Surf's Up!

There was a heavy surf advisory here in San Diego for the weekend, so I decided to take the camera down to Ocean Beach and see what I could capture. It's an Olympus C-4040 Zoom and has the ability to take 30 seconds or less of video. Here's the best I came up with. As a point of reference, the cliffs are about 20-25' tall at this point, so the splash is coming 30-35' feet up out of the water.



I learned a few things from the experience. First, it ran out of batteries after taking about 6 short movies. Second, you need to time the waves better than I did. Third, I wish I had brought my tripod. Lastly, I wish I had a real video camera. This ersatz one didn't work that well. What I needed to do was set up a video camera on a tripod and capture about 20 minutes of surf and then edit it into something much tighter.

I also tried to get some footage of the surfers who were riding 10' waves, but the zoom feature doesn't work very well in movie mode, so those movies came out like little black dots riding big waves. Oh well. Next time will be better.