I didn’t manage to make as many photography trips to the beach this year as normal, or as many as I would have liked, but here is one of them and I thought I’d better blog it now before summer seems to distant a memory.
This is Emily-Jayne and one of this year’s Miss Northern Ireland contestants. Emily-Jayne’s absolute passion in life is horses and Polocorsse in particular, and she told of how trips to the beach for her are usually involving horses and Polocrosse.
Make-up by Catherine.
Here’s a few images from the afternoon…
Consistent with my summer experimentation into using hard and direct sunlight, this was a direct sun-only photo.
It would be normal to head for a shaded area in such brutal sunlight, but here my idea was to face Emily-Jayne almost directly into the sunlight.
The shadows are hard, but using the sun like this is no different to me than using a hard, direct flash which seems to be so fashionable. Same result but no flash required, just using the sun. It’s free too 🙂
Exactly the same as previously with direct sunlight but this time I posed Emily-Jayne with her back to the large rocks. I love the hard chin shadow!
Emily-Jayne had said she really liked the sunset beach pictures I’d did previously, so this was an attempt to ‘cheat the light’ and artificially create a sunset look much earlier in the evening.
There simply wasn’t as much colour and detail visible in the sky at the time, but by massively under exposing in the camera it meant the sky colours came out nicely. The trade off was it then became a huge ask of the flash to output nearly enough power to light Emily-Jayne, who would have been a complete silhouette otherwise.
So not a true sunset shot in the end, but given that this was an extremely bright, into the sun shot at the time with little or no colour visible in the sky and the beach virtually bleached out, I think it worked out well in the end 🙂
