Tybee Island Surfers

In October of 2012 I was honeymooning on Tybee Island in Georgia.  Tybee is a quaint beach community that hasn’t allowed high rise development or over commercialization.  It was here that I proposed to my wife almost a year earlier and has become a very special place to us.

I’ve been visiting Tybee since I was a young child, but it wasn’t until this trip that I learned that the island has a large surf community.  Each morning my wife and I would walk out to the beach to watch the sunrise.  It seemed that right about 7am dozens of surfers would appear.  My interest was piqued and I decided to build a set of images into a portfolio.  I began by shooting the candid lifestyle photos using a Canon 5d Mark II and Zeiss 50mm f/2 Makro lens.  Shooting handheld for these allowed me to quickly move about capturing each scene without being noticed by the subjects and enabling interesting angles inches off of the sand or water.

To complete the set of images as a portfolio I thought it was important to try to add some intimate head and shoulder environmental portraits.  After receiving a tip from one of the surfers that that Wednesday morning was going to be a good tide my wife and I decided to roll down to the beach with a mobile studio.  While I set up the equipment my wife approached the surfers and asked for a minute of their time for a portrait.  We had a few willing participants who we had promised an emailed copy of their photograph.  Setting up we shot the portraits with my Phase One Medium Format Digital system at ISO 25.  The images were made at f/8 with a Mamiya 80mm f1.9 lens and lit from 45 degrees left with a single strobe and Chimera medium softbox.  Shooting tethered on the beach to our Macbook Pro Retina into Capture One Pro allowed us to show each surfer their portrait right on the spot to gain their trust.

I really enjoyed meeting and photographing the surfer community in Tybee and look forward to spending more time there.