JourneyLearning: - Your journey guide

The glistening white sands, turquoise waters, and vibrant blue skies of tropical beaches are the stuff of which wall calendars (and daydreams) are made. Capturing the simple beauty of such scenes is relatively easy if you keep a few basic concepts in mind. Because tropical beaches have such inherent prettiness, finding attractive compositions isn't hard. For broad views, use a wide-angle lens and look for vantage points where the curving line of the sea lures the eye into the scene--perhaps leading to a particularly attractive palm grove or a row of beached sailboats. In places like the Caribbean or the South Pacific, where the sea and hillsides are close neighbors, climbing to a clearing and

shooting down at the beach below may reveal vistas unseen from sea level. Be sure to use a small aperture (or your Landscape exposure mode), so everything is in focus from near to far. Don't be afraid to let your designs border on abstraction; sometimes simple arrangements of sand, sea, and sky are the most effective. Including people (see the photograph) provides a good center of interest and also helps establish scale, but take care with exposure. Tropical beaches are very bright and contrasty, and the intense light reflecting off the sand will fool your camera into turning the sugar-white sands gray and casting your human subjects into silhouette (see Exposing for Dark and Light Subjects). One compromise if you have an SLR or a sophisticated point-and-shoot is to use your camera's exposure-compensation feature to add a full stop of exposure to the suggested settings. Better still, try working early and late in the day, when the light is less harsh and contrast isn't such a problem. The low angle of the sun at these times also casts long shadows that give scenes a sense of depth and three-dimensional relief. If you are forced to work at midday, be sure to use film with a speed of ISO 100 or slower, so you are not working beyond your camera's available range of shutter speed and aperture combinations