NZ Wakeboard Champs
The Nautiques NZ Wakeboarding Nationals. Every rider gets one run and the photographer gets one chance at each. Shot for NZ Wakeboard as the event’s official coverage.
The assignment
Championship coverage is unforgiving: the trick happens once, at speed, against water glare, and every rider deserves the same care as the podium favourite. This was the official event set, delivered branded and ready for the sponsors who put their names on the bottom of every frame.
The hunt
The grab at full extension, the landing spray, the face on the podium. But the frame that opens this set is the quiet one: a board and binding on the dock, sponsor decals shallow in the focus, everything beyond it dissolved. Shot wide open so the equipment reads as portrait rather than product. Energy mode on the water, stillness on the dock.
The frames
Sixty frames, the whole weekend, ending where it should: on the podium. Inverts held at full rotation above the wake. The boat with the rider hanging off its shoulder in a wall of spray. Kids walking to the water with boards over their shoulders past the sponsor flags. Riders getting strapped in on the dock. And the ones that matter most: a girl surfacing after a fall, grinning, and a kid throwing a shaka from the water. Riders sent so high the spectators in camp chairs sit under them. The winner walking back up the bank barefoot with his board under his arm, grinning at someone off frame. And the last frame of all, the champion on the top step with the cup above his head and the other two placings either side of him. Half the set is the competition. The other half is the reason anyone turns up.
