The mission of the NKF of Florida is to prevent kidney and urinary tract diseases, improve the health and well-being of individuals and families affected by these diseases, and increase the availability of all organs for transplantation.
The NKF Surf Festival began 24 years ago as event to benefit chronically ill dialysis patients. It was the heartfelt commitment of former professional surfer, Rich Salick, of Cocoa Beach FL, and his twin brother Phil, who put his life ont the line in 1974 by donating a kidney to save Rich’s life. All proceeds of the event go directly to dialysis patients. Come join the fun and make a difference in people lives. Let’s have some fun!

I tossed my gear in the truck and headed up to Cocoa Beach. Shoot before 11-12ish on the east coast of Florida presents back light issues. Shooting in mid day is great light but better have a bucket of sun screen and water. I was shooting with the 5D mk II and 2.8f L 400mm lens. The lens has the range and sharpness to really get close to the surfer in the water. I shot from 8am to 2pm, I was cooked and tired by this time as well as the surf had flatten out. Over all the images are good, I need to tweak a few more settings.

I shot using aperture priority at f8 and ISO 100 because of the very bright light, I was getting shutter speed with enough speed to stop the action. I had the auto-focus set to AI servo because to the constant movement of the subjects. I also used burst mode to allow continuous shooting so I can go back and pull the best action shot of the bunch. I found this technique to work better that single frame shooting. I would miss the peak action shot. Apples Aperture has a great feature called staking which can group shots that are very close in time to each other. This makes finding the best of an action sequence easier than hunting by opening and closing files in Photoshop.