Beach photos
 

I don't have a lot of experience photographing at the beach and I'm always looking for someone to experiment with. I managed to get this daughter of a friend to stand in.

I know enough not to schedule the shoot in the middle of the day. Knowing exactly the time of the sunset, I scheduled the meet at 7:15. This gave me about an hour and fifteen minutes of low horizontal light.

I can say that the next time I will rely more on props: boats, sails, any structure that can add interest to the composition. Just standing on the sand with a blue background doesn't do much for me. In one of the ones below I managed to talk a guy out of his sail boat for a couple of minutes, but I rushed so much that I missed some details like the left hand, which sorta ruins this shot for me. This head shot looks pretty good if you like to paint big toothy grins. The one of her holding on to the rigging is not terrible, but in order to use the prop she was turned directly into the sun which flattened out her face. It wasn't that great a design anyway.

I learned that I can't effectively take a photo of a person with the sunset in the background without using a flash.

I took 85 pictures and can't say that I would rush to paint a single one. I can tell within a few seconds after setting up for the first shot how the day is going to go. When I could make this gal laugh she had a nice expression, but otherwise she looked a bit sad. I did manage to get a handful of nice photographs for them and I'm thankful for that. And, I learned a lot without any real pressure to produce.

Here's what I'd try in that lighting situation: Take two shots with different exposures. In the first one, spot meter on the face. In the second, do an overall average metering of the whole scene. That way you can avoid using the flash.

What I meant to say is that you can't get it all done in one exposure. The following is a spot meter on the face and a full scene exposure. The spot metered shot doesn't look so hot without any light coming across the face to define the form. She's basically looking directly away from the light and looks pretty washed out. I reached my level of incompetence on that idea.

And then there was this ... I looked up and saw this guy almost chest deep with his handle bars sticking out of the water walking directly toward the shore. My mind blinked a few times thinking what is wrong with this picture. By the time I got my camera up he looked like this. I never found out if he was half boy, half fish (like Kevin Costner). You see some strange things at the waters edge.