Monday, August 22, 2011

Best Videos from Last Week · The Ways of the Wind


Video Replay is a selection, IMHO, of the best videos from the last week (Aug 15 - 21) of DaNews. The first video is a tasty, don't beat 'em over the head, introduction to the 2012 Naish Windsurfing Collection: 


Windsurfing vs. the World:



The King of the Hook, the ever so unusual and often funny once a year freestyle event, is put on by the Columbia Gorge Windsurfing Association...some of this year's rendition: 



From the Indian Ocean, Marco Lang in Mauritius:



Point of view, or simply POV, camera angles record the scene from a particular player's viewpoint. POV is how the broader field of cinematography would characterize the GoPro genre so common now in windsurfing videos. Here are 3 good examples from this week.

James Douglass is an accomplished GoPro videographer. More of his musings and videos can be found on his James Blog. James enjoying a summer day in Nahant:


The next video demonstrates the central issue of where to put the camera to get the most interesting view. The camera mount in the Punta Experience is something new:


Jeff Bennett of Maui Windsurfing wrote: "At the 2011 Maui Race Series Neil Pryde State Championships, Mike Yasak wore a GoPro camera during the morning age group heats. Mike was kind enough to share the footage with me. I’ve made two videos from it, one a highlights video with some footage I shot from the beach intercut with the GoPro footage, and another much longer video of all of each race 1 through 4 of the men’s age 50 division at the 2011 Maui Race Series Neil Pryde State Championships." 



Newspapers will report on windsurf gatherings, like a regatta, if someone prods them enough in advance. Usually that role falls on the shoulders of an event organizer who is sometimes overwhelmed by a sea of details. And more often than not the paper will do an adequate job of announcing the event but will lose interest in the follow up report of what happened. Occasionally you might find a human interest story about windsurfing usually concerning a long standing business or something interesting a windsurfer has done. In short, newspapers know we exist but for most of their readers our sport is a big yawn.

One notable exception to the newspaper doesn't really care syndrome is the Maui News which faithfully reports on windsurfing news. Their Maui Race Series reporting would look right at home in any big city newspaper's sports section. Covering windsurfing on Maui makes sense especially when you consider it's a relatively small island with 150,000+ residents and water sports are way big there.

Meanwhile, back on the U.S. mainland, something new for windsurfing started this summer in the Gorge. Katie Crafts of CGWA fame is writing a column for the local newspaper, Hood River News. A column for a newspaper usually means a regular feature driven by the author's personality and explicitly containing their point of view: the GoPro video of journalism. This summer she's written 5 articles, with one more to go, for her column: The Ways of the Wind. How did Katie get this chance to write about windsurfing for her local paper? "Adam Lapierre (a local kiter and reporter at the paper) contacted me after I submitted a press release, and laid out the idea of a recurring column about windsurfing.  As a writer and windsurfer, I, of course, thought it was a great idea and jumped on the opportunity!  Hood River has a lot of different "circles" of people - wind sport people, winter skiers, small business owners, farmers, ... it's nice to have a platform to bring awareness to these different circles, and this has been an awesome opportunity to do just that - build awareness of how windsurfing fits into Hood River (and how Hood River fits into windsurfing) through the column."  

Unfortunately there is no archived record of Katie's column, but she did photo copy the original clippings. Click the image and zoom for easier reading:




 


 





































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