On the long list of popular things to do at the beach, taking family beach pictures sits right up near the top, probably just below surfing, swimming, and snapping selfies. Few locations offer a better backdrop for bright and airy photos, and from golden hour through sunset, the lighting can’t be beat.
Of course, shooting at the beach includes its own inherent set of challenges. Beaches can get (very) crowded, open shade is scarce, and depending on the particular beach, the views in any direction may not offer much variety. If you frequent the beach for family portraits, you may also struggle to find new and creative ways to feature it in your pictures, which is why we’re here.
Whether you’re planning a trip to the coast with your own group or photographing someone else’s family on the beach, the following family beach pictures, ideas, and tips will help boost your creativity and make the most of your time out in the sun. Let’s get started!
What Gear Do I Need to Take Family Beach Pictures?
To start, you might wonder which gear will serve you best for capturing family beach pictures. Well, another popular thing to do at the beach is walking, and you’ll likely do plenty of walking for your shoot as well. For this reason, I recommend going as light as you can on gear while still packing what you need to get the job done. Here’s a brief overview of gear you should take in addition to your camera and lenses for capturing family beach pictures.
Camera Accessories
- Camera Bag: Look for a small to medium-size bag that will fit your camera, a couple lenses, ND filters, batteries, memory cards, and a flash if necessary. It helps to have easy access to your gear and straps for a tripod or light stand, if possible.
- Tripod: Qualities to look for in a tripod include light weight, compact size, and a sturdy build. Knowing this, get the best you can find to fit your budget.
- ND Filters: Bringing an ND filter to an outdoor shoot will open up a number of possibilities, including shutter drags with a shallow depth of field (one of the featured tips below). I prefer using a 4×4 square nd filter (roughly 4-stops of light reduction) so that I can hold it in front of the lens without having to attach it.
Lighting
- Flash: Despite the abundance of available light at beaches, you may want to take along a flash to allow greater control over your exposure. With a flash, you can lower your ambient exposure to preserve more colors in the sky while adding a touch of light to brighten up your subjects, for example. While they come in all shapes, sizes, and power levels, something in the range of 100-200 watt seconds of power should suffice, depending on how bright it is.
- Light Stand: If you plan to use flash at all, don’t forget a light stand. Look for something compact and lightweight.
- Umbrella: Often underrated and underused, but always effective, it’s hard to beat umbrellas for quick & easy-to-use light modifiers.
- 5-in-1 Reflector: It’s always a good idea to bring one of these light modifiers along for a shoot, no matter the genre or location. They’re very affordable and easy to use to great effect.
- An Assistant: Whenever possible, have an assistant join you to help carry and look after the gear, secure your flashes (when in use), and do whatever else it is you might need help with while capturing family beach pictures.
Family Beach Pictures, Ideas, and Tips for Photographers
Use the following ideas and tips to enhance your experience of taking family beach pictures.
- Check Tide & Other Conditions
- Decide on Sunrise or Sunset
- Dress for the Occasion
- Shutter Drag
- Find Reflections
- Look for Natural Frames
- Try a Silhouette
- Watch Out for Heads on the Horizon
- Direct for Action
- Incorporate Storytelling
Tip 1. Check Tide & Other Conditions
As per usual, it’s important to start with safety in mind. During the planning phase of your session for family beach pictures, check expected surf and weather conditions online or via an app for the time and location of your shoot. I recommend making this a habit anytime you plan to shoot on or near the beach. You don’t want to unexpectedly get caught at high tide and subject your clients to potentially dangerous high surf, surprise waves, and riptides.
Once you’re on the beach, always keep an eye on the ocean. Stay alert enough to notice larger waves coming in so that you have time to get out of harm’s way if the waves look big. Sadly, rogue waves and riptides claim a number of lives each year. You don’t want to end up a statistic.
Tip 2. Decide on Sunrise or Sunset for Family Beach Pictures
It goes without saying, lighting can make all the difference in your photos. If you plan to shoot with natural light on the beach, you’ll most likely want to avoid midday sun and instead opt for either sunrise or sunset. When the sun hangs directly overhead, you’ll find yourself battling unflattering shadows on your subjects’ faces. Of course, you can use a reflector, but you’ll also have to battle squinty expressions whenever you direct your subjects to look at the camera.
You’re no doubt familiar with golden hour, but most people only associate it with the late afternoon. In reality, you can take advantage of golden hour twice daily, during the first hour after sunrise and the last hour or so before sunset. During this stretch of time, the sun hangs lower and the light hits softer and warmer, often resulting in more flattering portraits for your subjects. In addition, you’ll find the sky offers bolder colors, which looks great for more dramatic imagery, whether captured with natural light (often in silhouettes) or flash.
Pros & Cons of Each
The beach is often less crowded closer to sunrise, but in my experience capturing family beach pictures, rallying the troops for a photoshoot early in the morning has proven more challenging than having them show up closer to the end of the day. This gives a slight edge to scheduling your family beach portraits closer to sunset. Plus, if you can stay 30 minutes or so after sunset, you can work the beautiful colors of blue hour into your session.
Tip 3. Dress for the Occasion
Because you’re shooting on the beach, I first recommend that everyone wear sunscreen. The trick, however, is using either quick-dry sunscreen or applying it long enough before the shoot that some of the sheen wears off, unless of course your subjects want to glisten on the sand.
I also recommend that families wear comfortable clothing (you’re at the beach, afterall) and make an effort to color coordinate. This doesn’t mean everyone should wear matching colors, but they might try using complementary colors or employ a monochromatic theme with different shades of a particular color. As an added tip, between solid colors and patterns, solid colors tend to be less distracting.
Finally, wind and beaches go hand in hand. Try to avoid clothing that might take to the wind like an open sail and flap and fly all over the place. The only time this really works in your favor is for capturing maternity beach pictures. Then, by all means, flap and fly away.
Tip 4. Drag the Shutter for Family Beach Pictures
One quick and easy way to make your family beach pictures more dynamic involves dragging the shutter and capturing the motion of the ocean. To do this, you may need to use an ND filter so that you can slow your shutter speed and still maintain a wider depth of field. Just position your family in or near the water’s edge, and capture the shot as the waves wash ashore. You’ll see this effect used often in engagement and wedding photography, but shutter drags work well for family beach photos, too. Simply direct your family into position and let them know to stand still once they’ve struck their pose.
If you’re creating an HDR portrait and have to use different exposures for the water and sky, try to keep them below the horizon line. You can always add a mask in Lightroom or swap out the sky with specialized editing software if needed, but this tip can still come in handy, even in those instances.
Tip 5. Find Reflections
The beach can be a great location for working reflections into your photos. You can often find existing puddles, especially at low tide, or else add your own reflective surface with a phone or mirror, and then double the impact of the epic landscape.
When capturing a reflection for family beach pictures, slow your shutter speed to capture a smoother reflection. This works similarly to the shutter drag discussed above, but it doesn’t require as slow a shutter speed. You don’t want to slow it so much that you introduce too much camera shake. If this happens, you’ll need to increase the shutter speed or use a tripod. Also, if the water is not perfectly still and your shutter speed goes too low, your subjects will appear less sharp in the final image. Just keep an eye out for this as you dial in your exposure settings. If you want to capture more detail in the reflection, use a faster shutter speed and narrow aperture (f/8-f/22).
At the end of the day, we want to use reflections to lead the viewers to our subject. To achieve that goal, we need to make sure that our subjects are in focus.
Tip 6. Look for Natural Frames for Family Beach Pictures
As grand and epic as beaches are, they can also look plain when always captured as wide open spaces. Try to find natural elements on the beach, like rock formations if you’ve got them, to help create interesting frames around your subjects. Check out the video above to see how I used a rock formation at a local beach as a frame, foreground element, and source of shade to capture a variety of compelling images of my subject. While the video features a single subject, the same concepts can be applied to taking family beach pictures.
Tip 7. Try a Silhouette (or Moody Lighting)
Silhouettes stand out as one of the coolest images to capture when the light begins to fade and the colors in the sky grow more vivid. Depending on when you’re shooting and how dark it is, you should be able to use the shadows to create a compelling (and perhaps dramatic) family beach portrait!
We don’t need a perfect exposure to capture a solid silhouette. All we really need to do is place the family against the colorful sky (typically looking out toward the sunset) and lower our exposure. We only want to retain the outline of the family against the sky.
When posing the family for a silhouette portrait, remember that composition takes center stage. Viewers should be able to easily identify each family member, despite the lack of detail due to the lower exposure. Many families will hold hands, but you can also mix things up and get a variety of shots, such as a side-angle shot of dad tossing his young son up into the air, and so on.
You can find more tips on photographing silhouettes here.
Tip 8. Watch Out for Heads on the Horizon
This tip rings true through all genres of photography, really, but it’s worth mentioning in a list of tips for family beach pictures, too. Simply put, make sure the horizon doesn’t intersect with your subjects’ heads. It serves to do little more than distract your viewer. In family photos, some shorter subjects may wind up with their heads at the horizon line, but that’s okay. In those instances, I’ll position the taller subjects’ heads clear above the line and get lower to do what I can for the shorter subjects.
Tip 9. Direct for Action for Family Beach Pictures
Like with any family portrait session, you’ll want to capture safe, mantle-ready, formal family poses for family beach pictures. However, you should also spend plenty of time playing, walking, and doing other activities that families might do at the beach.
This process can begin immediately following the formal shots. While the family is still in position, use cues to encourage the family to strike different poses, like squeezing into the person in the center or making funny faces for the camera. From there, you can mix up the group variations, removing or adding family members along the way.
See our article on group photo poses for more posing and directing ideas.
Tip 10. Incorporate Storytelling
Similarly to the tip above, incorporating storytelling into your session will allow you to capture a wider variety of shots within a single scene. We often spend a fair amount of time setting up for particular portraits. Unfortunately, many photographers snap a couple shots after putting in all of that work and then they move on. Instead, I recommend capturing a range of angles, poses, expressions, and groupings without moving anyone out of position.
To do this, start with a wider angle to establish the scene, capturing the whole group. While I’ve demonstrated this with action shots above, the same concept applies to formal group poses. You can begin with the standard formal pose and then direct the group for different expressions. Next, move into a medium angle and capture a tighter shot of the whole group or just a portion of the group. Finally, move in close for tighter shots that capture even more detail, perhaps of a single individual as he or she laughs at whatever prompts you’re giving. You can then move to the side of the group and shoot across, using one side of the group as a foreground element while you focus on someone standing on the other side.
Mixing up your angles (wide, medium, and tight) while capturing a single scene will allow you to deliver more images and also design more cohesive spreads for your blogs or photo albums.
Conclusion
I hope you found these family beach pictures, ideas, and tips for photographers useful. While they should definitely add to your toolbox for photographing families on the beach, you can apply many of the tips to family photography in other locations as well, which should come in handy when it’s not necessarily beach season (or if you don’t live anywhere near a beach). If you happen to read this during the summer and you are beach adjacent, however, you can find additional beach photography tips designed specifically for summer shooting. Happy shooting!
