How to take photos at the beach: protecting cameras from sand, saltwater, sunlight, heat

Surf, Sand and Sun
Great for photos, tough on cameras

hen I set out with my camera on no definite mission, my summer wanderings often lead to the sea. This would be no surprise to Herman Melville, who wrote in Moby Dick, "If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

If fear of damaging your camera has prevented you from taking full photographic advantage of beaches and shorelines, consider a few of the subjects you've been missing: ocean sunsets, sandy stretches, water birds, blue vistas, stormy surf and people engaging in a host of seaside activities. Melville seems to have had artists, if not photographers, in mind when he wrote, again in Moby Dick, that rivers and oceans fascinate because they show us "the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all."

In places overrun with commercial development, whether because of industrialization or tourism, beaches and harbors often provide the only visual counterpoint to buildings, traffic, crowds and pollution. The influences of the sea are fairly constant, so beach photography need not involve exotic travel. Pictures taken on New York's Jones Beach can, in essence, convey the same feeling as shots of the French Riviera.

Beach lighting is bright and uniform—there are few, if any, buildings to block the sun, and the sand acts like a giant reflector, so you can record the scene using a small aperture, or f/stop setting (which deepens the zone of sharpness), and a fast shutter speed (which freezes action).

"The Beach" by Robert Winkler

Load film well away from the water; salty moisture that gets inside the camera can damage film and corrode parts. If a shady place for film loading isn't readily available, turn your back to the sun and load the film in your shadow. Use film rated at a speed of 200 or less. Films faster than this are so sensitive that even your camera's smallest aperture and highest shutter speed may not reduce the light enough to prevent overexposure.

After a swim, rinse your hands with fresh water and dry them thoroughly, or use an alcohol-moistened "towelette," and keep your camera away from a wet bathing suit. The warmth of your bare skin against the cooler camera can fog up your viewfinder, so put on a dry shirt whenever you shoot. Stay a safe distance from people who are splashing around, and when you finish shooting, wipe the camera with a soft cloth to remove any residue from the salt air. To dislodge dust and sand, blow the camera body and lens with compressed air (camera and electronics stores sell small, portable compressed-air canisters) or with an ear syringe.

Inspect the lens, and if you notice any salt particles or water spots, clean it using lens tissue generously moistened with lens cleaner. Unmoistened tissue just drags abrasive salt grains along the highly polished lens surface. Never let a camera lay in the sun—the intense light can leak inside and fog the film. To discourage thievery, use a case or bag that's not emblazoned with a camera manufacturer's name. Avoid leaving an expensive camera on the seat of a locked car, where it's exposed to prying eyes and extreme heat. If you can't take it with you, put it in the trunk.

Although an all-weather point and shoot is the most worry-free camera to use at the beach, you can't easily add lens accessories, so it limits your creative options. If you use the more versatile 35-mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera, screw an ultraviolet, or UV, filter onto the lens.

The UV filter is also known as a haze filter, a misleading name since it cannot cut through ordinary haziness to give you a clearer picture. Visible haze is little affected by any kind of filter. A haze filter does, however, screen out atmospheric haze—the scattering of ultraviolet light. Invisible to the human eye, atmospheric haze can give pictures a bluish cast and some apparent softness of focus, especially at higher altitudes. At sea level, however, where atmospheric haze is minimal, the UV filter's main function is to protect the more expensive lens. Since the UV filter is virtually clear, it does not affect exposure.

If you use an SLR, you might also try a polarizing filter. Like a UV filter, a polarizing filter screens atmospheric haze, but more important, it deepens the blue of the water and sky by reducing polarized reflections. When light waves from the sun reflect off water, they become polarized, vibrating in one plane instead of many, which produces glare. The light in parts of the sky can also be highly polarized, depending on the position of the sun. By reorienting light waves before they pass through the lens, a polarizing filter eliminates much of the glare, so colors appear deeper or, in photographic parlance, more saturated.

To use a polarizing filter, which has two independent glass elements, rotate the outer element while you look through the SLR's viewfinder. As the elements come into proper alignment, minimizing polarized reflections, the image will darken. You may be tempted to take the picture when colors are at their deepest, but this effect can be overdone. After all, polarized reflections are visible to the eye; if you filter them completely, the water and sky can seem artificially blue.

When using a polarizing filter, which is quite dark, you'll need an aperture, or f/stop, setting that is about 1.5 times greater than normal, a correction your through-the-lens camera meter will make automatically. Opening up the aperture narrows depth of field (the extent of the scene that remains in sharp focus), but since the beach is so bright, the loss won't be significant.

Indeed, beach lighting can be so intense that special exposure problems arise. Many camera meters are designed to give proper exposure for a subject with average reflectance—one that approximates the tone of white skin, which is much duller than a white-sand beach under a sunny sky. If a subject is lighter (or darker) than average, the meter will underexpose (or overexpose) to bring the subject in line with its standard of reflectance. Thus, it would underexpose a white beach, making it look too dark.

To compensate for the camera's tendency to underexpose bright beach scenes, use an f/stop setting one-half to one-and-a-half times greater than the meter recommends, depending on local conditions. Keep in mind that a lower f/stop number admits more light—f/8, for example, will give you twice the exposure of f/11. The reverse problem often occurs on water, which can be darker than average from the meter's point of view if there are no specular reflections from the sun on its surface. In that case, less exposure may be required.

Another exposure problem can occur in bright light. If you use film rated at a speed of 400 or higher, your pictures may be too light even if you use the camera's fastest shutter speed and smallest f/stop setting. The light must be cut back further, beyond the limits of your camera. This can be done by screwing on a neutral density filter, which comes in different strengths and simply reduces the light entering the lens without affecting colors, or by using a slower film. A slow film has added benefits—a 100-speed film, for example, usually has richer color rendition, better contrast and less graininess than a 400-speed film.

"Dune" by Robert Winkler

As for subject matter, the beach has it in abundance: seascapes, peaceful seaside communities, anglers, boaters, crashing waves, surging swells, frothy foam, tanned and scantily clad bodies (wet, dry or covered with sand), surfers, divers, runners, sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, kite fliers, shells, seaweed and reflections. People at ease on the beach often behave as they do in their living rooms, so you'll also find humor.

The major obstacle to natural-looking beach photographs is a distracting slanted horizon line. For creative effect, you can tilt the camera, but as a rule, keep the horizon straight by holding the camera level. Use the line where water and sky meet as your guide. Just before you release the shutter, glance at this horizon and make the slight shift that may be required to level the camera.

Weather that keeps swimmers and sunbathers from the beach needn't foil a photographer. Nature at its rawest—storm-tossed seas, huge breakers, ominous skies, powerful winds that blow sand and bend grass—affords some of the most satisfying beach images. You'll also find plenty of camera fodder after Labor Day, when the teeming masses of summer give way to isolated figures: the woman on a beachside ramble, the romantic couple, the man walking his dog, a gull poking among shells at the water's edge. The sand becomes cleaner, the water clearer, the sky bluer and the sun traces a lower arc—giving you an opportunity to see and photograph the beach in a different light.

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A message from Robert Winkler

Jeff Brush/Connecticut Post (used with permission)

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