I gathered my kit together and taking the car, drove just down the road to the lake at Brogborough, and from the full car park, it was obvious my hopes of a decent wind were mirrored by the throng of windsurfers putting their sails up in expectation.
I decided upon the heavy tripod and the long Tamron 150-600mm zoom, on the EOS 7D MkII, but soon realised it would be handy to have another camera with a shorter lens as the activity was close inshore, so I went back to the car and brought out a camera bag with the 5D MkIII and the 85mm f/1.4, for shots of anything happening close by me.
I had not been shooting that long when one of the windsurfers, Nick, came over and very generously gave me a couple of cans of lager, which was most appreciated, and despite the lack of an even surface, I managed to keep it propped up by one leg of the tripod, without losing a drop to any careless movement of my feet.
Rain threatened from time to time, but fortunately never became a downpour, and it did offer me some useful cloudscapes to add to my library – they are always handy for backgrounds to add drama to shots with bland blue sky, or for producing cards with backgrounds for text messages. I was visited by a Common Tern a few times as it fished for tiddlers along the shoreline and also a pair of swans and a family of Canada Geese; some of these were handy to try to retain various sequences within a specific gallery to help those sailors wishing to analyse their manoeuvres. In this respect I feel I often failed to cover a complete manoeuvre due to either another windsurfer crossing my path or my inability to keep my shutter pressed long enough, or simply because the final action came too fast for me to realise I needed to keep shooting rather than trying to use only short intermittent bursts to try to give myself less to process later!
However I came away feeling that I had covered the afternoon reasonably well.
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