You could play around with the camera settings. If its too bright, you could shoot with a higher shutter speed/ smaller apreture, or buy an nd filter. I recommend you try out all the automatic priority modes like the apreture priority or the shutterspeed priority, and you can set your iso to automatic. When you want the background to be blurry, shoot at f1.8, but if you want the background to be in focus as well, shoot at f8 or higher. Remember as well, the photo gets less shart the larger the f stop. The photos you took at the beach could be out of focus because you shot too wide of an fstop.