Black & White Kiteboarding

Shane Anderson from Kitesurf Nelson getting some major air at Lyall Bay in Wellington, New Zealand

A few months ago I was in the market for a new housing for my canon 7d. I did my research & settled on a CMT water housing from the US. They were fantastic, & kept me informed all the way through the building process of my housing. Finally it was finished & shipped arriving on my door step just in time for the weekend. The housing exceeded my expectations & my 7d fitted into the carbon fiber body like a glove. I was very keen to take it out & get some shots with it that weekend.

Unfortunately the surf wasn’t playing nicely & the forecast was for pretty much no waves & a strong cold southerly wind. All was not lost though, because a strong cold southerly in Wellington, New Zealand means that the kiteboarders will be out in force. I headed down to the beach & there were already a dozen or so kiteboarders out playing amongst the pretty much non-existent surf. I loaded the camera into the housing, doing all the pre-seal housing checks, suited up in my wetsuit & booties & was out there. I went with the canon 50mm/f1.4 lens instead of the canon 15mm fisheye, & the 50mm fits snugly into the same dome port as the fisheye does. I choose this lens because in the kind of conditions that there were that day, you usually don’t get close enough to the kiteboarders to warrant the use of a fisheye. Sure I would have gotten a few photos where they would have been close enough, but not as many as I did get with the 50mm.

The day was overcast & grey so there wasn’t much colour around. I walked out to chest deep water & started shooting as the kiteboarders buzzed around me. I was pleasantly surprised as to how light the housing was how comfortable it felt when holding it by the pistol grip. I missed a few good shots while I was sorting out my camera settings, but once I had them I pretty much just shot away for an hour or so. I exposed for the kiters & let the sky blow out a bit. As it was fairly overcast, the sun was filtering through the clouds & was just like a big soft box in the sky.

When it came to processing the images, I played with a few colour options, but decided to do the whole set of images in black & white, as the softer lighting & lack of colour suited them more so than if they were in colour. I was happy with the final result, & the kiteboarders were pretty happy too – some of those pics would look fantastic as a large print…

Check out the slideshow below of the 32 images, & if you want to see a larger version of them, then either click on the image itself, or click here for the whole gallery.

Kiteboarding | Wellington | 01 May 10 – Images by Mark Gee

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 8:07 am and is filed under photos | kitesurfing and tagged with 15mm fisheye lens, 50mm/f1.4 lens, B & W, black & white, camera housing, canon 7d, CMT water housings, kiteboarding, kitesurfing, lyall bay, new zealand, water photography, wellington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.