The second round of the Bluescope Steel Illawarra Regional Junior Surfing Series was held last weekend, and with the next round only a few weeks away, surf photographer Don Jonceski has been kept busy shooting the surfers in action.
Jonceski, who’s been taking surf shots on and off for the last twenty years, is the official photographer for the competition, and says that there’s a few elements involved in capturing a great surf shot. One pretty important factor, he says, is knowing your camera.
“Given the subject is moving, you need to have a camera that can track the moving subject, and most modern digital SLR cameras have got a few different types of settings for tracking moving subjects…[and] there’s some trial and error to narrow down the best settings.”
One of the settings that need to be mastered, says Jonceski, is focus, which he says can make all the difference to the success of a shoot.
“If you’ve got the wrong settings, out of 100 shots you might get half of them sharp, compared to the right settings where you’d get probably 80% plus sharp,” he says.
Another element of the photographic process that has increased with the growth of digital technology is the post-production side, with photos edited in programs such as Adobe Photoshop. This post-editing is particularly handy when the weather isn’t so crash hot, Jonceski explained.
“If it’s really dull and overcast, it’s hard to get that [contrast], and so there’s some camera settings again where you can try and improve contrast and colour saturation. In fact almost all the time these days, to get the best out of a photo, there’s post processing.”
“There’d be some image sharpening, sometimes adjustments in colour saturation, and then depending on what the photo’s being used for, there’s a whole host of creative tools that you can use within Photoshop,” says Jonceski.
Another photographer who’s dabbling in the ways of the waves is University of Wollongong student Jobi Manson, on exchange from the United States, who believes the skill of the surfer is also a crucial factor in capturing the perfect shot.
“It’s about technique and it’s about style, and when somebody is pulling massive roundhouse carves, to be able to get them at the peak of that moment is really crucial. To find people that can surf as well as they say they can, and to be able to show that on camera is two very different things,” Manson says.
The next round of the Bluescope Steel Illawarra Regional Junior Surfing Series will be held on the 21st June, and Don Jonceski’s photos from the first round of the competition can be found here.
