With strong winds from the south west forecast for the whole weekend and wave height predicted to be between 7 to 10 foot, it was a great opportunity to get some surf photography in. Later on in the year I will be meeting up with Chris Burkhard, category winner in the Red Bull Illumine photography contest and senior staff photographer for Surfer Magazine, so I’ll need some images to put in front of him for critique.

Surfing photography is always a numbers game, with the cameras motor drive set to a high frame rate so with a few high volume SD cards fitted in the camera, it was just an attempt to get the surfer positioned well in the frame. With the surfers a fair distance out in the bay I decided to use the Nikon D800. Admittedly it has a slow frame rate of 4fps, but when put into the DX crop mode the frame rate improves to 6 fps. The crop file is a good 24MB in size, so plenty of resolution is still available and gives the advantage of increasing the focal length by 1.5x. My focal length of 500mm now became 750mm. A higher frame rate would help, but since most of my day to day needs don’t need such a high rate, I don’t own a camera with one; I just hire it as and when it is needed.

So not a bad start to the exercise, but a few images in less flat lighting conditions would be nice. Overall, still a work in progress.