Fun at the beach…

The weather has been incredibly warm here for the last couple of days. The beaches are completely overfull and temperatures were in the thirties (Celsius) for a while. At some point it was estimated that about half of the country was close to the waterfront… That would be roughly 8 million people… While I am writing this I am thinking I must have heard this wrong. 8 million people on the beach sounds a bit too much…! Whatever the case it was total madness. Ofcourse I was the lucky girl who – on the two hottest days of the year – I had to do two weddings. One on thursday and one on friday and man, was it hot… With any wedding it involves a lot of running around for me and in this case the sweat was literally running down my back. Still better then having a rainy day on your wedding right?

The day before those two weddings we had been planning a shoot with Marcia, a model I have worked with on a regular basis, on the beach. We had been planning to do a beachshoot forever, I think we started talking about it a year ago, but the first appointment had to be cancelled due to torrential rains and so we were glad that the weather predicted sunny skies for the wednesday we had planned the shoot.

We were all looking forward to it. Being besides the water when it’s hot is always better then being indoors right? In total we were with 5 people, so we headed to the beach, but getting there was a nightmare. Traffic was bad and getting a parkingspace took us almost an hour and even then we had to walk for about half an hour to get to the beach. Apart from ourselves we also had to carry the necessary gear, but hey, we got there eventually. A little later then planned but we still had plenty of time. The idea was to start shooting around 4 pm as the light would be better then. That meant we had time to do a lunch together, talk about what we wanted to do and put on the makeup. So far, so good. It was incredibly sunny and I had brought a Sunbounce screen instead of regular studiolights (that would have been disaster on a very crowded beach, not to mention the sand) which would have worked fine….

As soon as we were ready to start shooting the sun disappeared!! Believe it or not! You can see from the photos that there was no sunshine. Still hot enough, but I was thinking of doing some special shots where strong sunlight was essential, but no, the sun decided that it had done enough work for that day and refused to come out at all! In terms of light, it was still fine really. I used my regular flash to add a little bit of fill in light where needed as I always shoot into the sun. Camera was on manual most of the time. Aperture priority works well, but in this case it got a bit confused due to the dark skin of Marcia and the bright background. Shooting on manual meant that I didn’t have to worry constantly about readjusting the light.

Despite the lack of sunlight we still had a lot of fun. It’s always funny how people react when you’re doing a photoshoot in a public place. Little kids wanted to pose as well, so we have a  few very cute shots with Marcia and a few little girls, which I obviously cannot post here due to privacy reasons, but they are adorable. Then you have guys that feel the need to try and impress Marcia, people that are interested in my camera (which ofcourse looks very impressive! haha.. ), people that want to know for which magazine we were shooting (none, this was purely for our own fun really) etc. etc. Beachbar De Tropen (Egmond aan Zee) was kind enough to allow us to stay there for the entire afternoon and part of the evening (well, we did eat and drink more then enough) which saves us having to take all our stuff with us all the time while shooting. All in all it was a very fun day with some good shots as well.

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Tagged as: beach, marcia, model, Photography