Engagement pictures for a couple and their dog on a cloudy day at the Myrtle Beach State Park

I had another nice couple for engagement portraits at the Myrtle Beach State Park this past week. I’ve got their wedding coming up later this year. This couple brought along their baby for the moment, their little dog. I can’t remember what it was exactly. I know it was a poodle mix of some kind. I have two poodles myself. They are very sweet dogs as long as they are used to being around people. My dogs love it when clients come by to discuss a wedding. I tell them people are coming, and they will wait by the window.

You have to be careful when a couple has extremely different skin tones. His skin was very dark, and she had very fair, light skin. If you were to have a camera on spot metering and only set the exposure for his face, hers could be overexposed. Or the opposite if you metered the camera on her face. Of course, this isn’t really much of an issue anymore. Modern cameras have so much dynamic range it’s hard to mess up more than a little adjustment in Lightroom will take care of.

Even as good as modern cameras are, I usually shoot on manual and check every few shots on the screen. You really can’t go wrong doing it this way. Subjects backlit by sunlight are going to trick up a camera on auto exposure, and you get a lot more consistency on manual, which helps for a quicker workflow later when doing adjustments. This was a very cloudy overcast day which made things easier. Of course, you also don’t get the nice look of the sunset, but it can be good in its own way. I hope you enjoy the pictures below.