If you’re reading this website it probably means you’re relatively new to surf photography, like me, and in turn that means that I can almost guarantee you shoot with a digital camera. I don’t blame you, shooting with film is hard and expensive, digital is easy and cheap, it seems like there’s no sensible reason in 2014 to shoot surfing with film, luckily there’s still some magazines and photographers who don’t act sensibly all the time.
Here’s the link: stabmag.com/old-fashioned-values
And here’s the blurb from Stab:
A Return to Old Fashioned Values: Where the acid complications of phones, digital cameras and computers are iced for isolation, waves and film. An anti-establishment surf journey between a photographer and his subject.
Head to Stab Mag to read, see and hear about three surf trips where all the surfing was documented on film (…and digital HD video, so as to better accompany the stories about the pre-digital experience when presented on the internet, where they are voted on by people on their phones).
All three have a nice interview with the photographer, and many good captions too, alongside some really great photo’s that look great, and definitely offer something different to the vast majority of surfing images you will see on the ‘net, there’s also a neat video for each gallery so don’t skip until you’ve watched it.
Here’s a quote from Jon frank (who I voted for):
The last thing the world needs is more photographs. And the principal advantage of film over digital is you shoot less. The ratio of bad photographs to great ones increases exponentially in relation to the number of frames exposed.
I think that holds true if you’re already a highly skilled photographer who has a good understanding of exposure and light, but if you’re learning, like me, it sure helps to be able to take more than 36 shots before swimming in and changing rolls, and to see the results instantly. I’ve shot a little bit on film, using disposable waterproof cameras, the original 35mm GoPro and my now dead Canon SureShot A1, I got a few photo’s worth keeping and lots of crap, I might fare better today, and maybe I will muster the effort to get my Canon EOS 500 into a housing and take some photo’s at some point.
I encourage you to go and check out these articles, if nothing else it will make you glad you’re able to shoot with a digital camera and appreciate the great work surf photographers were doing long before you were learning surf photography/born.
Links/resources:
- Jon Franks website, (check out this shot in particular, it will blow your mind)
- Ted Grambeau’s website
- Brian Bielmann’s website
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