When shooting for the Girls of Rocky Point Calendar, I often find myself on the beach under the bright afternoon sun. The unforgiving shadows and the sheer brightness of the sun itself are a couple of reasons many photographers avoid shooting this time of the day. To add to that, we’re on a beach which offers no shade and sunlight glaring off the water. Not the friendliest of conditions.
You’re on a beautiful beach with a group of models. What to do? On the day we began shooting the sky was clear without a single cloud and the sun was as bright as it gets. Which was perfect. I already had one large, powerful light in my setup and it didn’t require any electricity. For these shots, I set them all up so the sun would act as my hair/rim light. Keeping the sun behind your model also adds to her comfort. She won’t be constantly staring into a bright light, squinting or dealing with watery eyes.
Depending on just how bright the sun is, I may suggest simply using a reflector to illuminate the model with a bit of bounce fill. I like to keep my setups as simplistic as possible. Though in this case, using only a reflector would have resulted in a completely washed out background. I wanted to retain some of the details. I needed something a little more powerful to offset the brightness of the sun. For my main light, I brought down one of my 600w/s monolights from the beach house and attached a beauty dish to it. Being that beaches aren’t teeming with electrical outlets, I also brought down a battery pack to power the strobe.
After metering he sunlight, I set the strobe between 1-2 stops less than the sun. As I mentioned, I wanted to retain some of the details, but also wanted a bright summery feel to the photo. With respect to the background I wanted and the position of the sun, the placement of the strobe changed a bit from setup to setup. However it was always positioned so that the model was directly between it and the sun. This type of positioning allowed for there to be some shaddowing, giving the model’s features depth and keeping them from having an overly flashed look.
All the photos below utilized this type of lighting. For more photos from the Girls of Rocky Point Calendar shoots, check out my Flickr photostream or the Girls of Rocky Point website.
