The day before I left my last posting we went back north to do some more wakeboarding. Here’s a handful of shots I took from the back of the boat while Scott was playing on the monoski. If these bore you, skip right past to something more interesting, I promise this isn’t all I have on this site. There are lots more regular posts coming, I just wanted to share some of the shots I liked.
I shot the following series of images in a few seconds’ worth of action down 200m of a tropical seaside river-lagoon the other day with my buddy playing on a monoski. He complains that his weight is too far on his back foot, but it all looks pretty fun to me. The frozen water-patterns are one of my favourite features- the ones in the last shot are my favourite, it’s too bad that you can’t see his face. At any rate, I’m hoping to head out with the guy again in the next couple of weeks, especially as it looks like I’ll be out here a little while longer, so maybe get some more shots…
Click the pics to see bigger versions…
The pics were all taken with my Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM. For those that know the lens, it’s a macro lens that works great as a portrait lens on the 1.6x crop-factor sensors like the EOS 400D, but certainly isn’t a custom-built sports-lens. I found myself wishing I had the 70-200mm f/2.8 L that I’ve got my beady eye on, but which is stretching the budget a little right now, especially if I hope to find a place to live when I get back to Australia. I reckon though if I’m going to keep up some of these water-sports I might just have to bite the bullet. After all, my round of kite-surfing shots were pretty disappointing, but that promises to be a good avenue for some fuuun photoshoots.
This is my buddy Scott. We work together. We’ve known eachother a few years now, and he happens to be out here where I am, which is rather nice. Last weekend I went up with his family to a resort area a ways outside the capital and we hooked up with Holger, who I met the previous weekend kite-surfing. As well as being a kite-surfer, Holger runs a water-sports centre, and on offer is water-skiing, monoskiing, and wake-boarding.
Scott’s a bit of a water-skier and decided to give the monoski another run. I sat in the boat and snapped off a bunch of shots while he zipped up and down the river. It was a lot of fun for all involved. My lens isn’t perfectly suited to capture action-shots- I was using my 60mm portrait lens, so had a fixed focal-length which luckily was just about right to catch the action in-context- but no super-tight face-shots or anything too intimate. The camera’s sharp depth-of-field did a good job of isolating the flying spray, and being cranked wide open I was also able to really up the shutter-speed to freeze the action. I like this image because it also frames the scenery we were playing in, which was lush and pretty and tropical- not your average water-sports park in some flooded suburban quarry. I got a bunch of fun shots of Scott which I’ll share in due course. However, coupled with the photographically-disappointing kite-surfing expedition, I’ve suddenly started craving a 70-200mm zoom lens…
NB: Once upon a time, when I first started this blog, clicking on an image would let you open up the larger version of the shot. For some reason this feature appears to be disabled now. It still works on my earlier posts, but they did a rejig of something a few months back and everything changed. Any ideas? Cos this image would really benefit from being seen a little bit larger so you can see all that luverly spray flying…
