Morning Surf (enlarge photo)

I owe this photo to pre-visualization. DaHsi is one of Taiwan's surfing hot-spots. A good friend had invited me to spend a weekend at DaHsi to enjoy the beach and to shoot some film. Sleeping on the beach obviously benefited my brain; I woke up in the middle of the night with a vision in my head ... a surfer wading into the surf in faint, pre-dawn light. As the sky was still pitch-black I went back to sleep.

As dawn began to approach, I woke up my friend and told him it was time to go in. Reluctantly, he threw on his boardies, grabbed his board and began to make his way towards the water.

To fully realise my vision, I knew that I'd need to use a small burst of fill-flash to prevent the surfer from merely being a silhouette. Just the right amount of flash combined with the abundance of yellow in the foreground worked perfectly.

In my 2002 Year-End Photo Contest, Morning Surf was voted the Best Sports Photo and the Photo of the Year.