Day 40 | Mark

Mark is one of the best surfers in Holland. At least I think so. He has this very powerful fluent style, is good on a longboard, shortboard and probably any board you put him on. He’s comfortable on the mushy Dutch waves, but also the firing barrels in France.  He knows his boards, used to work with German shaper BUFO before he got big, and has shaped a few boards himself. If you watch him surf you can learn a lot. Also his position in the water is usually spot on. In Scheveningen the peaks are always moving, and he moves intuitively with them. Now Mark is always very modest about his surfing so he would never attest to this. And he deserves the credit! He’s married to Femke and they have a son Teun(about 14 months old). Mark works as a troubleshooter in the Circustheater in Scheveningen. This means that you have to know a lot of technical stuff about a lot of different things. When something goes wrong in the show (due to technical issues) the troubleshooter tries to fix it. That’s always a stressfull moment, but he has remain calm and just get things rolling again. Usually you have someone stressing on the headset while working. Well Mark just fixes it and isn’t bothered by anyone shouting or stressing. I know all this because we used to work together on the musical Tarzan. That was a show very dependent on technology. We had some “fun” times… I personally never minded when stuff would go wrong, just as long as no one got hurt.

So tonight we had Mark, Femke and Teun over for dinner and I off course wanted Mark in the Dailyclick. I had this idea I wanted to try lighting wise for a future shoot. We only had about 10 minutes because it was already way too late for the little ones. I had been hoping for some more sun, but in the end there wasn’t any sun…. So I kinda copied the strobist setup from Day 38 | Growing. I kept the strobes in the same place, but chose a different shooting position.

I used the Nikon D70 instead of the D300 because I wanted to shoot at F2.8. The D70 can sync on 1/500 of a sec, and it gives me a bit more control over the ambient light. Unfortunately the LCD display on the back is not functioning properly and everything looked okay when we were shooting. But on the computer it looks a whole lot different! I got some keepers but it wasn’t the desired look and feel that I wanted. Did learn a valuable lesson!. Even with short shoots with friends, go for a safe shot first and then experiment…. At least now I know how to do it the next time.

Nikon D70 17-55mm 2.8. Strobist setup: Bare flash behind Mark, Shoot through umbrella camera left. Both strobes have 3/4 CTO filters on them for a bit warmer feel

You can see some surfing pictures of Mark here:

Mark surfing Hoek van Holland

Mark surfing at undisclosed location in Scheveningen

Mark surfing at same location with a lot smaller waves…

More tk.