Candice O'Donnell, Watergate Bay

One question that gets asked a lot is “how do I become a surf photographer?” Of course everyone would love to combine their passion and their job, and the image of the job of surf photographer is totally glamorous and alluring: getting paid to travel to exotic locations and shoot stunning images. And you get to bask in the immense kudos of having them publshed in surf mags.

The reality is slightly different. For starters, the pay is woefully bad. The rates magazines pay for shots haven’t gone up in twenty years! Very few make a living from surf photography, in Europe anyway. And also, if you think it’ll mean you get to go surfing more, forget it. When the sun’s out and the surf is pumping you’ll either be swimming around with your housing getting bombs on the head or standing on the beach with your big lens getting the shots.

Having said that is great fun, so if you have a burning desire to unleash your creative vision on the surfing public, read on for some top tips.

1. Get shooting. There‚Äôs only one way to get your work published, and that‚Äôs to take great surf shots. Sounds kindof trite I know, but I‚Äôve lost count of the number of people who email asking about getting in to surf photography and don‚Äôt attach a photo. So get out there. You don‚Äôt need a photography degree, you just need a camera, and some creative inspiration. Which brings me to…

2. Don’t go overboard with equipment. A lot of amature photographers think being a pro is all about the kit. It isn’t, well it is to an extent, if you’re a pro you will DSLR body like a Canon eos 1ds, plus a backup, loads of lenses including a big 500 or 600mm, water housing and so on: at least £10,000 worth of kit. But when you’re getting started all you need is a camera. You could even buy a cheap film camera to experiment with. One mistake a lot of people make is to shell out thousands on a DSLR pro body but buy cheap lenses. It’s much better to go for a cheaper body and better lenses.

3. Learn your craft. Assuming you‚Äôve got a basic grounding in the technical side of photography you need find your inspiration. Buy loads of magazines, not just surfing ones. Find images that inspire you, and analyse what makes them great. Plough through online photo sites like flickr.com and collect images you love. Don’t forget, it’s not just about action. To win assignments you’ll have to be able to shoot lineups, portraits, lifestyle, landscapes even reportage.

4. Get feedback. Once you’ve captured some images upload them to flickr and get networking. It’s an ideal place to get feedback on your shots and find out what works.

5. Study composition. The difference between an average shot and a great one is very often compostion. That‚Äôs why the late great photo editor of Surfing Larry ‚ÄúFlame‚Äù Moore used to advise budding surf photogs to take art classes and learn about composotion, rather than take photography classes. (By the wayYou can read about Larry Moore here. He was one of the greats of surfing photography). I’ve given a few basic tips about composition in a previous post, but there are many others online. One of the best books about photographic composition is The Photographer’s Eye by Michael Freeman.

6. Contact editors. Once you’ve got some good shots and you’re confident that they good enough to be published, start to cultivate relationships with the magazine editors. If you can get through to them give them a ¬†call and see what kind of thing they’re after. As a rule magazines are looking for action shots of known surfers, great lineups and unusual angles. It helps if the images haven’t been before, so think twice about uploading them to social media sites.

Good luck and get shooting!

Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Decide what you want to convey.Great photos create emotion in the viewer: think what you want to message you want to convey: a sense of awe, wonder, happiness, sadness, gloom even. The picture needs to tell a story: is it a secret spot in the middle of nowhere, or a crowded lineup. Contradition creates interest and tension. So maybe shoot a normally crowded lineup looking empty, or a crowded secret spot (don’t give away the location though!). Tim McKenna shot a great lineup of Pipeline with one surfer taking off, with nobody else in sight, a very rare occurance  at Pipe.

Winter at Porthtowan

2. Have patience

What surfers want to see in a lineup shot is the perfect wave, an image which transports them to the spot and they can imagine themselves surfing it. They want to see flawless A-frames,  symmetrical point breaks and grinding barrels. Wait for the best conditions, find your spot and then wait for the biggest waves to come through.

3. Find the angle

Don’t stay in one place: move around to find more interesting angles, especially ones that no-one else has used.

Creating a frame within a frame.

4. Use the foreground

Although the subject is usually the wave,¬†use elements in the forefround to create a sense of scale and depth, and to tell your story. Think of it as creating a frame within the frame which helps to focus the eye of the viewer on the main subject. Bushes, trees, fences, dunes and even people are all good for this, but they usully need to blurred, so you will need to…

5. Use a telephoto

If you’re using a digital SLR a lens or zoom with focal length of 80 to 200mm is ideal. Keep the aperture fairly wide to keep the foreground blurred.

6. Use the rule of thirds

What separates an average shot from a great one is composition. The rule of thirds simply means dividing the image into thirds, with two horizontal lines and two vertical lines. Your main subject should be roughly at the intersection of one of these lines. Don’t have the horizon bisecting the image either, and make sure it’s straight.

Happy shooting, don’t forget to post any lovely lineups to our flickr group.

Sarah Beardmore surfing South Fistral

Hello and welcome to my surf photography (mostly, I’ll also be talking about portraits, seascapes and so on too) blog. If you’re interested in taking better photos of waves, surfers, people and seascapes, this is the place for you.

Today I’ve been experimenting with adding texture and frames to my images to give them more depth and interest. Here’s a shot I took last year of Sarah Beardmore at Fistral. It was shot on a Canon eos 40d using my trusty 600mm f4L lens.

The border comes from collection I bought on disc many years ago, back when you had to buy such things. Do people buy stuff anymore? It’s all free on the internet I guess? A quick search found something similar here with a tutorial on how to make an alpha channel in Photoshop -¬†this is how you get the image into the frame.

The next stage is to get the texture over the image. There are same great free textures available over on Flickr. The one I used is here. All you need to do to download it is to click on all sizes and download the size you want. The original size¬†is probably best. Then you re-size it the same size as your image, copy and paste it into your surfing image. Here’s the texture I downloaded from Flickr.

Next you need to adjust the layer in the layers pallet in photoshop. “Soft Light” works quite well. “Multiply” is sometimes good, although it will darken the image. You can play around with the opacity and even invert the layer or change the hue and saturation until you get the look you want. It’s great fun and brings out your creative juices. Here are a few more images I’ve worked on, along with a couple of the originals as they were straight out of the camera.

Candice O'Donnell hang 5 at Watergate: fairly subtle overlay.

Fistral: North from South

The original image with no tweaking in Photoshop.