OK, it’s a tenuous and tedious link to surfing for a site ‘dedicated to surf photography’, but we’ve had no surf lately and i’m struggling for things to blog about, and I know this should really go on my photography portfolio site but it’s much easier to post a photo blog here on soulsurfing.co.uk with wordpress and modularity installed than it is to build a page manually on the other site, so here it is.
So… more fun shooting red squirrels than surfers? well you got to do something when the sea is flat for weeks on end.
It’s not more fun than surfing itself, i can just about remember how much i love that, and it’s been so long since we had good waves to take photos of (6th feb) that i might have just forgotten the fun of doing that. But for the last few days, dawn patrol has been in my back garden with red, and i’ve been more excited about that than i remember being watching the action at Compton or Freshwater Bay.
It started with the squirrel box that i got for my last birthday (thanks freya) and lots of expert advice from Paul Blackley (who has to be the best wildlife photographer on the Island in my book). The fact that i got the Canon 7d now and it can shoot at 8fps and up to IOS 6400 helps too, but the secret mostly consists of a big bag of hazelnuts and a lot of patience.
After a while i’ve learnt the routes he takes, and where he likes to bury the nuts, but its the way he bounces around at high speed and constantly keeps you guessing what he will do next that makes it such good fun to try and catch with a camera. There is a similarity there with surf photography, but i’ve found that after watching and taking pics for years, i can usually read the wave and anticipate what a surfer will do next, compared to that a squirrel is just a lot more random and so in that way, exciting.
These shots (except the obvious ‘urban acid’ surfing edit) are all shot in RAW and posted here as mostly sooc (straight out of camera) apart from the odd crop and in a few cases a little tweak to the contrast or exposure. In addition to being the first action shots with the new 7D, it’s also the first time i’ve used lightroom (beta 3.2) for managing the files and i’m liking the really subtle control and streamlined workflow its given me.
And because i couldn’t ignore surfing completely, i’ve chucked in an edit of one of my favourite photos from the last good swell.
Hope you like the pics, comments, feedback and criticism are all welcome in the comments box below!
