Most of the summer when the sun has shone there has been next to no wind, therefore not the most exciting time for action of the windsurfing variety on Brogborough Lake. Along comes November and both wind and sun, but the sun has a cold brightness, and when the wind is strong enough to blow my heavier tripod over, my hands on the cold metal of camera and tripod soon became very cold indeed.
I knew I was not going to be free over the weekend, so the lesser numbers on the water had enticed me over in the afternoon of Friday, and I concentrated on trying to capture longer sequences as the keen freestylers practiced doing their turns in the air, I was very grateful that Sam Barnes offered suggestions as to what to look out for and where to expect the action, and where in the past I would be more concerned with the start of a manoeuvre, Sam made the point that the landing was more important, so I tried to take longer bursts where hitherto I would stop short as I felt that to concentrate on the ignominy of failure might be unkind when the surfer failed. However, I could see his point that this might in fact help my subject to see why there was a failure.
So we shall see, I just hope that I don’t get a clip round the ear by showing a sequence where the end was less promising than the the start. This also reminds me that on this occasion I started shooting with the 150-600mm lens, but that often meant that 150mm was too long due to how close inshore the windsurfers often came, then I remembered that I had put the 100-400mm in the car, so I swapped over, which meant I could be closer to the water’s edge and therefore have a wider view before the bushes obscured my view.
