Boise Winter River Surfing

While this video shows beautiful cinematography with regard to clarity and use of depth of field, it is typically indicative of the problem you get in sports photography when the photographer doesn’t actually do the sport. The entire video is far to zoomed in on the surfers so you completely lose the context of the sport. This seems to be a common problem these days. It seems that amongst photographers, they have decided that zooming way in on a subject and holding them tightly framed shows their photography prowess. On the contrary, it shows their lack of knowledge of the sport and what a viewer who actually does do the sport wants to see.
I have seen this a lot in surfing and snowboarding videography. Even during the Olympics half pipe competitions on TV, the photographers always suck the in rider to where they fit just within the frame and follow them up and down, back and forth on the half pipe. This is awful and makes for terrible viewing. It completely loses the context of the pipe and how high above the pipe the rider goes. Similarly, in surf photography if you are not zoomed out enough to see the entire wave both vertically and horizontally, you lose perspective. I have noticed the filming of surf contests on the World Surf League circuit is pretty good. Go look there.