Laguna Beach Bikini

Photo courtesy of Pictor Photo Archives. Shot on Film and scanned onto Kodak PhotoCD

The bikini model in the picture is Tara, a world-famous bikini cover model. She was wearing a silver bikini and a silver belly chain when this photo was taken. Tara came to California from Texas in order to compete in a bikini contest and pageant.

Many pretty girls from all over the country descended on Orange County that week looking for a modeling career. All the girls wanted to get onto a bikini calendar or poster, or into a bikini magazine. The event was covered on the local television news and in the newspaper. Tara did not win the event that year, but she competed again the following year and won the crown! She has been a top bikini model ever since.

Production Notes
The location is right on the beach down by the waves at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point, California. This picture was shot late in the afternoon around the Labor Day weekend at the end of August. Probably around 6PM in the afternoon.

Lighting. I used a Norman 400B strobe light on a portable light stand. I had to lug all this equipment down to the beach. The Norman strobe puts out enough light to overpower the sun . This allows for pointing the camera almost straight into the sun without getting lens flare or loss of contrast. The lens has to be stopped way down.

Exposure. My guess is the exposure was f/22 @ 1/250 using ISO 100 daylight Fujichrome film. I always used a Minolta Autometer IV handheld exposure meter to set the exposure.

Camera & Lens. My camera was a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105MM Macro lens. The Nikon FM2 camera is a fully manual camera. One good thing about it is that the shutter sync speed is 1/250 sec. This is important.

Post Production
Film processing by Irvine Photo Graphics in Irvine, California. The original 35mm slide was scanned onto PhotoCD by Pacific Color in Seattle, Washington on 2/19/1995. Yes this picture is from back in 1995.

The PhotoCD Image file was recently converted to TIFF using Adobe Photoshop CS2. The TIFF was imported into Adobe Lightroom 2.6 for color correction and tonal balance. We left the black overscan borders, so you can see it was not cropped. There was no retouching, but it may have been dust spotted.

Publishers can license these pictures through Pictor Photo Archives in Laguna Beach, California.