The recent south swells here on Maui are making for some larger waves on Big Beach, and I knew that when I got back from my trip to Boise that I wanted to try something entirely new: Wave Portraits. I think we have all seen this type of shot with a surfboard as the model is ‘duck diving’, but I was sincerely interested in how difficult it would be to try to pull this off on a beach, in shallow water, without a surfboard. A crashing wave could make for a very interesting backdrop.

Turns out, it is extremely difficult to get the type of shot I was envisioning near the shore) in fact it’s almost impossible. The reason: water clarity. While the first 2 are the closest to what I had in mind, there is just too much gunk in the water. We really tried too, 1200 shots, and this isn’t something you can easily clean up in Photoshop. I wasn’t happy with any of the images we got, but I felt that it could have potential…just very hard to execute near the shore. I feel almost embarrassed to show them at all, but its important to share what I learned from mistakes

I think it works better with surfers simply because they are in deeper water and there isn’t as much sand floating around.

It sure was interesting though, man…so many variables. We had to wait for a big wave, be the right distance away from each other, time it so I am under a second or two before Annie, had to have the right angle (for composition) and it was overcast, so we didn’t get any pretty sparkles from hard sunlight. Just a difficult, somewhat depressing shoot. The recent south swells here on Maui are making for some larger waves on Big Beach, and I knew that when I got back from my trip to Boise that I wanted to try something entirely new: Wave Portraits. I think we have all seen this type of shot with a surfboard as the model is ‘duck diving’, but I was sincerely interested in how difficult it would be to try to pull this off on a beach, in shallow water, without a surfboard. A crashing wave could make for a very interesting backdrop.

Turns out, it is extremely difficult to get the type of shot I was envisioning near the shore) in fact it’s almost impossible. The reason: water clarity. While the first 2 are the closest to what I had in mind, there is just too much gunk in the water. We really tried too, 1200 shots, and this isn’t something you can easily clean up in Photoshop. I wasn’t happy with any of the images we got, but I felt that it could have potential…just very hard to execute near the shore. I feel almost embarrassed to show them at all, but its important to share what I learned from mistakes

I think it works better with surfers simply because they are in deeper water and there isn’t as much sand floating around.

It sure was interesting though, man…so many variables. We had to wait for a big wave, be the right distance away from each other, time it so I am under a second or two before Annie, had to have the right angle (for composition) and it was overcast, so we didn’t get any pretty sparkles from hard sunlight. Just a difficult, somewhat depressing shoot. One good thing did happen though, I finally figured out how to keep the water off my port! Almost everyone has told me to lick it, but after an hour of licking sea water off your port, you get tired of doing that. Turns out you can coat it with different types of grease and it beads right off. Rain-X will not work, in fact it will damage your port.

Ill try again in deeper water…maybe we will just do the surf board thing just to get the look down.