Earlier in the year, I (Ben) shot a second batch of photographs for my long-running "Inflate-Deflate" project, taking the pics on the beach in Wales. Generally the pics were successful, but during the edit I did regret I'd used the backup camera instead of the rather superior newer DSLR we bought last year, just because the newer camera has a noticeable improvement in sharpness with night shoots. I hadn't had much opportunity to try a new shoot over the summer due to other commitments and the short nights (I'm getting rather tired of doing photoshoots at 1am), but a trip to Wales in late Autumn seemed to offer some chances for pics.
Anyway, I recently acquired these; definitely at the higher-end of the summertoys market, these Sunnylife floats caught my eye earlier in the year in a shop window in Liverpool. They are very expensive at RRP, but also very good quality, by far the best quality of toys used in any of these shoots. They are also not plastered in warning labels and health and safety information, which made for a pleasant change compared to some of the other props bought in the last couple of years. I managed to get these two floats very cheap in an end of summer sale.
Lighting for this time (learning from the experience of the earlier shoot) would be these, to allow the rings to be lit all the way around. The long LED lights have been bought for a miniatures shoot, but would come in useful here. I chose to leave them in their plastic wrapping from the box, as it would provide a degree of damp-proofing on the wet sand. The inspection light was more for setting up the shots, as if anything it is a bit too efficiently bright for the shoot.
Compared to the previous two shoots, there was no drama getting to the location, beyond the fact it was pissing it down. It was very quiet, being a wet weekend in November, but the benefit of the clocks moving, and not having to worry about feeding The Childs (being as they were visiting Chateau Grandparents), was that I was on location by 6:20 pm; no midnight photography this time! And to save even more time on the beach -because these toys are massive and complicated to inflate with multiple chambers, needing the pressure to be equalized between them- they were blown up before setting off, though squeezing them into the car was a tad tricky.
A little behind the scenes pic of the setup on location... As usual, a degree of trial and error was needed with positioning the lights so they were not too obvious.
Equally problems with having the remote left on in your pocket when positioning the toys...
...and the tripod shifiting into the wet sand during a long exposure.
After a bit of experimentation, just shooting on 'no flash' mode (above) was ditched, as it made things too grainy. Resetting to manual and a 7-10 second exposure worked rather better.
There were a couple of issues with the red base of the ring overdominating the shots, but choosing the angles carefully gave me the effect I was after with the rainbow stripes.
The wet sand also gave some excellent reflections, an effect I really wanted, which was more by luck than anything else as I had rushed out without checking the tides until I was unloading the car.
All in all, I was very happy with the way these shots turned out with these rings...
Whilst I was there, I decided to reshoot one of the shots I'd failed at last time. I'd had a lot of problems with this, not least because I did the shots with the "48 beachballs on the wet sand last time after I'd been shooting for 5 hours, I was tired, cold, and the breeze was picking up.
Typically, as soon as I'd set up, the breeze started, not great when you need a 7-second exposure time.
I finally got one shot though, which ticked off something I'd wanted to do last time around but hadn't managed then.
So that brief shoot over, it was time to abandon and head back for a curry. The only real annoyance was that the shoot did demonstrate I should have shot the pictures with the new SLR in the first place, meaning I may have to selectively reshoot some pics if I'm going to progress the project in any way.
But I wasn't quite done here- I decided I was also going to shoot some pics indoors too, as with the earliest shots in the project...
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