Ahhhh yes photographing a beautiful fashion model on the beach and getting paid for it.  The ultimate dream for most beginning photographers.  I mean come on, you’re at a beautiful beach, warm sun and beautiful women right in front of you.    Well yes that is awesome.  So when I got the call from my client I was stoked UNTIL she said she wants to shoot at night.  My mind raced with every possible problem that I would face which of course the client has no clue about  because that isn’t their job to know what problems could arise.

So we have fourteen swimsuits to photograph and five different locations at Sycamore Cove up in Ventura County.  Call time was 8pm and we would shoot until 3:30am !  Ok so yes it is summer here in Los Angeles but at night especially the later it gets on the beach the temperature drops very low.  I don’t know what the temp was exactly but it was friggin cold !

Yes the model was wearing pretty much nothing, the bikini’s are VERY small but I needed my fingers to work and needed my mind to function lol.  I wore a skull cap to keep my bald head warm and a couple of sweatshirts.

Ok so enough of my bitching.  Shooting on the beach during the day is a challenge but at night it is even more challenging. We had to calculate what night and time low tide would be and schedule the shoot accordingly. We got lucky as it was a full moon so we weren’t working in pitch blackness but it was dark.  Flashlights were a must.  I had two assistants, make up, hair etc. the whole shabang.

Now of course there is no electricity down on the beach so we rented a Profoto 7B pack, two heads and some grids.  My key light had a large 4 x 6 foot Pro Foto soft box coming from camera left and up high angled down a bit. My f stop was f/8.  The light you see on the rocks behind our model  was bare bulb with the standard reflector attached and my first assistant hand held it at just the right spot.  The tide would come in and sometimes the water was too high so we had to sit there and wait until I decided was the perfect time to pull the trigger.  You can’t tell but Morgan our model was freezing her ass off .  To make matters worse this was around 2:30 am !   It was VERY VERY cold.  So here she is not moving a muscle waiting for me to fire the shot.  This shoot was definitely a challenge.  You know what’s cool ? You can’t even tell how difficult it was because the final image looks like it was a breeze.  But that is what separates the men from the boys    I would love to get some questions and comments on this post.  There is much more info I have to offer.  How in the world did I lock focus ?  But I want you guys to ask and I also want you to think about not just the technical aspects of the shoot but the psychology and how as a photographer I had to keep my model feeling beautiful even though she was freezing and wet.

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Tags: catalog photography, fashion, fashion models, jason christopher los angeles, key light, lighting, modeling, night photography, photographing a beautiful fashion model, photographing models at night on the beach, photography at night, Photography Lighting Techniques, Shooting on the beach
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