Bullshit Corner, 18th October 2020

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This is a bot tricky because this is supposed to be a secret location. In fact its on one of the beaches in one of  Bali’s most populated areas so the best you could probably say is that this wave is hidden in lain site.

The sensitivity might come from the fact that members of the PSOI, Indonesia’s International surf team are training there currently. And that is tricky. Clearly the surf team need waves to train on and waves are by nature public spaces. So imagine if the England football HAD to train in a public park and you turned up with your kid and decided to have a kick about. I don’t think that would be cool, and so it’s not particularly cool if you turn up here, especially if you are not very good, and start taking waves away from professional athletes. Actually this is one of the coolest places I have been, although they are all cool, and these are some of the friendliest people that I have met in my surf photography adventure. But, you can expect a frosty reception if you turn up and get in the way.

I actually have a bit of an issue with this whole secret spot idea. People get very excited about secret spots its nice to surf where there aren’t many people and it feels lovely to think that you are accessing something exclusive. the issue is that the people here, especially in these difficult time, need all the visitors that they can get.

So my recommendation is that you seek this wave out, and go along and buy a coconut and a beer, hang out, make friends and watch the brilliant PSOI team training. You can talk as much bullshit as you like.

You might see @deniblackboys performing his magic with huge grace.       

Or like this, this is my favourite shot of the day.

And you might catch a bule on the nose.

The Technical Bit

OK, so this is where it all went to shit. It was a little bit rough getting in and I think i may have knocked the shutter speed dial. The result that these phots were all shot at 1600th of a second, with the usual f9 and auto ISO. I have come to the realisation that whilst the auto ISO is amazing in my camera is amazing I think surf photography might be the most challenging environment for it. The difficulty is that most of the time the camera is under the water, where it’s dark, and only comes out of the water to take the picture.

I’ve been thinking about this and come to the realisation that if I am in the water for 2 hours and I take 300 pictures at 1000th of a second I am actually only doing surf photos for 300 1000ths of a second, or .3 of a second. That seems grossly inefficient. There are 7,200 seconds in two hours and 7,199.7 of those are completely wasted.

The result of all of this is that the ISO tends to default to certain ISO’s within the maximum that I have set, which is 1,000. These shots are all at either 500 or 1,000 and they are all under exposed. Underexposed is bad, it’s really hard to pull anything back from the RAW photos in editing. They all look muggy. 

This is the second set of photos that I gave to my new editor and she has frankly performed a miracle, thankfully. 

Anywho, this was the day that I decided I can be managing the ISO in the water and thats what I am doing. On bright sunny days it works best at around 320 – if it’s cloudy it can go up to 800 – and I am happy with that. The other realisation is that screens are a really shit way of taking and showing photos. in the water I have the back screen on full brightness which means that the images look over exposed, so I have to factor that in when I take the photos and review them whilst I am in the water.

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