Surfing Cyclone Ului on the 7D

Need an iPhone friendly link? Here ya go!

Want to see it in 1080P? Here ya go!

So at last I got around to chopping up the footage from last weekend’s semi-large storm swell and here it is! I must say it turned out better than I thought, mostly due to the surfing and acting talents of my good friend, Greg Weatherall.

Turns out he is a bit of gun surfer! In his brothers’ words “He’s a big unit! I’ve seen him smack the lip and just destroy waves! I mean look at him, he’s huge!” I’d have to agree, he is a big unit and yes he does tend to leave quite a wake in his passage. Despite not finding the 12 foot waves he was hoping for he still had a lovely time and turned it on for the camera!

Going into this shoot, I kind of had an idea what I wanted to capture. The usual spectator love that goes with these kinds of swells (Since every man and his dog wants a slice of the action), some good surfing and hopefully some nice footage for an intro, with Greg getting ready and all that kind of stuff.

I must admit the intro stuff wasn’t just off the cuff, I did wear my Directors hat for that, but hey, you got to set the scene right? Lucky for me, Greg is a good sport and was willing to indulge my shot-wankery, instead of just charging off into the surf with a devil may care attitude like every other pro surfer!

I started with the getting ready footage. The Sigma 30mm f1.4 and Canon 50mm f1.8 II really worked well here. I love these lenses, the bokeh is nice to play with and the quick glimpses gives you just enough to see what’s going on. We started off out at the furthest point break using Greg’s Canon 400mm f2.8. I must say, I was so excited to use this lens and my lord it is a lovely piece of kit, but man it is just so unwieldy it really didn’t lend itself to the way I like to shoot. Encumbered by my camera bag, my tripod, the glidetrack and the 400mm (in it’s own backpack, it’s that bloody big!) it was just such a pain in the butt moving around that I probably missed a tonne of great shots because I couldn’t spare the time to be moving around the rocks with all the gear. An assistant would have been invaluable, but as if that’s going to happen for this kind of shoot. So whilst the image is outstanding, and the extra stops really helped as the light fell, I don’t think I’ll be saving my pennies for this one.

I finished off the evening by pulling out the trusty Tokina 11-16 f2.8 and my Hyongnuo Intervalometer (Which has a dinky screen! Beware!) and grabbed 150 shots to whack together into a time lapse. 150 seems good to me and works out to be a 6 second shot. I’m not usually one for hanging on shots, but the music in this track really lent itself well to that.

At 6am the next morning. . .well you know the story from the previous post. . .very disappointing. . .nowhere near the predicted swell. . .sad faces all round.

I had learnt my lesson the day before though and left the Canon 400mm 2.8 in the car, waved goodbye to the Glidetrack and travelled light and swift with my camera bag with all my lenses in it and the tripod. Ahhhh! Much better! I did however borrow Greg’s 1.4X extender and found it worked quite well on my Canon 100-400 f4-5.6L. The 1.4X coupled with the 1.6X Crop factor was really quite nice. Sadly shooting wide open (at f8) was not really an option, as it was just too soft. I found to get anywhere near a sharp image I had to be shooting at around f11-f13, f13 seemed to be the sharpest.

You’ll notice that the footage looks radically different in places, there was bright sunshine, overcast skies, dim dusk shooting, sunset shooting, man I got it all. I was really hoping it was just going to be grey and overcast and look a little menacing, sadly that wasn’t the case. The colours in this clip are pretty much straight out of the camera. Just a couple of shots had to be corrected for contrast as the 400mm and the extender had left them a little washy at times. I think one day I might do a graded version of this clip just as a test, but today is definitely not that day!

What do I think makes this clip? Seriously, it’s got to be the song! It’s just great! I’ve been listening to it all week and funnily enough, it’s another track of that Gui Boratto Mix Collection on Renaissance. That compilation has been getting a hiding on lately! It’s just too good! The song itself is by Bomb the Bass and it’s called ‘The Infinites (Featuring Paul Conboy and Gui Boratto)”. Great album, you should definitely check it out!

So that was the weekend that was. . .Not what we’d hoped for, but now having cut it all up, not a total disaster either. Could it be better, of course! Will it be better next time? You bet! Let’s just hope we don’t have to wish too big of a tropical cyclone upon the Pacific islands to get the shots we want!

That’s it for now! It’s way past clock off time! Managed to get down to the Mooloolaba stop of the Triathlon World Cup today, hopefully will get some time to cut that this week.

Until then. . .stay classy!