Wild Sydney Weather

Yesterday the weather turned quite nasty here in Sydney and I noticed the swell was pretty big and that dangerous surf warnings had been issued.
I grabbed my cameras and headed down to my two local beaches, Coogee and Bronte. Coogee is usually a pretty mellow beach and doesn't often get big waves but it was like a giant washing machine, windy and super messy. Bronte was much the same except that there was a bunch of young groms hanging on to the rope on the edge of the ocean pool and getting themselves smashed by the double and sometimes triple overhead sets that were coming through.
All in all, great entertainment for a Sunday arvo!
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Behind the scenes of a product shoot

About a week ago I did a product shoot for Australian & New Zealand Snowboarding magazine here in Sydney. The shoot was for a buyers guide style product page and was shot on location at a bar in Sydney called the Minus 5 bar It should be called the minus 14.7 bar as that was the real temperature inside the walk-in freezer/bar. When the owners first gave the go ahead to do the shoot there, they told us we could not shoot for more than 45 minutes at a time inside the bar as apparently "the human body cannot withstand exposure to that temperature". Being the seasoned snow climate people that we are we laughed this off and replied that we often spend whole days out shooting and riding in temperatures much colder than -5 C or even -14.7 C, however that kind of backfired on us when we turned up on a balmy autumn Sydney morning dressed more for a semi cool night than say 3-4 hours in a commercial freezer the size of a small house!
Australian snowboard legend and all round top bloke Nick Gregory came along to assist me and to get some experience outside the snowboard bubble (well kind of outside the bubble!) Nick also didn't really think about the prolonged freezer experience when dressing as he wore classic Aussie tennis shoes without socks!
Nick was kind enough to roam around with my second camera body and snap off some shots when he wasn't helping me move frozen flash equipment around the bar.
The finished shot will be seen in the first issue of Australian & New Zealand Snowboarding, which will hit the news stands in May.
Click below for more of Nick's shots.

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Nikon D3 and 200-400mm f4 VR for a weekend

A couple of weekends ago Nikon Professional Services were kind enough to lend me a Nikon D3 and the 200-400mm f4 VR zoom lens to play around with.
It was a last minute thing and so I quickly tried to arrange to shoot as much as possible in the two days I had this amazing set up.
In the one weekend I shot a game of Rugby league, Tony Hawk demoing at Monster skatepark, a NSW Premier League Soccer match that evening and the following day I shot a handfull of overs in the final match of the Women's World Cup Cricket, and then another Soccer game that night. I definitely put the camera to the test, especially the high ISO capabilities. Most small club fields in Sydney have terrible lighting and I was shooting at ISO 6400 at f4, and shocked at how well the camera not only handled the noise at that ISO but also how well the camera was able to focus the long lens in such crappy light and keep up. On my D2x when shooting sports like soccer, the keeper rate is probably about 2-3 sharp shots in a burst of 10. The D3 was 9-10 tack sharp in a burst of 10! Seriously worth every cent.The other thing worth noting is how sharp this lens is for a zoom! You would think the images came from a prime 2.8.
It has been pretty hard to go back to the old cameras after using the D3.
Time to sell everything I own!!
lot's more shots after the cut.
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