Chris and I managed to pull off another beach shoot without losing anything - almost. A roll of gaffer’s tape going MIA is not as bad as what the angry seas have swallowed up in our past endeavors. So, to appease the ocean Gods, I decided to post a setup shot, perhaps give you shooters a little tidbit to think about.

Whenever I have an assistant or second shooter on hand, I go for the shoot-through umbrella. Its tough to manage in the wind alone but it spreads light a lot more than a small softbox and it can allow you to shoot right on through sunset. But I digress, this post is actually about cool, cheap and fun color gels.

When skies are gray and the daylight color is overall a bit dull, I have been going to the scotch tape and color gels more and more. (As if you really needed more junk to tape to your flash right?)

This is a “CTO” (color temperature orange) gel and its quite handy. It imitates tungsten light and allows me to set my white balance to something close to “tungsten”  and still have nice skin tones. But the background is daylight, not tungsten, so instead of looking like the dull gray reality that it is, it turns a nice blue color, and our subject stays normal. The orange can also be cool for imitating evening sunlight (see previous post). I prefer to buy the 1/2 CTO gels in a big sheet and then simply double them up when I need a full cut for a more orange look. There you go. Now your’e “gellin like magellan”. Darn those infectious foot gel commercials-see how I play right into their marketing?