Review: Beach and Shell Hack Exposed

Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post from Truth or Lie: Photography Hacks. In this blog post I will be giving an honest review of how I found this latest DIY Photography Hack. This one seemed super fun and creative. I couldn’t wait to get my hands stuck into this. When I saw the video my first thought was how easy it is made to look and for that reason, I wanted to try it for myself to see if it is actually that simple. My predictions are that this hack will Pass. Let’s take a look.

What you will need:

-a model

-sand

-a variety of shells (different sizes)

- Perspex or glass sheet

-2 chairs

-a camera or phone

The steps:

Take the chairs and place them at a distance from one another. Place the Perspex or glass over the top of the chairs. As I used Perspex that is flexible, I also weighted the sheet down so it could take weight in the middle.

Place a small handful of shells in a circle within the middle of the Perspex.

Cover this circle with sand, make sure you have left no gaps or missing areas.

To begin with, I set this experiment up outside, the lighting levels did not give me enough light for my photographs. This was due to the fact that I was taking the photographs from under the glass sheet and therefore the quantity of sand was therefore blocking the light.

At this point I decided to move the experiment to inside where I had more control of the light levels.

Although I could have changed the brightness in edit, the point of these hacks is not to edit the images. Especially in these reviews as I want these videos to be as raw and realistic as possible.

After moving the experiment inside I found better results.

The verdict:

I found 2 elements wrong with this hack. The first being the lighting, this experiment is definitely one to be tried during the summer months as more light is available.

The second issue was the Perspex glass sheet that I used. The transparency of sheet was not see-through enough to capture detail of the model and the shell he was holding. This could be improved with glass rather than Perspex especially if the glass is cleaned beforehand.

Overall, I am happy with the outcome. It worked much better than I initially thought. Although there were some problems that I found, the experiment did work to a high standard. I had fun while filming this video and feel like this experiment can be adapted and changed easily for different compositions. Therefore I will be giving this hack a score of ‘TRUE’ and receives two thumbs up from me.

References:

Instagram. (n.d.). Jordi Koalitic on Instagram: “Today I’m partnering up with @xiaomi.global to bring you all a brand new photography challenge that you can do at home. Are you ready?….” [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CA-OCeQJTml/ [Accessed 16 Nov. 2020].

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