Quick Start Settings for Surf Photography

Settings for Surf Photography can be tricky to figure out, this lesson gives you some rules of thumb to start getting great photos without using auto mode. These settings are not going to be ideal in some situations, but they will perform better than any of the automatic modes on your camera.

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You should use these as a starting point and make changes as you get to know the different settings and how your camera performs.

Surf photography from the beach and normal or telephoto in the water:

Mode: shutter priority
Shutter speed: 1/1000
ISO: auto
Focus mode: continuous autofocus
Focus point: center

Fisheye surf photography:

Mode: shutter priority
Shutter speed 1/1000
ISO: auto
Aperture (if using a manual lens): f8
Focus mode: manual focus
Focus set to: above water: 1m, below water: as close as possible

If you’d like to dig in to the settings that help preserve battery life for the Sony a6000 camera in particular, I recommend Matt from Salty Surf Housings’ blog post: Sony A6000 Surf Photography

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I have made some of my favourite surf photos available on the learning surf photography website, alongside the gear and settings I used to take them. You can find all of them here.

If you’d like to see how I processed the images, and get access to the Adobe Lightroom preset which contains all the edits I made, make sure you take the post-processing course.

Glossary

Here are some concepts that are worth reading up on if it’s the first time you’ve heard about them:

Shutter speed – the amount of time the shutter is open, letting light hit your sensor
ISO – the sensitivity of your sensor, higher ISOs mean grainier images
Aperture – the size of the hole inside your lens, the smaller the aperture f number, the bigger the hole, the more light gets in

Transcript

In this video, I’m going to give you some settings for surf photography that will act as a starting point for you when you are starting to take surf photos. I’ll build on some of the concepts we talked about here throughout the course, but this is really simple for you to just get your basic settings drilled into your camera, so you can get to the beach and get some good results, start getting sharp photos, hopefully, that will do the job and that you can build on and start making creative choices around. So these are the basic, quick settings that I think you should start with.

So I’m going to base this on my Sony A6000 and A6500 cameras, because that’s what I use day to day for surf photography. But there are all equivalent settings for other brands, like Nikon, Canon. They all have very similar settings to these that you can choose.

Shutter Priority Mode – Settings for Surf Photography

So, firstly, mode. I would go for, and again, this is for 90% of situations. You’re going to want to change this in down the line, but for basic start off settings, go for shutter priority mode. So that’s a little S on your mode dial on Sony and Nikon, and a TV on the mode dial for Canon cameras. So you want to set your mode to shutter priority.

Then you want to set your shutter speed to 1/1000th of a second. That’s going to ensure that you freeze the action. Then your camera will automatically set the aperture for you, because you’re in shutter priority mode. And you want to set your ISO to auto ISO. That’s your basic exposure triangle settings.

Focus Settings for Surf Photography

So you want to now sort out the focus. You want to go to continuous autofocus. And again, there’s a few different names for that, depending on your brand. But for Sony, it’s continuous autofocus. And you want to select the center focus point. Again, it’s just a rule of thumb. I’ll talk about this in more detail later. So you’ve got center focus point, continuous autofocus, shutter priority, 1/1000th of a second, auto ISO.

Image Size and Resolution Settings for Surf Photography

There are some other settings that you want to change on your camera, which are more general. So what I’m going to go through is a good starting point for surf photography. I would go for raw plus JPEG. That’s the type of image that your camera captures. I’ll go into detail on why that is, but that is a really great place to start, for a number of different reasons.

Then, image size. With a Sony camera in particular, you can then set what size of JPEG image the camera saves. And I go for small. And that’s because the reason I have JPEGs in there as well, is so that I can transfer them quickly off the camera, into my phone, do some quick edits, and post them online, or send them, more likely, send them to the person who’s in the photo, or family and friends who you’ve taken a photo of surfing. So by going raw plus JPEG, you’re getting a raw file, which is the one that you want to edit and produce prints and anything large, high resolution. You’re going to be editing the raw file and outputting it, probably a JPEG, from that. But the JPEG, raw plus JPEG, captures two files for each shot you take. The JPEG is just for zapping quickly to your phone. So I choose small, which reduces the file size, makes it easier to transfer it from your camera to your phone. Simple as that.

Drive Mode Settings for Surf Photography

The next one that I would change is the drive mode. So that’s the burst mode of the camera, how fast it takes photos when you hold down the button. And I would change that to the highest speed you’ve got. So that’s high plus on the Sony cameras. And that just ensures that when you do hold the shutter down, it will use the full fastest speed, that you can take as many photos as it can, until you let go of your finger. So with the A6500, in particular, it has a really big image buffer, so it can save lots of those photos and keep going for a long, long time. Longer than you’ll ever need for surf photography, in my experience. The A6000, and other cameras, have a smaller buffer, so you have to be more thoughtful about how long you hold down the shutter for, because it can just fill up and then stop taking photos. But again, I’ll go into more detail on that later.

The A6000 and other cameras have a smaller buffer, so you have to be more thoughtful about how long you hold down the shutter for. Otherwise, it can stop and freeze up because it can’t transfer the data quickly enough from the sensor to your memory card. So I would go for the highest speed card, and then one of the skills you will learn fairly quickly is to moderate how much you press and hold down that button. And what you’re really trying to do is capture the height of the action in any situation. So you’ll do small bursts, small bursts, small bursts. If I turn this one on, you can hear the sounds. So give you an idea:

(Sound of camera shutter)

So someone’s taking off, and that was the bottom turn. They’re trimming along the wave, I’m holding focus on the person. That was the cutback, and then another bottom turn, up to the top. And that was an air, and then that was them landing the air at the end. So you get the picture by focusing on just the height of the action and doing a little burst at each point when you think the most exciting moment is happening. And the way you’re going to know that is by watching surfing videos and through experience, basically. But you’ll pick it up fairly quickly. And that means you will have far fewer images to go through than if you just hold down the shutter for the whole wave. No one’s going to want to look at that. If you look at any surf magazine, there won’t be usually very occasionally there’s a long sequence, but usually there’s one photo of each wave, maybe two or three, but that’s it.

So you rarely need any more than a couple of shots of a wave, basically. The problem is you don’t know which shot is the best until after the fact. So you need to capture the fraction of the wave which is interesting, and you need to do two or three shots of each part of the wave which is going to be interesting. Then you just pick the best one, and it makes it a lot easier to review your photos afterwards. And make sure you don’t run out of buffer on the camera and end up missing a shot which would have been the best one of the whole lot. So yes, to get drive mode, set it to burst mode, put it in the highest, fastest possible.

There are some cameras which have really fast modes which will lock focus at the start on the first frame, and then because it doesn’t have to autofocus, it enables the camera to take it even faster. I’d avoid those modes. I’d go for the one before that, the fastest you can do with continuous autofocus. That’s the mode to go for. That’s pretty much all of the basic ones.

Extra Settings for Surf Photography

On the Sony camera, this a6500. I would activate Bluetooth mode as well. You’re probably going to want to pick up a few spare batteries, because you never know when you need a new battery. But if you activate Bluetooth mode, you use a bit more battery, but it enables you to synchronize with your phone and use your phone’s GPS satellite connection to plot the GPS coordinates against the images that you take on your Sony camera, which is a godsend when you’re going back through your photos.

Maybe not that day, you’re going to remember where you were that day, but in six months time, if you want to quickly look on a map to see, oh, I was at that spot. I wonder if the conditions look good for spot X. So let’s see what I did last time.Maybe I want to try something similar or something totally different. And you can find it really easily using the map, rather than going back and trying to remember when it was you were at that spot.

So that’s my basic Quick Start settings for surf photography. And as you go through this course, you’ll notice that I do explain different settings for different lenses, different types of photo, and various other aspects. But this should get you going nice and quickly if you just want to run out the door and set your camera.

So those are the basic settings for surf photography that I would recommend you start with. And then you can tweak them and change them, depending on the situation and the type of shot you want to get. But this will give you a good foundation to start taking surf photos that you’re proud of.

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