May 4, 2015 at The Wedge, an iconic surf spot on the Newport Beach Peninsula. Confluence of waves bouncing off the breakwater create a wave apex that is larger that at any surfing location in southern California. This week the storms in New Zealand have translated into waves between 12 and 20 feet at The Wedge. This shot was taken of a boogie boarder getting air as he streams down the face of the wave. If he bottoms with the nose up he will be able to turn to his left across the wave and increase his ride. If not, he will be pounded into the sand and engulfed in foam for a significant period of time. At the top left of the wave you can see a light brown area. This is churned sand, which at this location is decomposed granite. It is much grittier than normal beach sand. Consequently a sand plant on an uncovered body part has the character of being ground by sandpaper. This wave is about 14 feet. There were about 30 surfers and boogie boarders in the water and about 300 spectators on the sand. There is an article in BBC News on line about The Wedge today. While I had my 600mm lens with me and shot many shots, they did not capture the wave size. The crowds made it impossible to back up to widen my field with the 600. The usual blue water appeared green because of the significant overcast skys.
Nikon D800 Nikkor 24-120 120mm 1/2500 f/8 ISO640 RAW Aperature priority. I usually shoot RAW, but the changing light conditions made that impractical. Hand held and processed in Lightroom, PhotoshopCC2014 and NIK. It is minimally processed, but significantly cropped.
Thank you for your comments. 
Comments
4 commentsAs a desert rat, I'm alway amazed at the power of the ocean. This image shows some of that raw power.
Confused a bit by the comment "I usually shot RAW, but the chaning light conditions made that impractical". Did you mean manual exposure, rather than RAW?
The image feels a tad flat to me. Looking at the histogram, showed the image wasn't utilizing the full range of tones.
I put a Levels adjustment layer on the image, moved the black point to 26 and the white point to 228 and came up with this result. See what you think.
Yes, I meant to write manual and shot aperture. Thanks for working on the image. To begin with it is mor about photo journalism than photo art. None of the 2000 plus images I shot that day were decent from a technique perspective. Waiting for a sunny day with large waves to go back out.
I like the repost by Keith in that it lightens this up a bit and adds a touch more color depth. It can probably be improved beyond that... I often neglect to really process my photos because I'm lazy, or don't know what to do, or a combination of things. But when you have an image like this - the best thing to do is OVERprocess it to the point that it looks unrealistic, then backoff. It's too difficult to process it little by little and get it to the final result, without knowing what looks ridiculous. (Hope that makes sense!)
Cool image! Big waves are something. I made it up to see Mavericks when it was big one time. The surfers looked tiny on the waves. They are plain nuts to be out in those huge waves.