Two days ago, I was on the verge of driving all the way to E-Bay to photograph Travis Logie, Jordy and I am not sure who was the rest of the crew. They did hang around in J-Bay the days before, but we had horrible summer bummer swell absense. (Okay. Zigzag coined the summer - bummer phrase) I was pretty amped to get hold of them and do a shoot, so I managed to track them down after acouple of emails and phone calls. Eventually, I decided to bail on the idea because it's a long drive to E-Bay from J-Bay and back, and all that just for one shoot. I was pretty bummed. Hours later, my fate changed...

Ludi just phoned me from nowhere and he said that John McCarthy and and co. are looking for a guy to operate a video camera and that they will be arriving the next morning. Suddenly I was very greatful that I did not go to E-Bay. Before long, I pulled into the Supertubes car park. Did I say it was 04:00?! We had very little time to do filming, and there was a positive forecast for heavy J-Bay swell. I have been looking at it myself for a while, since I am also busy developing a mobile surf forecasting applet for wavescape.co.za and I was working with forecast figures all week.

John, Ian and and another friend (Sorry I forgot your name bru.) were in the water around 4:30 and their first waves were surfed in complete darkness. The surprise was that John was riding an Alea, shaped by Clayton Nienhaber. My assignment was primary video and they provided the little cam, but I did tag my photography rig along as well. In the beginning I tried to duct tape the little cam to my flash on top of the D3, but getting the same focal point was pretty difficult. Eventually, I only took video.

Looking at the way John surfs the Alea was very interesting, and it is evident that he has not been surfing since last week. At some point the battery ran out, but we fortunately got enough footage and they were happy with the results. We took a quick break and we discussed payment etc. and I was issued with a instant breakfast and banana and then they all three geared up and went for their second session. By then, Supers had really turned on and there were some sets that came through that were really like the kind of waves we get in winter. Soon cars and surfers from all over the country popped in, and guys like Greg Emslie, Shaun Joubert, Davey and Ryan Payne etc. were all over it. Offcourse I was shooting all the time.

According to my predictions, the wind would turn shortly after lunch hour and then go South and the East. Some guys only arrived when the wind started to turn. Eventually, I finished taking photos around three. I had so many layers of sunblock, sand, sunblock on me, that I felt a little stiff in the leg...

Ian and John were so kind to buy me a samie at Infoods, even though my job with them were finished at 9 AM already. I also greeted them as I munched the delightfull samie down. (Samie is a sandwich)

You are asking where are all the photos. Well, I have only managed to go through them now by deleting all the bloopers. I was a little rusty and had just updated the D3 to the latest firmware recently which added a couple of new features. Unfortuanelty I was playing a little with settings and forgot to put my minimum shutter spead to at least 1/1000 so some of the first photos have a slight motion blurr on the surfer. I also played around with the 51 point 3D tracking and auto focuss and auto exposure settings and for many of the photos it was not spot on. The result was that the camera sometimes focussed on foam instead of the surfer and that left me with a couple of blurry pics. BUT. Not all was lost, because I eventually got my settings right and also got many awesome photos. I am not going to upoad all 2000 of them, but will probably make a thumbnail video like I usually do and maybe put the best ones in the gallery. [EDIT] I just compared my images to other surf photographs and I realize you don't really notice the motion blurr except if you zoom the image to 100% and it still looks better than most surf pics out there. [EDIT] - see how I am ringing my own bell hey! ;-) chuckle chuckle...

The 24 hour day came in where I watched a movie with my wife, and then watched one all by myself and then I watched the entire director's commentary and when I looked at the time it was 4 am. It dawned on me! (The day also dawned upon me.) I just did a full 24 hours without sleeping. Needless to say my Saturday consisted of sleeping all morning to 11 and then doing calamari and chips at "Vismandjie" and then sleeping further untill 18:00.

If you see me on the beach, come and greet me. If you are in the water, show up an blow up. And remember to come and buy some pics off me afterwards!