Working With Models and Water

During the late Spring and into early Fall, we all like to enjoy the water and like seagulls we flock to the nearest and largest body of water during our free time. Whether it’s a pool, lake, or beach, water is nature’s way of cooling us off quickly, relaxing us, especially during the summer and the retail industry makes billions each year on everything from swimsuits to snorkel fins—most sold through catalogs that feature beautiful bikini-clad models.

Photographers who capture these images work under the same conditions as all people with digital cameras taking pictures of their family near or around water—reflected light from the sky, water, sand and even from concrete around the edges of a pool. Anything on the white side of the tonal scale will reflect light with great intensity.

It’s this reflected light, usually a much sweeter light than direct, overhead sunlight and it is either your friend or foe. The enemy in it will cause your camera meter system to go crazy at times as this internal metering system is often fooled by all this reflected light and will give you false readings, usually resulting in underexposed images. To help prevent this, many photographers will set their camera under/over exposure compensation dial/buttons to overexpose the image by at least one F/stop, sometimes up to two F/stops, depending on the camera make and model and the type of metering system it incorporates.

But digital cameras can come to your rescue under these working conditions where film cameras could not because of their histogram display capabilities. Digital cameras allow you adjust your exposure on the fly, if you understand that a digital camera’s histogram is essentially the fingerprint of the image captured, from the scene to the subject.

It’s even easier if you trust your LCD screen, like I trust the screens on my Olympus E-1, E-Volt E-500 or my Leica R-9 with the Leica DIGITAL-MODUL-R back. With great cameras you trust and have built confidence you’ll learn to see your results right away and can make minor adjustments on your exposure compensation scale if you’re shooting in an auto-exposure mode, or if you shoot manual like I do, you’ll make the appropriate adjusts on the fly via the shutter-speed or aperture dial.

No one purposely wants to overexpose their digital images, but when the camera is in the auto-exposure mode and you use the over and under exposure compensation dial, think of this method as a “recalibration” of the camera’s thought process. The camera “thinks” that you want to overexpose the image and will allow itself to open up the aperture or increase the shutter speed to achieve that look, when in reality the camera is fooled by so much reflected light by the water, sand, concrete or other reflective materials, that this method simply is correcting for all this multiplied and intense, reflected light not normally found in most scenes. The camera is logically calibrated to normal scenes in it’s metering software. I like to think of as putting the sunglasses on my camera so it quits squinting.

Speaking of squinting, all this reflected light also creates squinting from your models and no different than darker than normal subjects, photographers photographing models don’t like models with closed eyes. One method some photographers use to reduce the squint is to take a black tulle cloth, a cloth similar to sheer material that you can purchase at your local retail super store’s fabric section for a few dollars. Depending on the size of your reflectors, this should cost less than ten dollars.

There are several methods in creating successful photographs with water laden locations. Adjusting or compensating with the camera meter is one technique, obviously using a hand-held spot meter provides more accuracy, but even understanding the sunny-sixteen rule will work just as effectively, especially if you know how to read a histogram and how it relates to the actual image.

Another technique is to use the reflective light as your main light source. Look at the angle of the sun, see how it reflects off the various surfaces, find an open-shade area for your model and position her so this reflective light illuminates your subject. Keep in mind, normally, especially during the more hotter times of the day when light is harsh, reflected light is less intense than the originating light source, thus if you have your model with the background behind her as open sky, beach or pool, chances are you’ll get and “over-lit” or over-exposed background. An easy solution, try and position your subject where the background is darker, such as dark green foliage or the side of a cabana bath or dark structure.

Using long tele-photo lenses will help diminish these bright backgrounds too, this is why most photographers that capture summer fun scenes with bikini models will use fill-flash techniques, some, like myself, will prefer to over-power the sun with flash. Over powering the sun with flash is simple, turn up the volume or light intensity of your flash unit so the flash is brighter than all the ambient light in the scene. As an example, if the scene measures 1/125 at F/16 (sunny sixteen rule), then turn up the power on your flash to provide the proper light for an F/22 exposure or more. Each F/stop of increased light output from your flash will darken your background, thus it provides for more emphasis on your model.

Like most water-filled images from the warmer months, many amateur photographers will experience darker than normal people in their photos, some scratch their heads in anger, often blaming their cameras when in fact, just making a few simple changes on a camera will make your subjects look brighter. Understanding how your camera works for you and how the elements around your scene can have an effect on your final images may someday determine if you’ll be photographing bikini-clad models with success, master it and that success may pay off with highly-paid assignments from the billon dollar fun-in-the-sun industry.