Beach photos

[Mike McCarty]

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.