Family portraits on the beach?

Question

Any suggestions as to what type of settings I should be using on my Digital Rebel XT? I'm trying to venture away from the automatic settings and I don't want to be experimenting on the day of the pictures and risk loosing light since we'll be shooting close to sunset.

Answer 1

Shooting on the beach is hard. A few tips for doing this with the rebel.

-- Shoot raw, add +1/3 to +2/3 EV (some positive exposure compensation, put your rebel in AV mode and meter off the white clothes if they are wearing white or off their skin if they are wearing darker colors (to do this - point the center of your lens at the area you want to meter and then half press and hold the shutter button while you recompose the shot). The positive exposure compensation will help you properly expose the subjects, since at the beach, the meter can be fooled by all the lightness of the background causing your subject to be dark. For exposure - for a family F4 or 5.6 would be good so that you can focus on the subjects but not worry much about depth of field being shallow. For these shots - you can use AV mode. Just make sure your ISO is high enough to support the aperture you set - if you need to - just raise the ISO a bit. On the rebel, you can get up to 400 with no real worries about noise and even above that, it can be corrected.

-- You should also take along a flash and use it for at least some of the the shots (as the sun really starts to go down - you will get some nice stuff this way). You can try using the built in flash, but an external flash will work much better. To properly use the flash for a shot like this, you are going for fill flash, so to do this, do the following:

1. Set your flash on ETTL
2. Set your camera on manual
3. Again - using an aperture of around F4, adjust the shutter speed until the exposure is just about right, maybe slightly underexposed (this will show in your viewfinder on the right side - you want the little green bar right at the middle or just below - don't overexpose - you really want a slight underexposure)

The above steps wil cause the photo to be mainly lit by ambient light but will cause the subject to be bathed in just a little bit of flash. If you do it right - they will be nicely exposed but it will be hard to tell a flash was used. Here's an example from the beach:

http://www.olphoto.net/photos/136851629-L.jpg

Answer 2

Favor your f/8 aperture for sharpness, use a longer focal length with a tripod...you should be able to use ISO 100 or 200 for less noise. Have the sunset 'paint' your subject with its golden light (have them looking into the general direction of the sunset light source.) Don't be tempted to include the actual (bright) sunset into your picture or it will blow out your dynamic range. Check your histogram after the shot, make sure the subject's curve is hugged up to the right, yet not too far to the right that it begins to clip off.
Shoot in RAW and err (or bracket) on the side of slight overexposure (because in RAW, you can bring back one stop of overexposure.) Avoid underexposed shots as those will look noisy and unsaturated if you try to correct them. Watch out for backlit situations (bright objects or light sources coming from behing the subject.)
If you have nice cumulus clouds in the background, you might want to consider using a polarizer, to make those clouds 'pop' out.
Use your lens hood if you have one...this will improve your contrast.
But if you must include the sunset into your photo, you will need a powerful flash, and perhaps a graduated neutral density filter.
When composing, be mindful of shadows that the subjects might be casting onto each other...shadows are very pronounced at this time of day.
Finally, be VERY careful with sand on your equipment...sand is one of the camera's worst enemy.

Answer 3

If you were shooting slide film, you would want to open the aperature a half stop in beach or snow scenes that are very bright. the reason being the light meter averages a scene to a medium grey when it should be nearly white. print film and digital should need no correction as the final brightness is determined in the print.