Saturday Photoshoot at the beach

This past Saturday's photoshoot was with Bodyfitt, a model who contacted me through ModelMayhem. Kahulani was our makeup artist for this shoot, which we did at Poolenalena Beach in Wailea.

In order to make use of the best light, we got an early start at 7:00am.


One of the first shots we attempted was to have the water flowing around the model. This is normally a shot I would do on an overcast day, but I wanted to experiment with this idea on a sunny day because the colors would pop more.

To make the water blur I needed to use a slow shutter speed, which was difficult because of the bright sunlight. In order to compensate for that, I set the camera to the lowest ISO possible and the smallest aperture possible. In this case it was ISO 100 and f 22. I also added a ND filter to the front of the lens to further reduce the amount of light coming into the camera so I could use a slower shutter speed. Even with this, the best (slowest) speed I could get was about 1/2 a second.

It was a little difficult getting the timing of the waves right. I would like to try something like this again in the future at a different location.

Our next setup was on the lava rocks. Our model switched to a gold colored wrap to contrast with the blue sky. Fill lighting was an AB800 with a beauty dish at about 3/4 power.


I used a polarizing filter to deepen the colors of the ocean and the sky.


Bodyfitt is a personal trainer and has a very muscular and toned physique. One of the things she wanted out of the shoot was a more soft look. For this next shot, we had her lie down in the surf and draped the blue fabric around her. To help with the soft look, I backed up far away and used a 70-200 lens @ f2.8 to give me a shallow depth of field. To further accentuate the shallow depth of field, I had the camera very low, almost resting on top of the sand.

This is one of my favorite images from that shoot.


One of the ideas we had for this shoot was inspired by the image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around in the surf from the movie "From Here to Eternity". We concluded our photoshoot with our take on the classic movie scene.