Before I left Kerry on Monday to return to the real world in Dublin there was time for a visit to Derrynane, and a bit of a lazy afternoon spent on the beach. For me it was a chance to practice some landscape and portrait photography in non-ideal light conditions. While it was a lovely day, it was 3pm and the sun was high in relatively clear sky, making for harsh light and hard shadows.
Myself and Aoife shared an apartment at the weekend with Conor and Helen for Fiona and John’s wedding, and as I finished taking a few landscape and seascape shots from the graveyard that overlooks Derrynane strand, I spotted them sitting on some grass-covered rocks further up the beach.
I had been taking photographs in the cemetery with Mike and so when we reached the spot where Conor and Helen were enjoying some sunshine I roped him in as a “voice-activated lightstand” to help me take a portrait using some simple but effective off-camera lighting.
The technique here is pure Joe McNally or David Hobby – take a small flash, move it off the camera, warm it up a little with a tungsten gel, soften it a little with a Lumiquest Softbox III, balance it with the available sunlight by controlling shutter speed, aperture, ISO, flash power and flash position, and angle it so that it is lighting against the sun, bringing some light back into the harsh shadows from the sun.
Having gelled the flash and mounted the mini-softbox on it using velcro which I have stuck to the flash permanently, I gave it to Mike to hold at camera right, with the body twisted so that the infra-red sensor pointed towards the camera. I set it on full power as that sunlight was bright, and I needed as much punch as I could get from the flash. I fired a few test shots, playing with the aperture and, via Mike, the flash position, until I got the look I was after – an underexposed background (achieved by setting the camera in aperture priority mode and dialling in a -1.7 stop exposure compensation value) with the flash bringing Conor and Helen’s smiling faces back to a good exposure. Incidentally the setup is almost identical to the one I used for the rose bush in Islandbridge a week earlier, except this time I’m not trying to kill the ambient light, but work with it.
Conor and Helen found it all very amusing, helped along by some witty comments by Mike, which allowed me to get this natural shot of the two of them.
I’ll definitely take more of these sorts of portraits in the future – the technique is quick and easy, and if you get the balance between the flash and the avaible light correct the results stand out from other available light portraits at the same time of day. You can’t go wrong with that background either, and in fact the shot almost has the look of one taken against a backdrop or a green screen with the mountains and sea added in later. But it was taken at 3pm on a bright sunny day on a beach in Kerry, using artificial light to complement the available light, and to sculpt it into something more usable.
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