Beach Photography Tips

We all love the beach, but getting a decent photograph from your day at the beach can be a little tricky and sometimes frustrating. Here are a few quick tips on beach photography that should help you improve your images.

1.   Timing – Be late or be early - If your into “landscape” photography, this is the best advise for you. The “golden hour” gives you the most dramatic images ever produced. Golden Hour refers to the couple hours around sunrise or sunset. Every other regular Joe, enjoys the beach all day round. SO what do you do then? On to tip two.

2.   Know The Limitations of Auto – If you’re shooting in auto mode at the beach in the bright sun, your camera will probably be   under-exposing your images. If you’re having problems with the auto setting, then switch to manual or tone of the pre configured modes on your point and shoot camera. Maybe Bright, Outdoor or Beach.

3.   Mind Your Exposure Settings – A beach during the day is really really bright. When shooting with an SLR, in such bright conditions, you’re going to need a low ISO setting (100 - 400) in combination with a narrow aperture (somewhere between (f14 and f22) with a fast shutter speed.

4.   Use Fill Flash - When photographing people at the beach, portraits or groups and it’s bright you’ll find that they will almost always have shadows on their face, often cast by hats, glasses, noses, position of the sun etc. Switch on your flash and force it to fire when shooting in these situations and you’ll find the shadows may be eliminated and your actual subject is well exposed. As a rule try shooting with the sun on your subject instead of behind it, unless your trying to capture a silhouette image.

5.   Look for interesting Focal points – “All my beach images look the same, I don’t bother carrying my camera to the beach anymore”. This is what a friend once said to me. I think that’s really sad. Our twin island republic has excellent beaches with many photographic opportunities if you have the ability to look beyond the cliche shots.

So go out to the beach this weekend or right not for that matter. Try our tips, practice what you learned, experiment, experiment, experiment, but most of all have fun, and keep capturing those memories.

All Images Copyrighted © 2013 Razor Digital