Taking photographs of people in hard sunlight will always be one of the more daunting lighting situations we can find ourselves in. Without additional lighting, or the use of scrims, we have a few basic ways of dealing with the harsh sun:
- pose our subject into the light,
- pose our subject with their back to the sun, or
- just suck it up and accept that our photos will look bad.
Well, that last option isn't really the way to go if we have any pride in our work as photographers. Which leaves us with the two other options ... Read more inside...
Too often there's the desire for us to bring the detail in our backgrounds back in by adding flash. But there are times when the image will be stronger if we just allow the background to completely blow out. It especially works in our favor if the background is cluttered, because then by letting the background completely over-expose, we can simplify our composition.
The key here then is to expose for your subject with careful exposure metering. Read more inside...
Flash photography tip: Find your background, then your settings
With flash photography on location, we nearly always start off by figuring out what we want to do in relation to our available light. We might just need fill-flash, or or flash might need to do the "heavy lifting" and expose correctly for our subject in relation to the available light. When we have our subject in (relative) shade, and need to figure out our flash exposure, we also need to decide exactly what our background is.
It usually works best to be specific about our background ... and how we position ourselves Read more inside...
As a photographer you'll often hear instruction to just "look at the available light". Great. But this advice is also often given without clear examples of what we're actually supposed to be looking at. So let's explore that a little bit using a sequence of images of our model, Aleona, photographed during a recent individual photography workshop.
This is also keeping with the loose theme over the past few weeks, that for a photographer "using the available light" is not a random thing or just a meaningless catch-phrase. Read more inside...
In preparation for a review of the Fuji X-100 camera, I met up with Anelisa to see how this little camera performed during an actual photo shoot. The image above was one of the photographs we ended up with. Now, there is something specific about it that I wanted to explain in a separate article, instead of it being glossed over deeper inside a camera review.
The composition is simple - I do like my compositions fairly central, it seems. Similarly, the lighting is simplicity itself - all available light. There were two main sources of Read more inside...
This image of Amy, one of our models at a workshop, is a fairly straight-forward portrait using off-camera flash in TTL mode. And it is ideal for an overview again of how easy the ambient & flash exposure metering is. The basic approach with this on-location portrait is to expose for the ambient light in the background, making sure our subject is somewhat under-exposed ... and then to add off-camera flash with a softbox. The first question that came up was - how did I meter for the ambient light?
Read more inside...
I noticed that search engine query come up in my web-stats - 'which metering mode for outdoor photos'. So it might be a good idea to answer it specifically. Which metering mode should you use for outdoor photography? Or for that matter any kind of photography?
The basic approach is quite simple: Since I'm using manual exposure mode nearly exclusively, no matter which route I take to get to a specific shutter speed / aperture / ISO combination ... I would be getting the exact same exposure regardless of which metering mode was used.
In this Read more inside...
Using images from a past workshop, I want to explain a simple concept with flash photography on location. In workshops and seminars I quite often describe the flash as 'riding on top of' the available light exposure. It's just another way of describing the usual technique of under-exposing the ambient light somewhat, and then using flash to give correct exposure. We can thereby control the final look of the image by controlling the direction of light from our flash.
By using flash like this, we can use the flash to 'clean up' the light in the Read more inside...
(subtitled: the episode where I finally learn now to use the Auto modes elegantly)
In my discussion of what would be the best camera in the world, I mentioned (at length) the clear advantage that Pentax cameras have because of their Hyper-Program and Hyper-Manual modes. I explain these two modes in more detail in that linked article, but in essence, the modes work as such:
Hyper-Program - is a program exposure mode, but by dialing the shutter speed dial it becomes Shutter Priority / Tv. By dialing the aperture dial, you instantly Read more inside...
photographic composition - finding and framing your best shot
Strolling through Green Park in London, I saw these rows of winter-barren trees. The way the snow clung to the trees and branches from the morning's snow storm, white against dark brown, gave a posterized effect already - the crazy patterns of the branches starkly etched against the white snow.
I took several photographs, finally liking this photo above the most of all. Aside from resizing, it is straight out of camera ... my iPhone 4. And therein was a lesson for me that I mulled over the rest of the day, while further Read more inside...
