More fill flash examples

[KmH]

Check these shots made in direct sunlight at the beach.

The beach is a notorious location because you not only have the direct sunlight, you also have sunlight reflecting off the water and the sand.

Key West photos. Before and after Photoshop. «Photo retouching in Photoshop

 

[jowensphoto]

I'm going to start following that blog, thanks for posting :thumbup:

I'm still working on my PP but don't currently have the $ for photoshop so I use GIMP. Any (good) tutorials you know of that could help me with this sort of editing?

 

[Derrel]

Check these shots made in direct sunlight at the beach.

The beach is a notorious location because you not only have the direct sunlight, you also have sunlight reflecting off the water and the sand.

And, let's also look at the other side of the coin----

Because of all the water and sand that acts as a truly massive reflector, the beach is often an area where one can skip fill flash because the water and the sand provide the equivalent of reflector fill. If people are wearing sunglasses, the look of natural light at the beach can be extremely beautiful. Shadows delineate shapes and show size,and volume of objects; crude fill-flash can lighten the shadows up so much that subjects lack dimensionality. It's a balancing act. With the infinite depth of field one is forced into with "normal" bright-light beach exposures, such as 1/200 second at f/16 at ISO 200, with a crop-body camera, virtually every shot not made with High Speed Sync or Focal Plane Sync will have sharpness from the foreground and extending out to infinity with most all full-length figure shots, regardless of lens focal length. I do not think of the beach as "a notorious location", but then I do not live in Iowa either.

If you have a choice between using a flash and a reflector or a scrim in a beach situation, the better results almost always come from the natural, continuous light modified with a reflector or scrim, or combination of those two modifiers. Especially from those with less that 20 years' worth of experience...fill flash with really slow-speed transparency film and with a lead shutter camera is one thing; when you have an ISO 200 d-slr with a top sync speed of 1/200 or 1/160 second, you really need to bone up on the way your camera shoots HSS or FP Synch flash if you wish to exercise any type of control over your backgrounds.