It's on!

[Admin]

Hi guys, the Gorge has starting to warm up now and we are getting a lot of windy days.  I've been down at the Hatchery a few times shooting images and there is an incredible energy in the Gorge right now. It honestly reminds me of the early 90's. The foil has completely reinvigorated old and new windsporters and the foil-free crowd is just as stoked as ever.  This is a sequence I shot yesterday. I'll add more images to this post as I edit them. I also started a Flickr page recently for anyone who cares to see updated images and maybe some hummingbirds :-).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/randystrome/

[LaPerouseBay]

The foil has completely reinvigorated old and new windsporters and the analog crowd is just as stoked as ever. 

Does analog crowd refer to non foilers?  (Normie trying to keep up here).  I gave up when you surfer people referred to Sup as going over to the dark side.

Nice pictures.  Those time lapse things on one background are a photoshop effect?  You were doing that way back when you did Dave in Maliko gulch... I never considered how much work that is for a digital program until the current era. 

I used to just shrug it off and think, 'meh, drag and drop, whatever' because I'd never tried to produce a photo like that.   It may not be drag and drop. Even if it was, it's still quite a trick to have nice borders. 

I'll bet there was a tripod in there somewhere.    

[Admin]

No, that was just me being goofy. I changed it to "foil-free" for clarity :-).  I did see that they just recently cancelled one of the downwind events here, but I have a feeling that that has a lot more to do with the wider economy than with our sports.  Ask the bike industry! 

That image compositing is done in Photoshop by getting as clean selection as you can from a group of images and then using the one with the most suitable background to position them on, to hopefully show the action of the moment.  New cameras are pretty much magic and can capture a ton of in focus images.  Getting them separated out cleanly and getting them to mesh in with the background is a fun process.  Editing tools can be pretty helpful for clean images on clean backgrounds but it is a little trickier on busy backgrounds or where focus is blurred.

[surfcowboy]

This is great, thanks man

[Dwight (DW)]

I believe the event was cancelled because the Maui race was moved to conflict with the Gorge event. Everyone is staying in Maui this July, until after that event. Expect the crowds to return late July in HR.