Every Monday I sit in my office and stare at my Mac for hours as I edit through the photos from the past seven days. It's a capture of my week of commercial work, my travels and the people I meet along the way. Okay, there are a fair few sneaky surfs in between. But it is the colours of autumn that always leap out at me this time of year. The dawn hues are bold and bright, the colours glow vividly and the surf just never disappoints.
Even better this week was the peaking north swell as it turned the entire north coast of Dunedin into a short-period, corduroy blue wonderland. It's this type of swell that lures me out from behind the camera and into a few peaks of my own and I need these moments to stay fresh and inspired. Okay, I did go over the falls four times on a series of solid sets at Aramoana and my ribs still hurt when I laugh, but you're going to have to work pretty hard to take this smile off my face. That's the essence of surfing – relatively intangible, but completely real.
When we publish a set of images like these we often get accused of using Photoshop to make the water blue and intensfiy the colours. We don't do any of that, but here are a few tips to boost the colours in your own images:
1) Use a polarising filter – it cuts the glare off the surface of the water and saturates the colours to give that deep, deep blue.
2) Shoot early and late – the colours are so much more intense in those few hours after sunrise and before sunset.
3) Use a tripod – shoot longer exposures pre-dawn and a bit longer after sunset and watch those colours pop.
You're probably surfed out after these past few weeks, but I have some bad news for you – you're not going to get a rest period this coming week. Lots of crazy weather in the Pacific and this in the forecast for the south.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS The Aotearoa Surf Film Festival is coming back to Dunedin on April 8 and 9, 2015. More info here.
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