens is fast enoug to shoot under most conditions but I never shoot unless it is a clear sunny day. With my Canon 20D, it's equal to a 940mm. This is the lens of choice for all serious surf photographers. Unfortunately, mine cost over $7,000. The Canon 100-300mm zoom and Canon 400mm are also good lenses as long as you can shoot from a pier or jetty, or the waves are breaking close to shore. You can see some of my surf shots at www.surfshots.biz.

 

Larry