Usually I (Ben) prefer to do night-time seaside pics later in the year, when it gets darker earlier and there are less people around out of season. But with a deadline to hit for an open call, I was forced to hit the beach in a Bank Holiday week, for a development of my location shoots from "Inflate-Deflate". The concept was to use the backlit-beach tat theme to explore ideas of plastic left on beaches; so a typical beach scene would be set up, but only the plastic items would be lit, particularly the sorts of things which seem to often get dumped at the end of a day by less-responsible people...
Setting up was a lot quicker and easier with an assistant this time around to help carry everything, and most of the inflatables were partially inflated in the car, which whilst quicker, would have made for an interesting stop and search had The Fuzz wandered what we were doing driving around late at night.
We actually had two goes at this; the first night, there was a camper van skulking in the lay by (obviously trying to avoid paying to use a campsite), and when we got onto the beach it was windy and the sea rough, with rain coming in, so we abandoned and went home. Arriving the next night found the place with only one random car in the lay by, and the sea like a millpond under a clear sky. Perfect shooting conditions...
Building on the experience of the last shoots, there were still some issues; the lighting used for example. The above shot shows a problem with using the strip lights, with the blow-up whale, in that individual LED light bulbs were too obvious.
This shot shows another problem, in that the tide was rising pretty damned fast (the beach is very shallow), but without drama or even waves, so without realising it in the dark the water was suddenly up and lapping around the set. As the above angle shows however, I'd learnt from last year (where I'd had to splash around in the sea to retrieve props which had blown away) and was therefore dressed for a bit of a paddle so I could get some more interesting angles from within the sea itself...
As this shot shows, the rising tide sometimes was only noticed when lights started floating away; again, learning from last year, this time I'd wrapped each light in a seal able freezer bag to stop them from getting damaged from the sand or the seawater.
...the same floating-away issues applied to the inflatables, but at least with the sea so calm and no breeze they were easy to catch before stuff drifted too far.
These two shots show the effect of the clear sky, the moon, and the calm sea.
With the main four shots done, I decided to try and get some more individual shots of the inflatables to bulk-out the collection shot for the "Inflate-Deflate" project, though the plan really is to try this later in the year properly on a night where it gets darker quicker. Not entirely successful, the above shot shows the problems lighting a complex shape like the unicorn, as the light taped to the neck is a bit too visible.
The modified concept seems to have gone down well with the people I've shown the shots to so far, and it was enjoyable to plan and shoot. Waiting for the second night made it work, rather than trying to compromise on the first night, and learning from the problems of the last shoot was a good move (dressing for ending up in the sea, pre-preparing the props, sketching out plans for where everything needed to be set up etc). The only damage was one light where the bag leaked, and the batteries had an interesting reaction with the salty water (a bag full of slightly-fizzy brown water...lovely), and two of the inflatables which were annoyingly damaged straight out of the packets.
All in all, a successful shoot, and a nice block of images for the wider concept, and a few new shots to add to the collection from the earlier "Inflate-Deflate" set.
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