I was at the coast yesterday for a few hours, and I ended up photographing windsurfers. I found a (very windy!) spot just above the surf a a beach a bit north of Davenport and set up with the long lens and a tripod… and proceeded to make a few hundred exposures. Some of the better images are now in the queue to appear here a few weeks from now – some of them are already posted in my Flickr Gallery. (There is a link in the sidebar.)

For someone who shoots more landscape images than anything else, photographing sports (and other active subjects like birds in flight) is actually a good exercise on several counts. While I’ve pointed out before that landscape photography isn’t always as sedate as some might imagine (lighting, clouds, etc. can change very fast), in general there is a lot more time to carefully consider things, and you do frequently get second chances. Not so with these subjects. You have to think fast – the subject is moving, the camera must track the subject (and lock AF), momentary juxtapositions appear and are gone, lighting can be tricky, and you somehow have to think about composition in a very dynamic way. All good practice, I think.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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