Your Guide to Better Beach Photography by Sarah Vaughn Shooting at the beach: your kids & clients Tips for full sun, back light & much more The beach and photography is a match made in heaven, with deep blue sky, cotton ball clouds, azure sea, and children laughing and playing in the golden sand. But it’s also one of the most challenging places to shoot. Have you ever tried to take pictures of your children or clients at the beach only to be confronted with full sun, blown hot spots, glare from the water, harsh shadows and lots of messy, sandy people? Beach photography is tricky, for sure. But with a few tips, techniques and practice, there are few locations that can yield as beautiful backdrops and happy, joy-filled subjects. My own love-hate relationship with sun-filled beach photos comes from living on an island in the Indian Ocean for many years. With no sand dunes or structures to filter the light, I learned to navigate beach photography through trial and error. And though a flash and reflector can be your best friend - I’ve chosen today to focus on tips that anyone can use, even if you’ve left your flash at home or couldn’t fit that reflector in your beach bag. Yours, Sarah Vaughn When to shoot First off, not all sun is created equal. When you are at the beach with nothing to block the light, choosing the right time of day is even more important. If you are shooting a family session at the beach, you will likely have control over when and where you schedule it and can select the best conditions for the job. But if you are going to the beach with your family or shooting a beach wedding, you may not be able to avoid the harsh noon-day sun. However, you can still get lovely images, despite tough conditions. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the best and worst times of day to shoot, how to manage the different lighting scenarios you will find, and include lots of tips for both capturing and processing your images. In full sun, it’s critical to choose the right time of day. Golden hour: shooting tips & full sun solutions Golden hour at the beach can be sublime. This is when your subjects are bathed in magical golden light. The sand and water just sparkles with it. Golden hour times change depending on the year, but normally it’s the last hour before the sun goes down. Use Kelvin or custom white balance. Because the color of the sun can be intense at this hour and you may not have any structures to filter that gold light, if you set your camera on auto for white balance, you will likely end up with yellow people. The intense yellow tone to the image can also mean that you will blow out one of the color channels in your subject’s skin if you are not very careful with exposure (since skin has a lot of yellow/orange in it). This is why you will get best results with either custom white balance or using Kelvin and metering very carefully to preserve your highlights in important areas. My preference is for kelvin, because the sun temperature changes dramatically in the span of just fifteen minutes, from golden to the pastel tones of sundown. This means that you need a way to change your settings on the fly rather than having to continually pull out your gray card or Expodisc. I like to use live view for times like these, so I can see which white balance works best. Focus on the last fifteen minutes. The golden hour may not be an hour. Even forty five minutes before sundown can still yield very intense sun that often overpowers your subjects, especially if you are shooting out in the open. My favorite time for taking beach portraits is actually fifteen minutes before sunrise or after sunset. The light is buttery warm and is far softer than just half an hour prior. Try the morning. Golden hour light in the morning and afternoon is equally magical, but sometimes the morning light can be a little more fresh looking and less orange because there are fewer particles in the sky. Shoot in RAW. If you don’t get the white balance right in camera, RAW is indispensable in giving you the flexibility to fix issues in post processing as well as preserving your dynamic range, RAW files are wonderfully forgiving. Golden hour: processing tips Adjust the yellows if needed. When processing golden hour images, even with custom white balance you may need to take out excess yellow in the image or play with specific tones. I love using Lightroom’s HSL sliders or Photoshop’s hue/saturation tool that target individual colors, allowing you to reduce saturation or change the hue of specific tones. The same holds true if your beach image contains some green foliage or grass and the color has gone neon. Be careful that you do not go overboard and affect skin tones. You sometimes want to remove a little yellow, but not change the warm golden feel of the image or make your people look sallow and gray. Fix your exposure and white balance first. Use the RAW file before you do any creative edits or export to edit in another program so that you are using a file that has the fullest amount of information. Watch the white. If you are changing the white balance and trying to cool down an overly warm image, pay particular attention to the color of the sand and any white items of clothing. Tipping the temperature slider from yellow toward blue can give your sand and clothing a blue cast if you don’t use a judicious hand making small changes in different ways (such as using a combination of white balance, HSL slider, and adjustment brush to take out excess yellow rather than make one big sweeping white balance change). Middle of the day: shooting tips & full sun solutions High noon is the most difficult time of day to shoot, in my opinion. The light is coming from overhead, so if you take an image of someone with nothing to fill in the harsh shadows, you will get raccoon eyes, dark shadowing, and hot spots, especially at the top of the head. I generally try to avoid shooting in mid-day, but if I’m at the beach with my children at this time, I sometimes do want to capture the memories. Ideally you will find a tree or structure to block the sun, but if not, you can: Keep them engaged. I often go for shots where my subject is looking down and engaged with their activity rather than looking straight at the camera. That way I don’t have to worry about unsightly shadows. An alternative could be to have them look up at the sky to fill their faces with light. Get creative. I love working in challenging light. Why? Because when I try to solve problems (such as how to avoid unsightly shadows), I have to get creative in ways that I don’t at other times of the day. That means that I might shoot from a different angle, focus on details instead of a standard head shot, and open myself up to new possibilities. Remember the light in the clouds. On a cloudy day, you may be tempted to not worry about the noon-time problems, but you still need to. The range of highlights and shadows will not be as dramatic because the sun is being filtered, but the light is still coming from above and you will have the issue of blown out foreheads and sunken eyes if your subjects are not positioned properly. Step back. Because portraits can be challenging, take advantage of the brilliant colors of the day by shooting images of the surroundings or portraits where the subjects make up only a small portion of the frame. Let the beach shine with environmental portraits. You can incorporate fun components like reflections. Middle of the day: processing tips Manage your highlights and shadows. The biggest thing to be mindful of when processing images like these is to manage the dynamic range of your highlights and shadows. I often take advantage of my RAW file’s ability to bring down highlights and lift shadows where it is needed. If I’ve done my job in exposing so that I haven’t blown important areas of my subject, than my highlights and shadows are usually easier to manage. My favorite tools are the highlight and shadow sliders, the tone curve and the adjustment brush in Lightroom and levels and dodge/burn in Photoshop. I use these to brighten faces where they fall into shadow and bring down highlights that are close to blown. Consider a matte. This might be a matter of style, but I often apply a subtle matte to images shot in full sun. It can soften distracting highlights and harsh shadows so that our attention remains on the beauty of the day and our subject. Make your colors pop. Sunny days at the beach naturally contain vivid colors. There is nothing like brilliant blue sky and candy-colored sand pails and swimsuits. Help them along by adding some subtle vibrancy or saturation in post processing - but watch the colors to make sure they don’t go out of gamut and lose detail, something that is easy to do, especially with colors like red or pink.