Thu, Apr 22, 2010
Let’s face it, shooting at noon on a sunny day, pretty much is one of the worst situations around. Saying it is a challenge is an understatement.
Whenever I’ve stuck in noon-day sun, I try to solve the problem with three simple techniques.
1. Find open shade. Open shade is where the couple is in the shade, but light is still hitting them from the sky. In the photo on the left, the sun is directly above them, but the overhand is shading them. Just above in front of them is blue sky. The blue sky without the direct sun, gives a nice soft light to shoot with.
Backlight. In the second shot, the couple has their back to the sun. This is really easy to do. You’ll want to meter off of the faces and shoot in manual mode. I don’t care how awesome your camera is, it will under expose in this situation. Once you have the exposure down, just shoot and shoot an shoot. The bonus with back lighting women is that the highlights in their hair look just incredible.
Fill Flash – This is my least favorite technique. The basic fundamental is put your flash on -1.5 or so and shoot away. This will work in most situations. In the third photo, I really wanted to bring out the background colors, so I did something a bit different. I metered off the couple’s faces and bumped my exposure DOWN about 2 stops. Then had my flash on normal TTL. This produced some very dynamic colors.
Thank you for your time and happy shooting.
Fundy
Fundy is the creator of Fundy SOS and creator of Mobile Fotographer.
