Sometimes you don’t want to be bombarded by surf images, over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to expand my pool of inspirational and instructional resources to see what they can bring to my surf photography.
Whatever you’re interested in this list should offer at least a few ideas to keep you improving.
I recently joined the Plymouth Camera Club, so far it’s been really good fun with a nice session on portrait lighting and a judging session for one of their internal competitions, both gave me plenty of ideas and inspiration on general Photography that I’ve already applied to my surf and general shooting.
I’m looking forward to entering a competition soon and seeing what I can learn from the more experienced club members.
I’d definitely suggest checking out your local club to help get the most out of your photography, surf and otherwise.
2/3: Podcasts: TWIP/Big Lens Fast Shutter
This Week in Photo (TWIP) is a weekly podcast featuring 4 or 5 guests each week who talk about the latest news, answer questions from listeners and offer tips and advice on various types of photography, I stick it on in the car or when I’m doing the washing up, it’s nice to just keep up with the latest announcements and often throws up an interesting idea, service or product that is useful to me.
Most recently they interviewed the hosts of the Big Lens Fast Shutter podcast which is all about sports photography so I’m going to subscribe to that too and hopefully pick up some more relevant tips for surf photography.
There’s lots more podcasts out there too, just do a search for photography and you’ll find several dozen, I’d suggest downloading a few to hear what they’re like and picking your favourite, mine happens to be TWIP but there’s many alternatives.
I’ve used Magic Lantern on my Canon 550D and now my 60D, if you haven’t heard of it and you have a Canon camera you should check it out, it’s a firmware add-on that runs alongside the normal Canon firmware and gives you access to lots of very cool and often useful features.
I’m hopefully going to be experimenting with using Magic Lantern on my 60D in my housing to allow me to do a couple of things I wouldn;t ordinarily be able to, if I can get my head around the way it works.
Anything that expands the capabilities of your camera and allows you to try new things (especially for free) is worth investigating so I recommend taking a look to anyone starting out in surf photography to see if there’s something in the feature list that you can use.
5: In Focus Skateboarding Photography/Videography Video Series
I was planning on taking some skateboarding photo’s recently and I stumbled on the In Focus series on Youtube, they’re great video tutorials on many aspects of skateboarding photography and videography.
The one that I will definitely be re-watching and I think will really be of benefit to surf photographers is the one on composition with photographer Michael Burnett:
Too often videos like this don’t really go through practical tips, focusing on a more personal interview with the photographer, this one is awesome and I’ve tried to use some of these ideas in my surf photography already.
I’d recommend all the videos in the series, a lot of them are about filming so if that’s not your thing skip to the photography ones, they’re all well produced and I’m subscribed to the channel and looking forward to more.
I aspire to create this type of video for this site, I’ve got a couple of ideas for a couple but it’s going to have to be done damn well to stand up against stuff like this.
I hope this list will inspire you to try something new then bring back what you’ve learnt to your surf photography, they have all certainly helped me out.
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