BUCS Surf Championships, Newquay. Oct 2015

BUCS - British Universities & Colleges sport.

This October I travelled down to Newquay to work for BUCS, as a volunteer photographer. The event I photographed was the surf championships on Fistral Beach.  This was my first time photographing a sporting event, and it was a great experience. The constantly changing weather and conditions in the water made the job challenging, but interesting. Unfortunately the competition was called off after the first day of heats on Friday, due to lack of waves. This meant that I only had the chance to shoot for one day, rather than 3. For the following two days I photographed anything else that was going on at Fistral, which included the award ceremony.

The environment in which I was shooting was comfortable and familiar to me, and made the job so easy. The weather was cold, and I was above my knees in the cold water trying to get closer to the surfers to photograph them, but nothing made the experience unpleasant, it added to the atmosphere of the day and made me feel closer to the situation of the people I was photographing. It was difficult to keep my camera away from the splashes from the waves, but luckily I managed to keep it mostly dry and free of sand. The entire time I wanted to be in the water with the surfers, getting as close as I could to capture the photographs. In the future i'd like to invest in an underwater housing for my camera which will give me much more opportunity for photographing in situations like this, and allow me to be a lot more creative as I wont have to worry about damaging my camera. Also an underwater housing will be useful when photographing in the snow.

I tried to capture most aspects of the competition, I didn't jut want shots of the surfers competing, I wanted shots of them preparing, coming in and out of the water, spectators on the beach, how the competitors interacted with each other and so on...

I decided to see what the images looked like in black and white, as I have been looking at a few black and white images of extreme sport and thought they had an unusual quality that I liked.  I like how the atmosphere of the image completely changes when it is in black and white. In a visual practice seminar group, one of the other students in the group mentioned that when in black and white the images look much less 'baywatch', which I agree with.. I think in colour the photographs look rather typical to what you imaging surfing to be. The black and white images I think allow you to focus on the people in the photographs rather than being immediately drawn to the colours. I think you get much more of a sense of what the subject is feeling at the time the photograph was taken.