Just before my session today, I saw Koffie Jacobs, one of the local legends. He just got out of the water and was holding his flippers and SPL waterhousing. I told him straight how jealous I am, because I still have not bought my new cam and water housing. By the way, I hope we start seeing good photos from Koffie pop up in magazines and on websites very soon. I think he is the kind of guy that is fairly hooked up in the industry and knows his way around the lineup enough to be in the right place at the right time and anticipate moves before they are made.

At the moment I am looking at two options for water and land based camera rigs. The body will either be a Nikon D300 or an EOS 5DmkII. The 5D is full frame camera but has a "slow" continuous shutter speed. The D300 is a solid Nikon DX format camera. That means the sensor isn't 35mm wide (same as regular film) and the means that it has a magnification scale of around 1.4x . Therefore if I put an 18mm lense on it, it will give the same field of view as a 25.2mm on the EOS 5D. The D300 has a much better continious shooting speed, but less pixels. I am not sure if this will really influence printing, but I want to go for Magazine covers and center folds etc. The big mothers (D3x and EOD1DMk3) are too expensive and too big for me and I quite like the compact size of the D 300 and the EOS 5D.

As far as the housing for water badsed setup is concerned, I reckon I am going to get one from Erik at Delmar Camera Housings, since I am not a big fan of SPL and since I have had quitre a dialog with Erik about his water housings. 

For the land based setup, I am looking at a Sigma 500mm 4.5 or otherwise the Nikkor VR 200-400. I am a bit uncertain about using a zoom lense for stuff that are usually done with a prime lens, but I have seen some stunning wildlife photography that was done with the VR. I also like the idea of being able to zoom, because I experienced it was an issue with a long focal distance and a fixed lense and I had to move up and down the beach to get properly framed shots. Then again, I was using substandard equipment. Maybe if I work with proper equipment it will be totally different. 

Anyhow. Seems like we are not really going to have waves for the rest of the week, so I'll rather graft harder and surf less in order to be able to afford new equipment.

Later