Weston-Super-Mare Portrait Shoot with Danielle

I made the trip down to Weston-Super-Mare earlier in the week to finally shoot with Danielle after a few months of back and forth on Purpleport.

I intended to shoot some natural light portraits on the beach with the Hasselblad X1D and then move into the amusement arcades to shoot some neon portraits with the Sony but unfortunately the Hasselblad decided to have a melt down on me and so I ended up doing the entire shoot with only my Sony A7III with the Canon 50mm f1.4 USM.

It was super windy on the beach so we found shelter under the Pier and did a couple of different looks using back lighting from the setting sun and a 5-in-1 reflector to bounce some light back into Danielle to ensure she didn't become a silhouette.

We shot under the pier for about 30 minutes before deciding to head off to another part of the beach. En route to the beach huts we intended to shoot at, I decided to stop and shoot a couple of high speed sync portraits to make the most of the beautiful sunset that was occurring behind us.

The wind was so intense that I couldn't set up my umbrella so instead I had two assistants helping to light Danielle, one to hold the flash unit and the other holding a diffuser which I used as a makeshift softbox.

Once we'd gotten an image we decided to sack off the beach huts and take refuge in the amusement arcades where I shot a series of portraits using the neon lights from the machines and also a CD to create some interesting reflections.

We managed to get a couple of different images in the arcade before it closed and we were kicked out and that brought an end to a super fun shoot. Check out some of the final edits below...