Learning Surf Photography

The Best Lenses for Surf Photography

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Covered in this video

  • Fisheye lenses
  • Ultrawide lenses
  • Normal lenses
  • Telephoto lenses
  • Zoom lenses
  • Macro lenses

Resources

LSP pages:

General information on lenses:

Some general info

Inspiration

Transcript

One of the most requested lessons that I was going to take for this course was about lenses for surf photography there’s also one of the things that I’m really keen on talking to people about, because I think there’s a lot of opinions out there which are different to my own, and I think there’s an opportunity for people to really do something different with their photography by using a different lens, and that’s why I recommend something like the Sony a6000 camera to someone who wants to get into surf photography because their different lens can change entirely what you can create with that camera.

I’m going to run through really quickly the main categories of lenses that I think are used by surf photographers and I use myself, I’m going to start at the wide end, so when someone describes a lens as “wide” it means a really short focal length, which is a low millimeters, I’m not gonna go into any technical details, links below as usual so you can dig into that if you want to,

Essentially, the lower the number, so what’s the widest lens I’ve got, it’s a 6.5 mil, that’s a very, very wide lens, it’s actually a circular fisheye,  the wider the field of view of the lens, the more that the lens captures in front of it, and in fact this one even captures slightly behind it, it’s that wide.

Fisheye Lenses for Surf Photography

Fisheye lenses have been very very popular in surf water photography for a long time, I love using them myself, if you’ve used the GoPro you’ll be familiar with that super wide, distorted angle of view, and GoPro have got a few settings in there which allow you to digitally crop that in, which effectively is doing the same thing as using a longer focal length on your interchangeable lens camera.

We’ll talk about that a bit later I think, but bear in mind that fisheye is going to be similar to a GoPro it’s that really wide angle you see a lot of stuff, it’s quite distorted, fisheye lenses distort things and I think when you’re in a natural environment like the sea, underwater or in a barrel or something where there are no man-made, straight lines, basically then a fisheye lens really comes into its own, because that distortion is not as obvious, it’s not something that you really pick up on

With a fisheye shot of a wave, there’s no straight lines anywhere anyway so it’s not like you’re jarring someone’s expectations of a square building by ballooning it out with this distortion the fisheye creates, so that’s one of the reasons why I think they’re really popular for surf photography, the other thing is, you can shoot one-handed.

I’m just gonna find a housing here, there so, imagine there’s a dome port on here, you can just basically point it, because it captures everything this side of you in the shot, you just wave it basically, actually you’re gonna get whatever is in in the shot, so there’s pros and cons for that obviously, and working out your composition with that can be a little bit tricky without looking through the viewfinder, but it’s something that you can practice, and it’s really rewarding when you get it just right.

I’ve got a whole video on fisheye shots in the water, so check that one out, a fish eye lens is one of the things I recommend, whether with a fisheye shooting in manual focus, and that’s because the wider angle the lens, the deeper the depth of focus, the more of the shot is in focus.

I can set this fisheye, this is a 7artisans 7.5mm f2.8 lens, I’d set that to say, if it’s a nice day, I’d set it to f/8 in terms of aperture, it’s a manual aperture so I have to change the dial on the actual lens to set that aperture in place, and then I’d set the focus to maybe one metre, and if I take a photo like that, the houses on the cliff way off in the background will be in focus, obviously they’re going to be very small normally because they’re a long way away, but they will be in focus and everything up to maybe 50 centimetres away from the front of the lens will be in focus – that’s the depth of field, it is massive on these really, really wide angle lenses, and that’s why manual focus is often better.

Because the problem you might have if you go for an autofocus fisheye is, if there’s with a fisheye you’ll be shooting for a dome port, got a video on that as well, but the lens can focus, if it’s autofocus, on something on the port itself, if there’s a speck of sand or or something on there it can it can think oh there’s a nice contrasty thing to focus on, and it’s the closest thing, I’m going to focus on that, and that means everything else is blurry, but if you set the manual focus at a meter or so, then you’re going to find that everything’s in focus and it never changes, tape it down as well if you if the focus ring is a little bit loose, then just put a bit of tape on so it doesn’t move.

That’s another another tip for fisheye photography, and so yeah, fish eyes, I love them, a lot of people really enjoy shooting with them, I guess in the last decade or so or maybe five years, since GoPros have become more popular, then this type of shot is probably blown up more than any other because it’s the one that’s is the default setting on a GoPro, is to get that super wide-angle fisheye style shot, and because they’re so small and you can get really great pistol grip triggers like the KNEKT series, then it makes it really easy and affordable to jump in and get that kind of fish eye, right in the barrel shot, so you’re gonna see a lot of them, so that’s one reason why perhaps you might prefer not to use them.

Personally, I love the look, and it’s a challenge getting into the positions to get really nice unique angles of waves and things so I recommend them highly because you can get away with, well because you mostly use manual focus you can use a manual lens, which is easier to manufacture and that means they’re really small and really cheap, normally, compared to lots of other lenses, because they don’t have to build all of the electronics and gizmos in there, motors and stuff to move around elements to focus things because you just do it like that, that means you can get a really good quality lens, really great image quality, for a much lower price than you’d expect if it had a zoom in it.

Of course, the main manufacturers do create their own fisheye lenses as well, Canon have an 8 to 15 mil, there’s quite a few zoom fisheye lenses around actually, there’s a Tokina 10 to 17 mm on my Canon and you can pay as much as you want for them, basically you can get a very very expensive fisheye, well you can get a relatively inexpensive fisheye, and in my experience it’s not huge amount difference between the two terms of image quality, you’re probably paying that much extra for the consistency, so every single one that’s produced is going to get great images, it might might be less so on cheap ones, although I’ve not had any problems, and their autofocus is super useful in the right situations.

If you’re not a surf photographer then autofocus might be essential to your fish eye use, so you know, you choose wisely, but I recommend getting a nice cheap and cheerful one, it’s nice and small, you can wave it around really easily.

Ultra Wide Lenses for Surf Photography

The next category is ultra wide lenses and I’d say ultra wide rectilinear lenses, rectilinear basically means it doesn’t have the distortion that’s you get with a fisheye. It might have some distortion, but it’s not the same really pronounced curved edges if you shoot a picture of a square object or building or something with a fisheye, it looks curved in the final image.

This is the Sony 10 to 18 mm, at the 10 mm end that’s super wide, obviously, if I was to take a picture of a building then those lines are going to remain straight, and they won’t be distorted, in practice, in the water, you see less, there’s a smaller field of view, so if you imagine a fisheye, it’s the widest you can get, everything in front of you, you can see, with it 10 mil lens, it’s going to be less that you can see, but you’re still going to see the loads and loads of stuff, so you can be a bit further back and you still get the same sort of image, or you can get a different perspective, because everything straight lines.

I think they are very different beasts, I think this is 10-18mm is great, and I do enjoy it, and I’ve shot with it even in like shore breaks and things as well, and got some good results, but I personally prefer the fisheye look and so that’s the one I stick to if I’m going for that type of shot.

I tell you where this was really useful, I took this one out to shoot a surf school and so some kids had come down to the beach their first ever surf lesson so I had this one in my sea frogs housing and that gives you zoom control from 10 to 18 mil and that was super useful for getting those kind of shots where the kids are coming past you, so I’m kind of running along in the shallows, the wave is really small, it was just a perfect day for learning to surf, so I was kind of up to like my knees or my thighs in the water and as someone took off, out there they weren’t really, you know, trimming along the wave, or doing turns or anything, they were literally paddling into the whitewater, going straight towards the beach

It gave me an opportunity to see them take off, if they managed to get to their feet and stay on their feet, then I’d be kind of jogging through the water, and that stick at 18 mil and as they came up, crank the zoom back to 10 mil and I could still get those really wide angles, and with a fisheye I wouldn’t have, there just won’t be any point to take any photos when they’re further away but with a 10 to 18 mil I can make it to 18 mil, I can at least get some usable shots, especially because I can crop in, and a lot of the shots that I was getting were intended or destined for social media, so they didn’t have to be really mega resolution, and then pull it back to 10 mil as they go past, hello a couple of nice shots, I think one of them was used in an advert for the surf school, and I think it’s it’s really, really handy lens to have for that type of thing, if you can get close to the action, in that case they’re all using soft boards, there’s not really any danger to me, and I’m able to jump out of the way really quickly, so there’s no danger to them, and they knew I was there, I’d introduced myself to everyone anyway, so in that case this type of lens is really, really useful, but if it’s like action in the barrel, bigger waves, then I wouldn’t be messing around with zoom control, I would just be one-handed, pistol-grip, swimming through the wave and shooting with the other one, so if you’re more of the first category, controlled situation, you can get close without any danger, also you need to be a little further away, this sort of thing, there’s 10 to 18 mil is brilliant, but then, like I say, for the bigger, hollower waves, I go for the fisheye.

So that’s your ultra wide angle, you get kind of some lenses that are kind of in between, so this is a 16 mm f-1.4 by Sigma, which is a fantastic lens, it’s really, really great image quality, and I shot this one a few times, again with the sea frogs housing, in a dome port actually, normally I’d shoot a flat port with a lens like this, so I was shooting this 10 to 18mm in a flat port, but with the 16 mm, it’s a bit big for the flat port,  but the dome port worked okay, but I would say again, it’s one of those in-between focal lengths that I know a lot of landscape photographers really love, that kind of allows you to get nice detail in the foreground as well as getting lots of the scene in in the background, which may be with an ultra wide its harder to do, because you get too much of the foreground in, so this kind of 16mm on an aps-c sensor, watch the equivalence video to find out what that is in 35 mil equivalent, but essentially, what it gives you is yeah a nice in-between focal length.

For me personally, I like the fisheye and then generally speaking I skip to a longer focal length than this, but it might be for you, it might be just what you want, if you have pictures in your mind of really landscape style surf photos, if you surf somewhere with really impressive backdrops, so I’ve been to New Zealand before and some of the cliffs you see on the other side of the surf breaks are amazing, if you’re, I don’t know, in Norway or anywhere where there’s snow on the background, generally speaking in the UK there’s a few spots though, just like that which are really good, but most of them are fairly average backgrounds, maybe if you’re looking for one of those stunning landscape style shots, then this is a really good choice for you.

Normal or Standard Prime Lenses for Surf Photography

The next type of lens that I think is really good for surf photography is called a “normal” lens, it’s called normal because it roughly matches your field of view, you’ve got quite a wide peripheral vision, your area that your eyes focus on is generally about the same as a 50mm on a 35 mm film camera, and so they call that your normal length lens.

Also you might call it “standard” prime, maybe, a few different ways, effectively around 50 mil equivalent focal length is that kind of rough match to your eyesight and I really, really like it, I think it’s it’s really natural, if you’re if like myself, you come to photography from surfing then those images in your head of those brilliant days with your friend getting barrelled, or the morning light coming up over the cliff and then the spray glistening in the glow of sunset, things like that, then you will see those through roughly this field of view, and that’s why, for me, it translates really nicely to photography.

I find it really it makes it easier for me to compose things in an interesting way, if there’s something the foreground and I’m shooting with this type of lens then it feels like you’re there, it feels like you could just put yourself in that position, where as something like a fisheye is alien to you, it’s unexpected, I’m never going to see that vision with my eyes because it’s so wide and so intense everything’s in focus, whereas if we were 35 mil on my Sony a6000 or a6500, then I get a really familiar look, and then it’s up to you to obviously put the right things in the frame to resonate with the person who’s looking at that photo and make it interesting by putting the things that are interesting in the right place and drawing people’s eye to the right thing within that frame, but you start out from a really good point, a really natural point if you go for a normal length lens.

My favourite at the moment is the Sony 35 mil f-1.8 for my Sony a6xxx thousand cameras I’ve also used the Sigma 30mm which is f2.8 which is really, really great value and I’d recommend it if you are on a tight budget and you want this type of lens, there’s no reason why you can’t use a regular kit lens, I’ll go into zoom lenses in a minute, but anything that’s got this roughly 35 mil for aps-c, 50 ml for full-frame, focal length I think you will find really interesting and I recommend it.

Particularly if you’ve already got a GoPro for instance and you’ve got the wide angle covered, I think it’s the great first step into water photography because, like I say, at least for people who are experienced surfers, and other people are going to be able to get into it that bit quicker, because you need that water knowledge before you even go near the waves, if you’ve got that and you want to recreate what you’ve seen in your surfing life, get a normal length lens, and I think you’re onto winner.

60-90mm Long Prime Lenses for Surf Photography

Next are longer lenses, so they’re often called portrait lenses, what I’m talking about is 85 mil equivalent focal lengths, so there’s a 60 mil on for Sony aps-c, it’s a sigma lens, and there’s a 56 mil Sigma as well for Sony aps-c, and these give you equivalent around 85 mm or 90mm on full frame, and that traditionally has been the focal length people used to shoot portraits of people.

If you shoot that kind of focal length, it gives you a nice, shallow depth of field, you might see macro lenses in this kind of focal length as well, there’s a 90mm macro lens, again, it isn’t what you’d see with your eyes, it’s bit more flattering for people. In terms of surf photography, I think some people use it to amazing effect, Ray Collins is the one I’d recommend looking at, I’ll put some links in the inspiration section of this this part of the course, because he uses, I believe an 85-mm Nikon, maybe even 135 mm, which is pushing that the edge of what I’m talking about now, this category of lens with a really show depth of field.

It brings out details in the wave that you would never see with your eyes, you might catch a glimpse and see a slightly similar image for a fraction of a second, but you’re never going to see what someone that Ray Collins is going to capture with an 85mm lens and perfect positioning, and obviously, I mean he’s got the technical knowledge as well, so the lighting, the shutter speed, the aperture, the ISO, everything is coming together, and the post-processing, I think Ray Collins does an amazing job of that as well.

I like the Sigma 60 mil f2.8 on on my Sony I’ve got some great small images of small waves with that kind of lens I’ve I’ve had really good fun shooting that connivance and also quite big waves actually it’s quite useful if you you just sit in a channel that’s quite far away but you don’t want to use a big zoom lens like a telephoto zoom lens like this one then a 60 mm, 85 mm is going to get you close to the action it’s not as flexible as using a zoom lens for that kind of situation, but I have had some fairly good luck shooting bigger waves with 60 mm as well.

Zoom Lenses for Surf Photography

The next section I want to cover in terms of lenses is zoom lenses, so the one that most people will get with their camera is called a “kit” lens because it’s often provided in a kit with a camera body, for many cameras there’s a 16 to 50 mil, I’m actually using it right now to shoot this video, and I don’t have one handy to show you, but you’ve probably got one if you’ve got a Sony camera.

If you’re shooting with a full frame then you might have a 24 mil to 70 mil which obviously encompasses that normal range, and also a bit wider and a bit longer, so it’s it’s trying to cover 75% of the bases that you might want to cover as a photographer in one lens, and as such there’s cheap versions of these lenses which you get with your camera.

Usually there’s really expensive versions, because even professionals love the versatility of being able to do a wide-angle shot or a zoomed in shot, and people who travel really like this kind of lens as well because obviously you can capture lots of different angles.

If you read the link below, there’s Rambo Estrada, the New Zealand surf photographer, he travels a lot with the 16 to 50mm lens and he’s got some examples on that page of incredible images with this relatively inexpensive lens that just allows you to go for wide-angle landscape or portrait length shots as well.

The other great benefit of this kind of kit lens is because everyone’s got one, water housing manufacturers tend to support that lens as standard, so whether you’ve got a liquid eye it’s a C6000 or the Sea Frogs salted line, the standard flat port that comes with it will support that 16 to 50 mil kit lens, and I’ve shot some really cool shots with my liquid eye and the 16 to 50 mil, it’s versatile, it’s great for traveling, it’s  one that I think can be overlooked quite easily because a lot of people want to skip to something extreme like a fisheye or a six hundred mil or something like that.

There are pros and cons to it but it’s definitely worth experimenting if you’ve got one already for sure, get a housing that fits it or use it for your landscape photographs, from line up shots from the beach. Don’t pooh-pooh it basically, just have a go with it and see what you think of it.

You get travel zooms which are things like the Sony 18 to 200 mil, which attempts to cover your telephoto zoom and your standard zoom all-in-one, which I I’ve used a fair bit but I tend to go out with a style of photography in mind, I’m either going to be going for pulled back line up shots or I’m going to be going for more zoomed in shots, so I tend to leave one of those lenses at home and just take the one lens because I can pocket it and walk around with it easily and just pull it out and take a shot.

That lends itself to my style of surf photography, but if you’re traveling if you don’t have room for two lenses then it’s a good compromise. Often because they have to squeeze really long length focal lengths and really short focal lengths in one lens there is a compromise on quality and the image quality isn’t quite as good as two lenses that cover the same range.

I should explain “prime” means one focal length, so 35 mil, 50 mil, 6.5 mil and zoom means multiple focal lengths so 55 to 210 mil 10 to 18 mil, that’s a zoom, so if you’re using a zoom lens, a travel option is good if you really just want the one lens, but for surf photography, like I say personally I did have one for a while, I sold it because I wasn’t using it.

The next zoom lens that I want to talk about is the telephoto zoom lens and most surf photographers will be familiar with the 70 to 200 mil focal length, that’s a really popular one for all of the major camera and lens manufacturers and a lot of people produce similar focal lengths to that for their cameras.

This is a Sony 55 to 210 mil for a6000 series cameras, which is smaller and lighter and I love this lens, I’ve got videos below which compare this one to lots of others. You can also add on things a tele converter which makes this one a bit longer in the long end, lots of videos on that as well, I won’t go into too much detail here,

You’re going to need something like this for shooting from the beach, for a long time professional surf photographers shot with very long, specialised prime lenses, so 600 mil, 800 mil lenses from the beach, which allow you to get really close in to the action from a long way away, naturally they are incredibly expensive and so massive that you usually need a bag just for that lens itself, and then you kind of pop in cameras and things around it.

If you are 100 percent let’s do some professional surf photography, then you might want to go down that route, but everything I’ve read in the last five years or so indicates people are moving away from that type of lens and moving more towards a telephoto zoom like 70 to 200 is like a very short one 100 to 400 it’s a really popular focal length.

I’ve tried out the Sony 100-400 and it’s great for surf photography, you can get 150 to 600 mm lenses that are relatively inexpensive and produce great results like the Sigma and the Tamron, again video in the notes for this course, which will tell you all about how that works and how I’ve used them in the past.

A telephoto zoom lenses for the beach is what I’d recommend, I think 100-400 is a is a great happy medium between massive lens that you have to lug around and you really don’t want to bother getting out of the car half the time and the really small and lightweight cheaper zooms where image quality isn’t isn’t amazing.

If you had to have three lenses, personally I’d go for a fisheye at the wide end, a 35 mil prime for a normal length and 55 to 210 or equivalent, maybe 100 to 400, if I had to, those would be my three lenses that I would get for a surf photography.

But you’re not limited to that, that’s the beautiful thing, you can literally buy as many as you can afford, a lot of the lenses I’m talking about now are quite expensive but quite a few of them are fairly cheap as well, so if you wanted to get like the kit lens, I think it’s pretty inexpensive  it comes with the camera most cases, then you’ve got this normal length prime which is a couple hundred dollars maybe, and then you’ve got the fisheye, which I like I say if you go for a manual aperture, manual focus fisheye maybe $150, so you can get a setup that will get you really, really good results for very little money these days compared to the past.

Macro Lenses for Surf Photography

Let’s talk this really quickly about macro lenses, they’re very specialist they allow you to focus really close to the lens itself and I’ve tried them for surf photography, and for certain things, very creative looking things, they are really good, for action they’re not so good because they don’t focus as quickly as the equivalent focal length in a non macro lens.

If you watch my my small wave or flat day surf photography lesson which is coming up, then you’ll see where I think macro lenses fit in, but generally speaking I would go for a standard non macro lens over a macro for general purpose surf photography.

Image Stabilisation in Lenses for Surf Photography

Other things that lenses have on them: they’ve got image stabilisation quite often, optical steadyshot is what Sony calls it, a lot of different manufacturers call it different things, but that’s something that helps reduce camera shake and the effect of camera shake on images, so for us as surf photographers, as we’re usually shooting at really fast shutter speeds, we don’t normally need to worry too much about that, but it is really helpful for video especially, and if you’ve got a very long lens, a 600ml lens for instance, that can be really, really helpful when you’re framing your shot as well, so something to bear in mind there.

If it’s like a normal length lens I wouldn’t worry too much about having image image stabilization in the lens, the other thing to consider is some cameras have it built into the body as well, the Sony a6500 being one of them, but like I say, I won’t worry too much my image stabilization for surf photography, unless I’m shooting video of course.

Hopefully that’s given you a good entry-level understanding of lenses for surf photography specifically because it’s not too many resources out there which focus just on surf photography

Lessons related to the Best Lenses for surf photography

Find Your Ideal Surf Photography Kit

    1. Find Your Ideal Surf Photography Kit Introduction
    2. Find the Surf Photographs you want to take
    3. The Best Lenses for Surf Photography
    4. The Best Camera For Your Surf Photography

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