Gone Surfin'!

Nope, not Hawaii, nor Australia, not even Cornwall, Wales or Scotland.

Yep, humble Bournemouth. The safest of summer seaside family resorts really does get this "wild" in winter....

One to go LARGE!

After the popularity and success of yesterday's long exposure Blip, with the lone surfer just standing there in the setting sun, I had to return as the sun was out and still the weekend. Most of these water-loving dudes are most probably working professionals during the week. And how different chartered accounting must seem from 'riding the waves'!

And boy, don't they try! Scores of them, up, down, flat on their belly, most of the waves just mere ripples. Occasionally a bigger one comes along and, voila!

And why the black and white? Despite the sun being out, the sea was a pale greeny grey and the sky pale, as the sun is above right, a bit. By going mono, I was able to inject as much contrast and punch into the water and its spray, without the colours either looking horrid or the whites burning out. I took some time over this one, to get a full range of tones, over all the scene.

The D7000 was on 6fps 'high' drive and I simply pointed the Sigma EX 70-200mm f2.8 at the action, and had my finger hard on the shutter. I was lucky for about 5 shots, the other several hundred were of surfers not actually on boards or even on a wave. But there you go, you have to start a new type of photography somewhere, don't you?

I chose the 70-200mm f2.8 over the more obvious choice of Tamron's (much slower) SP 70-300mm, as the Sigma has a decent tripod collar and thus much more easy to use on the monopod, and the Tamron hasn't. I was also perhaps expecting low light levels and a much wider aperture would have allowed faster shutter speeds - this one was about freezing action.

I had no real idea how far out these guys went out - and I would have to factor in how far the waves would roll in - I was not up for wet feet myself! The result was that the Sigma was too short, even at 200mm.

Thankfully, a permanent resident in my rucksack is Sigma's 'matched' EX 1.4x teleconverter. Adding this allowed for a more usable 420mm f4 equivalent, over the max of 300mm equivalent (on DX). Fortunately I didn't have to crop this one very much at all.

I did stop down by one stop to help with sharpness, whilst the 'matching' allowed almost infallible hypersonic auto-focussing at all times. I lost only a handful of frames due to poor focus. This image has  been sharpened in editing, more really to highlight the spray droplets rather than because it lacked sharpness. The EXIF data shows the info with the converter in place.