Classic California Beach Girl
Photo courtesy of Pictor Photo Archives. Shot on Film and scanned onto Kodak PhotoCD
The model, Shauna, is the classic California beach girl–the kind that Jan and Dean would sing about back during the Golden Age of surf music in the 1960’s. Shauna is a very popular and successful swimsuit fashion model as well as a television personality and actress.
Production Notes
The picture was shot down by the waves in Laguna Beach near Thalia Street Beach which is a popular surf spot. There used to be a surf shop called Toes On The Nose right there. At that time, I had a photography studio right upstairs. During those years, I shot bikini models on the beach several days per week. Usually on weekdays so we wouldn’t have to deal with the weekend crowd.
The picture was shot later in the afternoon maybe a couple of hours before sunset in the late fall or early winter. Probably around 3PM in the afternoon. It was all natural light. At that time of the day in the winter, there are no harsh shadows so no lights are needed. Just let the sun do it’s thing. All the photographer has to do is compose the shots and pull the trigger.
I am going guess it was f/11 @ 1/125 using ISO 100 daylight Fujichrome film. I used a Minolta Autometer IV handheld exposure meter to set the exposure. The camera was a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105MM Macro lens. That was my main camera+lens combo for bikini pictures on the beach. I shot thousands of them.
Post Production
The film was processed at Irvine Photo Graphics in Irvine, California and the original 35mm slide was scanned onto PhotoCD by Pacific Color in Seattle, Washington. That was back in 1998. Everything has been carefully stored away in our media vault since then.
The PhotoCD Image file was recently converted to JPEG using Adobe Photoshop CS2. No adjustments made–just batch converted using Adobe Bridge CS2. The only thing added was the watermark logo and the image was resized for the web.
These pictures and thousands more are available for licensing through Pictor Photo Archives.