I was shooting with a Canon EOS 50D and 16-35, 24-70 and 70-200 f2.8 L lenses. The lighting was a Lumedyne 200 watt/second pack and Signature head triggered with a pair of Pocket Wizards. The back wall of the covered area was painted with a very pale cream/lemon colour so I decided to bounce the flash off of it.

I mentioned above that the effect is similar to a large soft box and the area of wall illuminated by the flash was about four square metres (a little over ten square feet) which is a big soft light by anyone's standard.

Looking at the brilliant LCD on the back of the camera after a couple of test shots, it was obvious that the colour of the wall was a little more yellow than was apparent to the naked eye. I shot a frame with a piece of white paper in the man's hand so that I could do a custom white balance. The net effect of this was to send the daylight behind them and any areas lit by the ambient a little blue - not an unpleasant effect.It was clear that they were enjoying being photographed and were happy to indulge my usual technique of playing around with lenses, compositions, exposures and lighting positions.

I was trying to shoot with a wide lens under the cover and the shot that you see above was taken with my 16-35 f2.8L right at the 16mm end. I usually try to shoot at 200 ISO and the meter reading for the sand and sea behind the couple was 1/125th of a second at f5.6. I altered the output on the flash to give me f5.6 on the couple and changed the shutter speed to 1/180th to marginally underexpose the background. The available light reading on the couple would have been 1/30th at f5.6 so they were lit exclusively by the flash. I shot a lot of different images with similar compositions before changing over to a 70-200 f2.8L IS lens.

I moved my subjects so that they were leaning in the entrance just as the light outside was getting a bit better. By the time I shot the image below the shutter speed was up to 1/250th of a second but not really underexposing at all.

The ambient light was starting to affect the man's head and you can see that he has a gentle blue highlight on top of his head. The light balance was just right for about two or three minutes before the ambient became brighter and I had to increase the power on the flash to maintain the balance.

After a few dozen frames we moved back onto the beach where we shot several more ideas. The magazine eventually ran a picture shot on the beach as the day turned brighter and it came towards midday. In the two pictures shown above I am looking almost due south where the midday sun would be. The second picture was taken only 45 minutes before noon and so the reasonably heavy cloud was a real help to make this picture work.

The whole shoot took a little over an hour and the edit took about the same amount of time before I sent the magazine around forty pictures.

© Neil Turner January 2009