Portraits: Pacific Surfers
It was a random afternoon that I decided I would like to photograph some surfers out on the coast. I'm not sure what prompted it, but that's what I felt like doing and that's what I set out to do.
It didn't take very long to find a few surfers. As it turns out, some long time acquaintances of my wife are regulars to the waves of Chiba Prefecture's Pacific coast, and they were plenty eager to have some photos done.
As I was leaving the house on the day of the shoot the weather looked good. It was warm, there was very little wind, and there weren't many clouds in the sky. However I knew from past experience that, despite a relatively short distance out to the Pacific coast, the weather could very well be a bit different once I got there.
Sure enough, arriving to the coast and stepping out of the car revealed some less than ideal shooting conditions. There was a strong wind blowing off the water—a cold, salty, mist-throwing, sand blowing, gusting wind.
This meant that the lighting modifiers I had intended to use were not coming out of the car. Soft boxes, umbrellas, and reflectors just don't get along well with heavy winds.
Also, since I had a feeling that sand, salt, and water are not good for the inside of the camera, the conditions meant that I would not be separating any lenses from the camera body.
It didn't look great, but I figured that I was already there and should see what could be made of it. So, I pulled out the protector filter that had been sitting unused in my bag for years, screwed it onto my choice of lens for the shoot, grabbed one small flash, and headed into the wind.
Once we began, I quickly forgot about the wind gusts, the cold, the salty seawater in my face, the sand in my eyes and between my teeth, and shot away for the better part of an hour and a half. All those little annoyances tend to fade away when doing what you enjoy.
In the end the images I took away from the shoot were not what I had originally imagined. Conditions forced a few changes, but that is how it usually goes. In my personal experience, coming from a shoot with the images you had initially pictured is without doubt the exception, not the rule.
I certainly don't consider any of my efforts a waste though. I learned what does and does not work in such situations, and I came away with some more refined ideas for the next trip out to photograph more portraits.
