| Photograph Information |
Photographer's Comments |
Location: South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida
Date: Sep 24, 2007
Date Uploaded: Sep 25, 2007
Viewed: 564
Comments: 2
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This is an image that a Kiteboarding School is considering for an ad that will run in every issue of Kiteworld Magazine for a year. Some of you might remember my first ever published photo was for a story in that magazine several months ago.
Kiteworld is a British magazine with a world wide circulation. This ad will be directed towards kiteboarders around the world to convince them that their next vacation should be to Miami to learn to kiteboard and/or to improve their skills with SkyBanditz Kiteboarding School.
Here are the original shots. Yes, the sky was replaced, but it took the hint about "something drastic" in post processing for anybody to pick up on it. That's what I was hoping for.
 - - - 
The day that we went to South Beach to shoot this it was gloomy and completely overcast. The sun is not in the east as  MelonMusketeer suggested, but directly overhead. Due to the overcast conditions there were no shadows evident. What took a long time was getting the main shot to look like it was taken in much better weather and then to match a sky to it. I burnt in some darker, shadow type areas in the lower part of the buildings since the sun was going to now be in the west instead of directly overhead.
The intent was to get a shot like this one - - -  which has a lot of compression bringing the background buildings closer to the subject. The kiteboarding school wanted a similiar effect with them in front of South Beach and the art deco style buildings that South Beach is known for as a major element of the photograph.
To get this angle meant that I had to be offshore, but with enough wind to kiteboard comes rough seas and shooting from a boat would have been impossible. Another option would have been to get a friend of mine to take me up in a helicopter but, again, the conditions were pretty rough and the budget didn't allow for it. What I did was to walk/jump down the jetty that extends out quite a way along Government Cut which is on the extreme end of the beach. Ken triangulated the distance and figured that he and the other rider were about 1.9 miles away from me. I was shooting with my D80 and the Nikon 80-400 VR. Even with VR it was rough to hold still in the wind.
When the wind really picked up the waves began crashing into the rocks of the jetty and started hitting me and it was all I could do to keep my equipment from getting soaked with salt water. Finally, I realized that I had better head back in before it got any worse. What took me ten minutes to get out to took me about 40 minutes to get back from. The moss and algae on the rocks were now wet and extremely slippery. I was carrying a large drybag with about 40 pounds of gear in one hand and my tripod in the other. I didn't want to put the tripod back into the drybag because it was wet with salt water. Twice I busted my a$$ and I thought that I might break my leg on those huge boulders. I got a nice gouge in my shin and I HAD to drop the tripod to save myself once. Luckily the tripod wedged between two boulders instead of continuing through to the ocean bottom. It ended up with a severe nick and a slight dent in one of the legs.
The subject of a recent thread was about what we do to get the shot. This is an example of what I'll do. |
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