Outdoor Lighting

You may recall in the past when you bought a roll of film that the little pamphlet inside the film package told you to shoot with the sun over your shoulder shining on the subject.

In professional shooting this is the opposite of what we strive for and there is good reason for this.

Having your subject look directly into the sun causes them to squint and frown and also gives the image a very flat uninteresting look. You can almost hear your subject saying…"Can you hurry up, the light is in my eyes and I can’t hold this pose much longer". On a cloudy day you won’t have this problem as the light is coming from a rather large source that gives very even lighting and no harsh shadows and no squinting.

So here is how we are going to handle this problem using a studio light to act as the sun

Ok here we go. Our model is sitting here with the sun coming from behind her.  You notice that we have a rimming effect which give us a very three dimensional look to the image.

If your subject is against a dark background as we have here, your shot looks even better due to the contrast.

Our only problem is that we don’t have enough fill or frontal light to bring out her face better.

We solve that with an age old lighting technique called bounce lighting and to bring it off we simply use a piece of white card to bounce the sunlight back into Julie’s face. You can get a piece of this board at any art supply store.

So now we bounce this sunlight in and  as you see we have a l much better looking  image. This isn’t rocket science folks.

I hope this tip has been of help. Get more information and see more video tutorials on www.barrycasson.com