X-T1 at the Beach

One of the great things about a weather-sealed camera – you can take it to the beach with minimal worries.

So I packed the X-T1, the 56mm and 23mm lenses, and headed to La Jolla CA.

First up, some daylight only portraits with the 56mm – using a concrete pillar as a reflector to bounce daylight into the face, and soften all those shadows and lines.

(Click on any image for a larger version)

The 56mm is so clean wide open – producing a wonderful graduation to out of focus, and soft and smooth bokeh.

One eye sharp is not a traditional portrait style, but I like the look in this case. I placed the AF box over the eye to ensure it was sharp. Focus and recompose is not a good idea at these wide apertures. 56mm Lens.

Going high-key by opening up the exposure +2.33 EV, and treating the RAW file with NIK SilverFX. Fuji 56mm Lens.

Adding a silver reflector and stopping down the lens, makes the image pop. 56mm Lens.

Swap the reflector out for the Elinchrom Quadra head, shot through a translucent umbrella, gives more control over the lighting. 56mm Lens.

Now that we have our own ‘mini Sun’ – we can venture out into the sunlight, making sure the the model is facing away from the sun, and is lit by our Quadra head. 56mm Lens.

Taking care to keep the hot-spots from the sunlight away from the features, and relying on manually metered fill flash. The flash also adds a nice catchlight in the eyes. Fuji 56mm Lens.

More Quadra fill flash – with the brolly lowered to illuminate the model – the translucent shoot-through provides a clean fill, with good image punch. The Quadra head is triggered wirelessly, and the camera is on full manual at ISO200, with a 4 stop ND filter fitted to keep the shutter speed below he max flash sync speed. 56mm Lens.

Back to the concrete pier pillars, for a flash lit, and cross processed portrait shot. The sun is proving a nice catchlight from the right of frame. 56mm Lens.

We spotted a surfer getting his board ready for the waves – Mikah smiled and asked nicely, and the board was ours for a few minutes, and the surfer-girl shot was in the can. Fuji 56mm Lens.

With the sun getting low, we do a few ‘walk to camera’ shots to get some movement into the shot – the Quadra provides fill against he setting sun. Fuji 23mm Lens.

Perfect light for 30 seconds, as the sun sinks into a fog bank. There’s a golden glow off of the wet sand. I get soaked sitting in the surf line, shooting from a low viewpoint! We go wide with the Fuji 23mm Lens.

Dragging the shutter, we get flash fill (Controlled by aperture), and ambient fill (controlled by shutter speed). Fuji 23mm Lens.

The light is almost gone from the sky – but it does make for rich saturated blues as a backdrop. 23mm lens again, with Quadra as fill.

One more take from the day – Quadra fill, 23mm lens to get the architecture in frame – PP in NIK SilverFX.

The full image set, with EXIF, can be found here

Thank you to my wonderful model – Mikah Sullivan