This isn't at all the shot that I set out to use for today's PAD. We had had a southerly change yesterday (though the temperature today is still warmer than I would like and there is an abundance of humidity to go along with it), but there was a gap in the rain this morning which allowed the surfers to hit the waves. The change brought with it a decent number of waves to be ridden, and having read the forecasts yesterday I naturally headed to Sandon Point to pick up some shots of surfing action.

One problem is that there was a lot of sea mist this morning. I decided to try to overcome that by using a circular polarising filter. Knowing that speed is everything in surf photography I also had the camera set to a relatively benevolent ISO of 400. I am not really that impressed with the Olympus's ability to handle high ISO values, but 400 isn't that high, right? Right?

Well for a lot of the shots of the surfers, it seems that it was because the damn things were as grainy as a rice paddy. Whether this was in fact a problem with the interaction of the glare, the circular polarising filter and the Olympus's sensor, I'm not sure. Some of the other shots that I took this morning were decently clear even though ISO 400 was used over the entire shoot, and even though some of them also had the CP filter on. It's times like this that I pine for a full frame with an optical viewfinder (the problem with digital viewfinders is that they tend to tell you what they think you SHOULD be seeing making it hard to be sure of the effect of filters compared to an optical setup), but I know that size and portability is the compromise that I've made.

However as it turned out, I didn't like any of the action shots as much as I did this "target of opportunity" one that was completely unplanned. This guy walked across the headland in front of me and stood checking out the water for a while. I decided to blast off a few shots of him, not expecting them to amount to very much though I'll admit that when I saw this wave starting to break I considered that I might end up with something better than I had originally thought. Once I got this into Bridge, I decided this was in fact the best shot of the morning. I'm still not 100% certain whether I prefer it with or without the black and white filter. Shooting into the general direction of the Sun added quite a yellowish, almost sepia tinge to the coloured version which I think may be distracting to the shape of the surfer and the wall of water breaking in front of him. Accordingly I stuck to the B&W filter.