Playing with Light at Monifieth Beach – Robin and Kath’s Pre-Wedding Shoot

Scottish weather as you know can be very unpredictable, but as long as it’s dry I’m usually quite a happy wedding photographer.

You see although everyone’s idea of the perfect shooting conditions is a nice sunny day – it’s the cloudy days that can sometimes present the most creative opportunities.   And we do get a lot of cloudy conditions in Scotland, so we may as well use them to our advantage.

Such was the case for our latest pre-wedding photography shoot with Robin and Kath. The chosen location was Monifieth Beach on the River Tay, a few miles east of Dundee.   The weather was kind to us – it was dry and bright, although cloudy, but it was very cold, so we had to work fast.

So when presented with the lighting conditions (bright soft lighting on a bright sandy beach) we have a few options on the types of images we could do – after a brief discussion with Robin and Kath we decided to go for a moody skies look – we would darken the skies to make the clouds look much darker and use off-camera lighting to make the couple stand out from their environment.

For the photographs on the beach, we setup the camera to under-expose the beach scene (i.e. make the background appear a litter darker than it really was) – this gives us the moody skies. I then setup my flash unit (or speedlight as we photographers call them) on a light stand to one side of Robin and Kath. We then program the flash to provide the correct lighting on the couple and help separate them from the under-exposed scene and add some impact to the image.  (Are you following along now…).

The reason we set the flash up off-camera to one side is to give some shadow and depth to our handsome subjects, rather than have the very flat look you would get if the flash was mounted on the camera itself.

Here then are the results of the photoshoot – Both myself and Robin and Kath were very pleased with the results, and we got the exact mood we were looking for on the beach scenes.

Robin and Kath are due to get married in just a couple of weeks time up at one of my favourite wedding venues, (and one of Scotland’s finest), Dalmunzie Castle in Glenshee, Perthshire. You can read all about Dalmunzie in a review I did of the wedding venue last year.

This will be our first of two visits to Dalmunzie Castle this year and both Morag and I are very much looking forward to it.

Like what you see? Want to see more? You can view our portfolio here.

Interested in speaking to us about your Wedding Photography or Portrait requirements? We cover wedding and portrait commissions throughout Scotland (and even further afield if you are planning a wedding overseas).  You can contact us by using the “Contact” menu at the top of the page, or you can reach us on 01259 210299 or 07887 835431 or via email at weddings@alanhutchison.co.uk

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P.S. In the meantime, we’d be delighted if you would be kind enough to leave comments and feedback for us below, our couples always appreciate reading the many nice comments we get on the blog, so please don’t be shy!  And if you have any questions about any aspects of our wedding and portrait photography, even a technical question, please feel free to ask.