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My brother doin’ it up right

This weekend my brother came to visit me from Colorado. He also has a friend who lives here who has a boat. Living in a city with several lakes I often hear the phrase, “You don’t want a boat, you want a friend with a boat.” I couldn’t agree more. Well they invited me out for a little wake boarding, which I had never done. Being the photophile that I am, I naturally brought my camera.

But I very quickly realized that shooting this type of photography presented a handful of challenges that could really hamper a photographer that doesn’t know this stuff up and down. So I thought I would give a walk through on what decisions I made before and during shooting to come away with the best photographs possible.

The Challenges

• Things are moving fast, as in most sports photography. This means a fast shutter speed is needed to freeze the action.
• The ride was bumpy. Thanks to choppy water, the boat did a lot of bouncing around which made it hard to keep the camera steady and to keep the shot well composed. It also meant an even faster shutter speed was necessary to combat extreme camera shake. The bumpy ride also made focusing extremely difficult because I just couldn’t see well through the viewfinder.

Mr. Friend with the boat

Things I Had Going For Me

• It was a bright sunny afternoon. Good for fast shutter speeds.
• Circles are a wonderful shape. Because the rope was tied to the boat, no matter where the boarder went, he was always the same distance from the boat, so once I got a focus, I could forget it as long as I didn’t change the focal length.

What This All Meant

Based on the challenges and the things in my favor, I was able to make a handful of decisions that made the shoot a success.

• Use aperture priority mode. I chose the widest aperture my Sigma 70-300 lens had: f4. This would get me the fastest shutter speeds my lens was capable of.
• Use ISO 400. This in addition to the wide aperture would speed up my shutter times. 400 is a good balance between quality and noise. This would get the fast shutter speeds of between 1/2000th and 1/3200th of a second.
• Use the center focus point only, use auto-focus, then switch to manual focus. With the shaking of the boat, it was impossible to do any manual focusing. So this is a case where I relied on the speediness of the camera to do the work for me (glad I didn’t have my old Canon D30 with me, it was dog slow at focusing). Whenever I changed focal lengths, I would get a quick focus lock then switch the lens to manual focus. This way I could take my finger off the shutter all I wanted and not worry about the camera trying to refocus when I put it on again. It also helped me get faster response times for the fast action.
• Use continuous shooting mode. Since things were moving fast and I wanted to grab the coolest shots, my strategy was to start shooting when the boarder started a jump, and keep shooting until he was back on the water again with the option of snagging his fantastic wipeout if it presented itself. This meant holding down the shutter and grabbing 4-5 shots per jump.
• Take my finger off the shutter. With all those burst mode shots and the fact that I shoot RAW, the camera’s internal buffer will fill up fast. On a Canon, if you finger is on the shutter at the half way point, it won’t write that data to the CF card to keep response times fast. So I regularly took my finger off the shutter to give it time to clean out the buffer.
• Keep the shots a little wide. With the shaking of the boat, it was easy to compose poorly and have the boarder half out of the frame with a tight crop. I wouldn’t want to lose a single shot, so I kept all the shots a little wide, using a 80mm or so focal length. I then cropped the photos in Lightroom to get a good composition. This isn’t my norm by any means, but I think this case was justified.

Uh…wipe out

After showing my brother a few basics of how to work the camera, here’s a shot he took of me wake boarding for the first time. Since I don’t see myself being able to try it again for while, I figured I better go all out and not waste a minute. This was my first feeble attempt at jumping the boat’s wake. As you can see, I pulled it off magnificently.

This was by far the most difficult photography I’ve done yet. But the lesson to take away is this: no matter what the challenges of the shooting situation, if you take a step back and take a systematic approach to solving the problems you have, you can make any shooting situation work for you. Use all of the tools you have available to you to get the shot. And don’t just consider the features within the camera.

I’m sure there are lots of things an experienced sports shooter would have done that I never thought of, but this was my best attempt. Got some tips that would have done better? Drop them in the comments and let us all learn.

Now if only there was a camera setting to eliminate the intense muscle soreness I still feel after several days. It wouldn’t have anything to do with my massive wipe outs I’m sure.