I belong to the UCSD Photography Interest Group that meets monthly via Zoom. Each month has various photo themes and October’s was “Shoot High or Low”. Which means take photos at a perspective other than eye-level.
I wanted to shoot low so went to Oceanside Harbor Beach in search of shorebirds. Unfortunately, mid-October or perhaps just this Sunday, the beach was devoid of shorebirds. Gulls were ever-present of course, but no shorebirds dodging back & forth through the surf. Fortunately, the tide was right and the surf looked good. So I walked out onto the south jetty and photographed surfers for ~90mins.
Using a Nikon Z8 with 100-400mm lens plus 1.4x teleconverter on a Benro monopod is a perfect setup for this. Actually, I could have left the 1.4x teleconverter off and still been fine since the jetty gets you closer than shooting from the beach. I’ve always wanted to do some serious surf photography living in SoCal most of my life. But this shoot was the first time everything gelled – the surf was good, light was good, and I had the right gear.
I started at 10fps and as I got better at following and framing the action. I bumped it up to 20fps. I filled a 512gb CF Express card with raw files. The 256gb SD card caught the jpgs & overflow. In ~90mins I took over 6000 images. Here are some of my favorites:
