There is a saying in aviation - during an emergency, the first thing you do is fly the plane. The idea being that, no matter what else is going on in the cockpit, the pilot still has to pay attention to operating the primary flight controls to maintain control of the plane. Otherwise, what's the point? That lesson was brought back home to me last Saturday when I attempted to undertake my first shooting opportunity on the beach.
Above you see one of the real keeper shots from the session - a beautiful (in my opinion) mother/daughter portrait. We shot about 100 frames that day. One of my goals in a shoot like this is to make it as hard as possible for the client to select the images they want because there are just too many good ones to choose from.
I'm sorry to say that the image above is one of only about 20 that are suitable for print, at least according to my standards.
The rest of them look sort of like this one. Do you see the problem? It looks like their falling backwards. It's actually somewhat of an optical illusion caused by the slope of the sand dune on the left. Their legs are running in a contrary line and the feet appear to be too high in relation to the rest of their bodies.
This was something that I just didn't notice when I was looking through the view finder. One of the challenges of shooting at this time of day is you have a very narrow window of ideal, golden light just before the sun goes below the horizon. At this location on this date, the sun is going down just a short distance out over the water and well to the right of the subject. So my lighting concept was to have the fading sunlight shining on their rear shoulder and head, rather than shining on their face and front torso. So I turned their bodies slightly away from the sun to get the effect I wanted. But I was so consumed with getting the light just right - which included an umbrella-mounted flash to the left - that I forgot to pay attention to what I was actually photographing. I forgot to fly the plane.
So next time you are looking down the lens at your subject, don't forget to fly the plane. No amount of creative lighting will rescue a fatally flawed composition.
