Clevedon Beach Shoot 21st May

We arrived around 6.30pm and the promised sunny evening had turned into a mucky grey one with quite a breeze whipping up. We had gathered to shoot a few brave models with the famous pier as a backdrop but with the weather and as only two models had actually shown up we had to improvise.

Initially I opted to leave out shooting a model and decided to concentrate on shooting the Pier with a long exposure to take the water to a misty glow and smooth the sky to a watercolor streaky effect. The Pier shot is held back from this blog as I will be using it for part of assignment one.

So once I had finished with the pier I walked to have a chat with one of the photographers who had been observing the shoots across the beach and at this point a model came over and sat to wait between calls. So, why not I asked, fancy a few quick shots just using the available light? Yeh she replies, so we grab just a few minutes.

The light was very low, many would have not even bothered, the other togs present were all using portable off camera flash. But..this is a challenge! I decided to use my 85mm f1.4 portrait lens which is manual focus. I set the white balance to overcast, cranked the ISO up to 800 and 1600 respectively and just shot. The wide aperture and the higher ISO took care of the low light and we just used what slithers of sheen through the clouds we could. The angle of the models face was really critical here to ensure we lit her well enough and used it to shape her face. This was a slow shoot, each shot was carefully considered and composed, in around 5 to ten minutes I took around 10 shots.