Hurry Up And Wait

December 30th, 2008 in Articles / Jamie O'Brien

To see this video at 1080p go to SmugMug by CLICKING HERE.

“Hurry Up and Wait” – these are words that I and every photographer / filmmaker / surfer – you name it – live by. It was a mad dash to get everything ready for this trip – people flew through winter storms, prototypes were assembled last minute and gear was shipped from all over the country. And then you get here. And no waves.

I knew that this might happen – and that’s why I gave myself close to 3 weeks to pull this off. Nonetheless – it hasn’t made the wait any easier. I can tell you that waiting for weather as a photographer is one of the few truly stressful parts of the job – but when you have a film crew with you – it just gets amplified exponentially as you’re no longer the only person waiting. This isn’t my first rodeo – and I’ve had to wait a long time before (in fact I had to wait over a week to make a single frame the last time I was here on the North Shore to cover the Pipeline Masters two years ago.) My 18 years of experience has taught me to simply let things unfold naturally. Certain things just can’t be helped along… Truth be told: I still can’t “relax” even in Hawaii when I’m “waiting” for an assignment to come together.

The fact that we’ve also faced some tough weather and a power outage hasn’t helped, but stress aside – we’ve been having a good time. We don’t have a single clip of Jamie surfing yet – but it looks like we might just get lucky as a swell is headed our way. For now I hope you enjoy a very quick cut of what we do have – mostly of us waiting. For the waves. And Jamie to explode off of them.

Next I’ll put up a behind the scenes piece/tutorial on how important Neutral Density Filters are with these digital cinema cameras and how they’re absolutely essential if you want to differentiate what you are shooting with your Canon lenses from what you see coming out of standard HD video cameras when shooting in daylight.