Shooting at the Beach

It's easier than you think to take glam-orous beach photos of your favorite young female. Yes, equipment and technique are important, but posing is the key.

Posing. First determine your sub-ject's physical strengths and weak-nesses. How can you position the body to hide the weaknesses and highlight the strengths? That's posing. Start with the body, toes up. Does the lady have big feet? Have her hide one foot behind the other or keep them flat on the sand. Broad hips? Shoot her sitting, leaning into the cam-era, with her hips as far from the lens as possible. Almost no hips? Turn her in profile so the curving lines of the back and backside create shape. Is she short? Place the camera low to make her appear taller. Does she have complexion problems? Overexpose by a half stop to lighten her skin. Don't be intimidated by the process of coldly analyzing a warm body. There are lots of places to go for help: maga-zines, ads, billboards. Study them. Bring tear-outs to the beach as guides.

Lighting. The best illumination for glamour, whether in the studio or surf-side, is soft and frontal. Commonly called beauty light, it should come from directly above and behind your camera and strike the subject's face and figure straight on, creating only one shadow: a tiny, butterfly-shaped "}" under the nose. Early or late in the day, the sun makes an acceptable beauty light.

Controlling squint. The problem with the sun is that when your model looks toward it, she'll squint. Prevent "sliver" eyes by placing a 3x3-foot square of black cardboard or cloth at eye level, just out of the camera's view and as close to your subject as possi-ble. (Don't let it block the sunlight from striking her, however.) Tell her to look at the cardboard.

Backlighting. Use the sun as a backlight. Move your subject around so the sun is behind her. To illuminate her front, use a reflector (see "Reflectors") to catch the sunlight and bounce it back onto her face and figure.

Fill flash. You can also use flash to bounce light onto your subject in back-lit situations. If you've got a reasonably powerful through-the-lens, dedicated flash for your SLR, use it (built-in flash units are usually too weak). No dedi-cated flash? Use traditional guide-number calculations for setting fill flash. Find your shooting aperture by dividing the subject distance into the flash's guide number; then set the shutter speed for that aperture as recom-mended by a meter reading of the ambient light. If the meter suggests a shutter speed that's higher than your camera's top flash-synch speed, use a slower film.

The camera. Virtually any 35mm SLR will do, but you must protect it from destructive sand and salt spray by (at least) encasing it in a plastic bag when not in use.

Lenses. While you can use a 100mm or 105mm lens, the experts recom-mend longer. A 70-210mm zoom should do nicely, and allows you to adjust the image size without changing lenses if you must change your shoot-ing distance to control manual fill-flash. But if you have longer optics, bring them.

Tripods. With shutter speeds slower than 1/200 sec or so, use a tripod to improve your chances of getting sharp pictures. It, too, is vulnerable, so pro-tect its lower extremities with leggings of plastic trash-can liners.

Reflectors. Though light sand can act as a natural reflector, the contrast of beach subjects is often very high. So its a good idea to carry a collapsi-ble reflector with you to fill shadows, and thus reduce contrast. Reflectors with gold and or silver surfaces also let you control the color and quality of the fill light.