San Francisco resident Ryan Tatar is passionate about two things when he’s not sitting at his desk at a Silicon Valley tech company: surfing and photography… and usually a combination of the two. He has attracted a good deal of attention in both worlds with his lo-fi photographs of surfers, captured with old analog cameras and expired and/or cross-processed films.
In the short video above, Tatar talks about his love for analog photography and introduces us to what he does. Read more…
If you’ve ever flipped through a surf magazine and wondered how some of those incredible barrel riding pictures were taken, then this two part Momentum documentary on surf photographer Zak Noyle will be particularly interesting to you.
When you think of underwater photography the first thing that comes to mind is typically colorful fish in deep waters, and a man decked out in scuba gear. That’s nothing like the kind of work Noyle does for a living. His kind of photography involves swimming in, under and around massive waves with only a helmet, wetsuit and flippers to help him as he hunts down that perfect shot. Read more…
Here’s a neat idea for a photo shoot: tarp surfing. This involves faking the look of surfing photographs using a giant blue tarp and a skateboarder riding across it. Have someone pull the tarp over the skateboarder and photograph him riding through the tube. Read more…
Italian photographer Alberto Seveso has a wonderful series of surfing photographs titled “Ink Riders” shot using blue ink, water, and a LEGO figurine. It’s an incredibly creative twist on the popular “ink in water” project. Read more…
Cinematographer Chris Bryan used a Phantom HD Gold camera in a custom underwater housing to capture super slow-motion footage of waves in Sydney, Australia. Water looks amazing at thousands of frames per second. Be sure to watch it full screen and in high-def.
The Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” This clip from the BBC documentary “South Pacific” shows Rudi Diesel capturing a once in a lifetime shot of surfer Dylan Longbottom in a massive 12-foot wave using a Typhoon HD4 high speed camera. It’s the first shot of its kind ever recorded, and one of the most amazing surfing shots you’ll ever see.
Devin Graham shot this beautiful surfing footage using a Canon 7D and a couple lenses (70-200mm and 100-400mm) with a 2x teleconverter, so much of the footage was shot at 800mm. The slow motion is actually “faked” (here’s another faked 7D video) using software:
To get the “super slow motion”, after I filmed at 60fps, I through it into the program “After Effects”. I used an effect that comes with the program called “Time Warp”. This allowed me to make the 60fps, to 1000fps. The way this works is the computer processes/adds frames in between the frames that are already in existence. It took several days for the computer to process the clips into the super slow motion that appears as well, so it does take a lot out of the computer, as far as processing goes.
Using After Effects or Twixtor to create fake slow mo is becoming a pretty popular technique. Beats shelling out big bucks to rent a high speed camera for many purposes.
