Another trip to Margate for more vintage fashion photography with the wonderful Queen of Vintage Madam Popoff.
One of the things I normally love about Margate is the light. Turner certainly knew his stuff. However today was not one of those days. The sun was high and harsh with not a cloud in the sky.
I adopted my lazy approach, two Nikon D750 bodies one with my trusty 70-200 VR2 and the other with one of my other lenses the 17-35 2.8D. On this body I had a flash and also added an ND filter to the lens. On this occasion, no primes, reflectors or off camera flash.
When shooting in really bright sun I use some fairly simple strategies. The first has got to be find open shade, basically shade where you can see the sky. I was lucky as there was a slipway down to the beach which provided some shade but with careful positioning I could find a sweet spot where the sunlight hit the top of Abi's head providing a nice separation and giving the image another dimension. The other is backlight with or without fill and of course full sun - using it as your key light.
Shade but with the sun hitting the top/back of Abi's head.
Here are a couple just using open shade, I like the blue hues in the shadows.
A wide shot using on camera flash - yes on camera flash!
Open shade but the sun is lighting the background.
Back to the slipway again where the sun has moved round a little. As a side note we couldn't use the optimum position here as a big dog had dumped in the sweet spot!
Very wide (17mm) with Abi's head blocking the sun and my poor little flash doing its best to provide some fill.
A couple at around 35mm using direct sun as the key light.
The rest are just in shade looking for nice backgrounds.
All of these images were shot in RAW and edited in Adobe Lightroom CC. On this occasion I used a tweaked VSCO preset.