You might have seen this already, but the video that surfaced, went away, then re-surfaced over the weekend of the right in WA reminded me of this blog post on Russel Ord’s fantastic new website:
http://www.russellord.com/just-another-day/
He includes a bit of text to start off the blog post, it’s mostly lamenting the modern obsession with getting any surf photography images published as quickly as possible, which puts a bit of a downer on craziness of his fisheye photo’s at such a bonkers wave, there’s no-one else shooting that angle at that wave but it seems like any time it breaks you see some of the best waves from several other angles within hours.
He also includes a list of equipment used for the shoot:
Equipment:
Aquatech D4 Housing with 16mm Fisheye.
Fuji XT-1
Nikon D800 70-200mm.
You can also dig out the Exif data if you’re interested to see which shots were made with which set-up, I noticed that the fisheye shots used higher shutter speeds than I normally use, with the ISO being bumped up to make up for it, you can’t see any noise in the images so there’s not really a downside to going up to ISO 800 for that kind of shot to make sure there’s not going to be any motion blur.
The other thing that surprised me was the number of shots taken with the Fuji XT-1, I’d assumed that it would just be the lifestyle shots that were made with the Fuji, but quite a few of the one’s in the gallery were shot with the XT-1 and the 35mm 1.4 lens.
I didn’t know much about the mirrorless Fuji so I looked it up, it’s got an APS-C sized sensor (the same size as the one in my Canon 70D) with a 16MP resolution, it shoots 8 frames per second and the autofocus is supposed to be pretty good, so it seems like a decent option for a small, lightweight backup for a sports shooter.
The Fujinon XF 35mm f1.4 lens gets pretty good reviews and only costs around £400, the results that you can see in Russel Ords gallery certainly look good, and the total cost for the body and lens is less than either of the other camera bodies he was shooting with alone.
Bear in mind that the shots in this web gallery are the “off cuts” so who knows if the XT-1 images were used in print, but it makes me keener than ever to try out a decent mirrorless camera in a housing, one day I’ll find the time to get a small housing and camera body sorted, hopefully soon.
Incidentally, it looks like he’s using wordpress as the basis for his website, the gallery that you see at the bottom of the post is powered by the same plug in as I now use on my site benpascoe.co.uk, I might do a post about the quick re-design I did on my own site at some point, WordPress is a very powerful way to manage your websites content and RusselOrd.com is a great example of what’s possible with it.
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