I recently added a new lens to my bag of photographic wizardry – a new addition that has given me a fresh perspective on this coastline of ours. And it's a whopper: a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L complete with Image Stabilizer. The front element is the size of a dinner plate and it weighs more than five kilograms.
It has been dubbed one of the most beautiful lenses in the world and I have several friends who use them and rave about them, so it was an easy decision in the end. The images from it have exceeded my expectations and I hope it will do the same for you. In surf photography at least, it seems size does count.
The weather bomb that got squashed down south last week and forced under the country produced some exciting surf on Wednesday ... the first big swell of the season. When a swell that size hits our coastline there are few places to surf from land. Instead the jet-ski teams of tow-in surfers come out of the woodwork and scramble around town looking for the best big-wave break.
I checked out Green Island for the first time – it was heaving some hideously beautiful waves, but they were far from surfable with this swell direction. So I sat atop the rock at Brighton and watched the megasets pound the outer reefs.
Just on dark I hurried back to town and saw the ski team of Dave Wild and Mike Dorking towing into some big waves at St Kilda.
"Me and my mate Dave towed into Lawyers Head at sunset tonight,10-15ft," Mike later wrote on the Dunedin Light Facebook page.
"Faces the size of lamp posts. Wave speed 44 km/hr at 12 seconds."
Check out their shots (below) from that big session, shot on the new lens with a 1.4x converter at ISO 1250 about 20 minutes after the sun had set. Impressive.
See you at the beach ...
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