Beach Location Photos

Beach Location Photos

by William Lulow

This is a short description of a little shoot we did with the kids and grandkids on Longboat Key, Florida this year. My daughter always wants sunset family photos so in order to create the beautiful colors in the evening sky, you almost always have to shoot into the sun. Today, even with really well-made, coated lenses, it’s often difficult to eliminate sun flare totally. This year I had the kids stand more to the side instead of right in front of the sunset and this was the result:

Here, I was able to capture a good deal of the color of the sky without having to aim directly into the sun. A light, bounced into an umbrella was placed close to the family and the camera position was quite a distance away because I was using my 85mm f1.8 lens. Here’s a shot of the setup:

You can see the relative distances of the camera and the light. The umbrella was just used as a fill-in light. The other umbrella was used to shade the lens against any possible flare. The camera was on a tripod (almost always, when I can) and the exposure was f/5.6 at 1/160th of a second with an ISO of 100. The settings were chosen to limit the depth-of-field and to stop any possible motion of the children. Light was produced by my Westcott fj200 monolight set at near full power, bounced into an umbrella and placed approximately 6 feet from the subjects. With any kind of flash photography it’s usually the lamp-to-subject distance that produces the exposure, so depending on what else in the scene is lit by ambient light, you would have to adjust your exposure to include those items as well.

So the out-of-focus water, the additional color of the sunset with a little bit of warm-ish light on the subjects made for a pleasing portrait.