At the beach, natural and off camera lighting

Mark1616

I managed to convince my wife to come out for a shooting session at the beach this evening.

I shot these with the 5DmkII, the first are all natural light and the sunset ones are with a 580EXII off camera left triggered with the 580EX. Lens was the 70-200mm f2.8 which was a bit long for the last shot but with all the sand I didn't feel like changing over and couldn't back up due to a wall.

Please give any CC possible as I still have a long way to go at this but feel I'm making some progress.

1


2


3


4


5

Mark1616

I know I'm new and not great, but I really would appreciate some input so I can raise my game. Anyone able to help?

Photogbiker

Couple thoughts...
...from another amateur.

Very nice natural light. In #1 a reflector camera right might have been nice to fill a bit on her left cheek. Not a full fill, just knock down the ratio a bit.

2 is great. I imagine the color balance is accurate, but might be hard to believe for some. I might have tilted her head the opposite way.

Really like #4. might have gone a bit lower on flash to get closer to the ambient light. You still want the subject to stand out and be lit better than ambient, but maybe not this much. #3 is similar, but the shadow going opposite of the sunset is distracting.

#5 was a good thought, but getting too late and too dark. Flash had to power too much and there is too much light on sand. Point flash up in future attempt to light only the model. Keeps sand a bit darker and any spill over the top of model goes off to infinity with no affect.

Very nice shots to learn from and a couple keepers to play with in post a bit. Shoot RAW too (don't know if you were) and you can play with some exposure latitude in pp work.

Hurme

Hello there,

I'll try to say something useful although you've probably spotted same things yourself.

First of all her expression is identical in all the photos. It might be she was smiling for real but that looks bit too much like a trained smile for me and seeing it again and again in each photo just reinforces that feeling. Just keeping your face as it is and being relaxed works, or a tiny hint of a smile or some real laughter that doesn't look so practiced.

I like the lighting in the first two photos. After that the ambient just goes down under. The artificial lighting still works in 4 as you don't see the immediate surrounding around her. But in 3 and 5 it starts to look bit weird. As was said above some fill in the shadow side would have done wonders, although considering how low the ambient light is you'd need to have been more aware of it and used it in your advantage somehow, now it became your weakness.

Of course it's easy to say these things in hindsight. I know too well how hard it is to focus on all this stuff while doing the actualy shoot.