Using Sexy Light On The Beach

Behind The Scene Look: How I Got That Shot

The image you see below was created as part of an engagement session. It was towards the end of shoot when we were at a beach and sun had already gone down. The park visiting hours were already over and there was a cop driving everyone out. And it was cold, the chill factor in the wind was sending shivers down our spines. We quickly grabbed couple of shots and drove out of the park.

This shot was taken with the help of an off camera flash, Nikon SB900 inside a Lastolite 24″x24″ softbox, triggered with my trusted Pocket Wizards. The following is a lighting diagram showing the set up for this shoot.

The flash had a full cut CTO (color temperature orange) gel on it. I wanted to give the feel for the post dusk bluish night sky. So I turned my camera to tungsten white balance. This gives the blue tint to the whole image. To compensate the blue tone on the subjects and bring the skin color back to normal yellow/orange tones, the flash had the orange gel on it. The full cut CTO gel fully compensates for the tungsten white balance.

Another challenge was that we required the light to be very close to the couple and we wanted wide angle shot to include more of the background for context. So the assistant was in the picture.

The Photoshop Work

To fix that we took two shots, one with assistant lighting the couple and in the shot. Before the second shot, the assistant ran out of frame and switched off the light. So the second shot was taken with the couple without any light. Once we take these two shots it is very easy to do a composite in Photoshop:

1. Open both the images in Photoshop as layers, with the image with assistant as the top layer.

2. Auto align layers (Edit –> Auto-Align). When we don't use a tripod there is always a slight movement of the camera and the frame changes. To compensate for that, we have to align the layers.

3. Once the layers are aligned, select the top layer and use layer mask to mask out the assistant. Now we are using everything else from this layer except area where assistant was. That area is picked up from the layer beneath.

4. Make other changes as required.

And, voilá, we have our final image. Do you have any questions? Feel free to ask below!