The Surf Sessions

Living near the ocean, you come to recognize it's different moods season to season. With the ocean always being in motion I find capturing those moments of motion to be easy and ellusive at the same time. I can capture motion, but it's difficult and time consuming to capture that moment or sequence of awesome power or beauty. I've found it has required great patience and a lot of disappointing pictures to pull out that one good one.



I was looking through some photo book at Borders or some bookstore like I tend to do when I'm in a bookstore and I've run out of ideas for what to look at...it's my default. I came across a book of just motion sequences and kind of had a little fling with them...but I directed almost all of them to the ocean, since I thought it was a nice way to show some of the process to trying to capture that "one" shot. Turns out that I don't think any of these had the "one", but the process became the shot for me.




I spent an afternoon on the pier shooting down at the surfline taking hand held time exposures and got some interesting results, most of my shots got ruined by my own unsteady hand, since time exposures are usually tripod only behavior, but I like the challenge of the hand held time exposure and the ease of travelling without a tripod. I think all the time exposures I have done are all hand held. I do very little tripod work if any. So, here is the motion of what should be multiple frames all smashed into one.


I don't know what it is, but I love taking pictures of photographers taking pictures. It must be that self-awareness crap that you always read about in art books. It usually just makes me smile...so if self-awareness makes me smile then that's nice.