Easy Beach Photos

Baywatch is getting a remake

During the long weekend, I got to take our toddler to the beach.  The sun was very bright - ambient was at ISO 200, f/20, 1/250.  That also meant extremely high contrast between sunlight and shadow.  If I exposed for the sunlight, the shadow would have little visible detail.  The simple solution is to use fill light.

Fill light will lift the shadow detail and reduce the dynamic range of the scene (the difference between the relevant highlight and relevant shadows) to within the camera sensor's dynamic range, thus preserving both highlight detail and shadow detail.

However, the other problem with shooting in these conditions is that the sun is a very hard light source, creating sharply defined shadows (as in the shot of our toddler building sand castles).  To address that issue, I like to use the sun as rim light instead of the key light.  With the subject's face in shadow, there's no harsh light on the face.  But that leads to the previous problem of dealing with the exposure of the subject's face which is now hidden in the shadow.

We could use a popup flash but that is a hard light source just like the sun, so we would be back at square one.  It's possible to use an umbrella or softbox but the beach is usually very windy, making it hard to handle a suitably large umbrella or softbox.

An easy alternative is to use a ringlight (aka ring flash), which produces light that appears almost shadowless (as long as the subject is not next to a wall).  A ringlight produces flat, even lighting that doesn't help reveal the subject's three-dimensional form - but that's ok under these circumstances because that's what we would expect a shaded subject to look like, thus making the use of the flash less obvious.  The ringlight's reflection will show up on sunglasses and other reflective objects but it's easy to clone out if you want to.  Here I left the reflections alone.

Besides real ring flashes from Profoto and Paul Buff, less expensive speedlight adapters are available from Ray Flash, Orbis, some eBay and Amazon sellers, and now from DIYPhotography.net.

RELATED POSTS:
Coco Ring Flash
Use Flash in Daylight?
Fill Flash: Summer Pool Party

Flash Series - Part 6: Use Flash in Daylight? Really?

I hear this exclamation a lot whenever I advise someone to use his flash as a fill light in strongly backlit situations, or when someone sees me using it in broad daylight. Despite being initially counter intuitive, this is perhaps the only practical use (image quality wise) of your built-in camera flash. Hit the jump for more explanation.

The Disadvantage of Off-Camera Lighting

If you read the other entries on this blog, you know how strongly I recommend using lights off-camera (wirelessly or otherwise). With off-camera lighting, you create more shadows that hopefully sculpt or flatter your subject.  However, when shooting with only one light (which is usually what we family photographers are limited to when taking candid shots), and using it off-camera, those same shadows sometimes obscure important elements of the subject.  Here's a sample:



In the original unedited shot, the shadows completely obscured our toddler's eyes and nose.  Unfortunately, the 'snow' was falling for only a brief moment, so it was only after it was too late when I discovered my error.

Solutions (probably most ideal to least ideal):

1. Off-camera fill-light.  The ideal solution is to use another off-camera light source for fill.

2. Increase the size of the light source by bouncing it or using a modifier (e.g. umbrella).  A larger light source can wrap around obstructions to some extent, and is less likely to create shadows that completely obscure large parts of the subject.

3 (tied). On-axis fill light.  If you're using the pop-up flash or an on-camera flash as controller for the off-camera flash, the problem can be minimized by using the pop-up flash or controller as a fill-light (dial in -2.0 or so flash exposure compensation).  The trade-off for Nikon CLS users is that you're precluded from using an SG-3IR to reduce blinking from subjects.

3 (tied). Balance ambient.  The ratio of flash to ambient can be balanced more carefully so that there's enough ambient to act as fill.

5. Postprocessing can help but only to some degree, as the shot above shows.