Wet hair look by the pool - Chiara B (shot against the light) (Patreon)

The first set shot on day two of my shoots in Naxos last month, shot mid afternoon and against the light, with Chiara posing by the pool with wet hair and body in a red microbikini and fully nude.

Below, behind the paywall, I explain how I lit my model against the sun and how I avoided burning the background.

Normally in a situation like this, if one exposes the model correctly the background would be washed out as it would be seriously overexposed. The alternative is to expose the background correctly in which case the model becomes very dark, often like a silhouette, which of course means that the microbikini won’t be seen.

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The wet look idea was Chiara’s, as was the positioning. However, my biggest photographic challenge was that it was mid afternoon, the sun was still high and I was shooting against the light.

So I used the Elinchrom One portrait kit to light the front of Chiara which enabled me to have an exposure of f8.0 and shutter speed 1/200 which meant that, as well as lighting my model against the light, I avoided burning the background.

I could have gone with f11.0 and slightly higher ISO but I wanted to model to stand out so f8.0 was better for that, as it blurred the background sufficiently without making it disappear completely. You can still see the hills and the sea whilst eye sores like electricity poles are hardly noticeable.

The camera settings are included in the last photo in this set, for the benefit of anyone interested in photography technique.

I did shoot some photos without the Elinchrom One but I avoided the background in order to minimise the High Dynamic Range problem. I will have these in another post.