In 2010 SAS’s campaigns were splashed over the front pages of The Sunday Times, featured in The Observer and starred in the UK’s most watched current affairs TV programme to mention but a few. This momentum translated into significant campaign victories for surfers and waveriders all over the UK.

SAS has never rested on our laurels and we have big plans for all of our campaigns in 2011. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we thought it would be the perfect time to reflect on the highlights from the year that was 2010.

Sewage

We started 2010 with a classic SAS action confronting the water industry as they tried, once again, to exploit legal loopholes to allow them to continue to pump untreated sewage into the sea. On the doorsteps of the court, our campaign squad greeted the water companies, their rude barrister and the judges with a huge image of a CSO clogged with sanitary towels, condoms and much worse. Emblazoned above this powerful and shocking image was simply the word “Appealing?”

In August we successfully exposed over 30 of the UK’s Blue Flag beaches because they couldn’t provide beach users with warnings when raw sewage was in the sea. We were the lone voice calling for information after sewage discharges. In 1 day alone we conducted over 30 press interviews and this high profile pressure helped us secured a great campaign victory. From 2011, all UK Blue Flag beaches with Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) must have systems in place to warn the public, in real time, when sewage is in the sea. This monumental campaign victory will help shape the future of public warnings about water quality.

Protect Our Waves

For the first time in the UK, waveriders and surfers have specific legislation to protect our waves, (surf spots, the surf itself and access to the surf). Our POW campaign resulted in recreational water users being awarded a seat on the regional planning partnerships within the Scottish Marine Bill. This gives surfers the appropriate platform to raise any concerns about impacts on our waves at the very earliest stage. We now have a bellowing mouthpiece, but we still need your eyes and ears on the ground, so be vigilant. Contact SAS with any information on waves under threat.

The Waves Are Resources (WAR) Report released this summer frames the intrinsic and economic value of waves.

The Waves Are Resources (WAR) Report released this summer frames the intrinsic and economic value of waves. To waveriders the values are obvious, but The WAR Report also details how and why waves should be recognised as valuable resources by non-surfers. Only once our precious waves’ true value to the whole community is understood, can we begin to ensure they are provided the level of protection they deserve. The WAR Report is being actively promoted to planners across the UK, at all levels of Government and compliments SAS’s credible body of scientific reports.

Marine Litter

On April the 1st SAS filed several reports of UFOs landing on our beaches. Unidentified Floating Objects! The new UFO campaign relies on your expertise and experience to identify persistent litter items found on our beaches. Once we have the object identified we can start to trace where it comes from and work with the industry to change their polluting practices.

The infamous and award winning Return To Offender campaign influenced one of the biggest companies in the world this year, Coca Cola agreed to meet all of the Return To Offender campaign demands. Persuading Coca Cola to reduce their packaging, invest in low impact materials, promote reuse and recycling and to support anti litter campaigns is a fantastic achievement.

However, Coke still need to improve, as they came out top on last week’s Christmastide action. During Christmastide, AKA the 12 days of Christmas, we identified the 12 companies whose products we find most frequently littering UK beaches. On each of the 12 days we sent each offending a company a beautiful, yet shocking, image of their products on a snow-covered beach. The contrast of these offending rubbish items resting on the pure white snow, with glimpses of yellow sand and the stunning blue Atlantic as the backdrop, will hopefully compel each company into subscribing to the Return To Offender campaign.

Beach Cleans & Volunteering

Our excellent regional reps have had an incredibly active 2010, starting with the Spring Beach Clean in March. SAS volunteers in their hundreds turned up to our Spring Beach Cleans all over the UK, but this was just the tip of the iceberg for our beach clean and volunteer programmes in 2010.

The 3rd annual SAS Makes Beaches Barefoot Friendly tour was another whirlwind tour of some of the UK’s most popular beaches. Once again, with the help of the Barefoot Wine team, these events had a great community spirit. The reward for rolling your sleeves up and helping clean your precious beach was a tasty BBQ and cheeky wine tasting. This is one of the year’s highlights for the SAS team, we are able to make a real difference to a beach, meet a lot of like-minded people and have a fun, relaxed day. The good news is this tour will be dramatically expanded for 2011! Cheers to that!!!

In August the inspiring MotivOcean beach clean and surf experience tour exploded around the UK. This was our most ambitious beach clean and volunteer programme ever. And it was a resounding success! In the space of just 10 days over 1,000 of you turned up to help. The vast majority of the volunteers were the notoriously apathetic 16-25 year olds. MotivOcean Part II will be rolled out from January onwards. For more information on a MotivOcean event near you, email chris@sas.org.uk

Events

The UK’s best Stand Up Paddleboarders (SUPs) crossed the Channel and along the way they raised over £8,000 for SAS and set a new World Record! Even with a near perfect sea state the event was incredibly gruelling and took a huge amount of dedication and determination.

There had been a lot of rumours that the Ball would make a comeback in our 20th anniversary. And on the first week of September super-heroes from all over the galaxy descended upon Porthtowan for the IncrediBALL!

SAS Invinciball

We had a superb new site, some fresh new music, but kept the amazing atmosphere from all the SAS Balls. Will it return in 2011?

Looking Forward To 2011

The 2011 calendar is already filling up with campaign actions and events. With each passing year more and more threats to our precious coastal playgrounds are identified. This isn’t demoralising to the SAS team, we use this as a motivator, powering our campaigns forward and ensuring they are even more impactful than ever. But as a small team we can’t do this alone, we urgently need your support and engagement. We are looking forward to working with you again in 2011!

A quick look behind the scenes of ace fashion photog Kirstin Prisk shooting sporty Nina for the coming issue of SurfGirl #26 Out in April.

Tech talk:
Decided to video and shoot it simultaneously through the monitor. It was the first time I have worked in this way. Worked out great thanks to a good team, good tunes, sweets, and coffee.
Gear: 5dII armed with the Magic Lantern firmware, Small HD monitor, Sigma 50mm 1.4 and the Cinevate DSLR rig + follow focus, Sachtler DV6 tripod. Lit using a custom made ring light.
Stylist: Anna Gr??nlund
Make-up: Suzi Winter
Model: Nina Eastham

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’s only one way to get your work published, and that’s to take great surf shots. Sounds kindof trite I know, but I’ve lost count of the number of people who email asking about getting in to surf photography and don’t attach a photo. So get out there. You don’t 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’ve 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’s why the late great photo editor of Surfing Larry “Flame” 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!

You can see some more of my work here

It was an amazing feeling to end the week and see some real progress.

Each day Will took us out to his secret spots and really helped us perfect our technique and work on any area we wanted to improve on.

For me it was jumps. I wanted to know the technique behind a really good jump, getting decent air and, most importantly, how to land the jump.

So here goes, SurfGirl’s Top Tips For Getting Air

• First of all visualise yourself completing the jump. Really see it in your mind.
• Go into the jump with confidence and enough speed to get you up and over.
• As you approach the jump, bend your legs and get closer to your board.
• You don’t need to push off the jump. You will be accelerated naturally from the jump. Adding an extra push from you, may throw your body off balance.
• Keep you body aligned, that is keep your shoulders in line with your hips, your knees bent. Only your head is turned to see where your going. This is really important part. Most people tend to swing there shoulders as they jump which in turn throws you off balance and usually results with landing on our backside, or ever worse your head!
• As you hit the jump remember to look to where you want to land, keep you legs bent, stay low and ride it out.
• Confidence comes with practice, so try to keep repeating a set of jumps and keep the technique strong in your mind.
• And just when you least expect it… AIR! Enjoy.

Willy G, our instructor

If you fancy hitting the slopes this winter and would like to progress a certain area of your riding, or maybe you are a complete beginner, then it is really worth investing in some coaching. Will offers lessons from beginners to advanced skiers and snowboarders, specific coaching days to perfect any area you want to work on, as well as video coaching and photo packages. If you’re lucky he’ll even bring you to the infamous Irish Bar, Covey’s where he DJ’s on a Monday (http://www.coveysirishpub.com/) – but be warned, if they hand you a shot of black liquid that makes your eyes water just from the smell….. be afraid, very afraid!

Contact:
William Giles
0033 450 897073
www.chalet-loreade.com

Jane gets some air!

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 occurrance 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.

You can see some more of my work here

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’s a portrait of Sarah Beardmore, along with the original as it came straight out of the camera.

You can see some more of my work here