Surfers in La Jolla, CA

This past Saturday, we were in La Jolla, CA to take some pictures of the beautiful beach scenery there. But then we noticed the surfers were having a great time, and decided to take some shots of them. The challenge was that we had mostly planned for wide landscape shots and hence did not have our longer 300mm lens and/or any of our teleconverters with us. As such, we had to take all these surf shots with our 70-200mm f/2.8 VRII lens and then heavily crop the pictures in post processing in order to get closer to the action.

The camera we used for these shots was our Nikon D800E. The large maximum effective resolution in D800E (36.3 megapixels) does make the pictures pretty amenable to cropping. However, D800E is not really considered a great camera for sports photography. That is mainly because its maximum burst rate (i.e., continuous shooting rate expressed in Frames per Second) is only 4 fps (may be increased up to 6 fps in DX mode with optional MB-D12 battery grip). This may be compared to 11-12 fps in the higher-end camera bodies (e.g., Nikon D4s, Canon EOS-1Dx). Note that, among other things, the maximum burst rate in any camera depends on its image processing power, its resolution (and thus the sizes of the image files), the write speed into its buffer memory, and of course the size of the buffer. The camera burst rate is particularly important for sports photographers who typically tend to shoot continuously in order to capture those great moments we are all used to seeing in newspapers and magazines.

Thank you for visiting and we hope you enjoy these surf shots…