An Impromptu Beach Shoot

Last weekend we celebrated my father's 60th birthday and for that we went to The Hague and spent a night at the Hilton. Close to The Hague lies Scheveningen which is a sea side beach town. As always I brought my camera and I had decided to bring a small flash as well. I was really bummed out over the summer when I realised all the missed opportunities in France because I didn't bring a flash. 

Read on after the jump >>>

Flash?

You might wonder why in the hell you need a flash in such incredibly sunny places as the south of France or the beach. Well there are in fact several reasons. Of course in such places you will also probably find yourself at night, but that is not the most important of them. You can use the flash as an extra light source. Normally when you're out and about in the outside world you have about one light source. Either the sun or the streetlights later in the day. This sometimes means that you can't get the shot you want, because if your model is standing with the light in her/his back then you will get a silhouette or a badly lit face at best. So in that case it is great to use a flash to get the light on your model. 

But there is another reason that ties into this as well.

Multiple Lights

The other reason is you can use the sun as a second light source instead of your main light source. When you are in the studio you often use several lights instead of just one light source and this is what I did at the beach as well. You use several light sources to create a sense of depth in you photos and to highlight specific areas. This all brings more interesting details into the photo. 

In using the sun in combination with the off-camera flash I managed to create three different lights: A main light (or key), a hair light and a background light.

As for the lights

So the main light, which is the off-camera flash here, lights the face of our lovely model here and gives us a chance to see her features. The hair light, the sun in this case, does as suspected and lights the hair plus a little bit of her back giving a sense of depth. And then the sun lights the background as well but with a different level of light then that of the hair light.

Combined they give a studio impression. 

This is the power a camera with an off-camera flash gives you, a studio look on a beach with only a model and a photographer.

PS. It helps when your model has great features as mine did, for I used incredibly hard light for all zones of lighting. The sun in a clear blue sky is hard as hell, and a bare flash as well.

PPS. Notice the way the model always looks in the same direction? This is because I needed her looking at an angle so I wouldn't get any specular highlights (click on it for an explaining post) in her sunglasses.