Pro Photo Show

by Alan Hutchison: More and more pro photographers these days are breaking out of their nice clean controlled studios to offer environmental portrait shoots.

Whilst the studio offers perfectly controlled lighting conditions, the big bad real world can throw up all sorts of challenges in your way. One of them is bright sunlight (ironically something I don’t actually have to worry about too much in my local area of Central Scotland).

But sunlight is easy to deal with, right? Weren’t we all told to keep the sun over our shoulder – i.e. ensure the light is falling on your subject.  Whilst this is all well and good, with harsh bright sunlight you are going to get subjects with squinting eyes – not the most photogenic of looks.

Getting your clients into the shade is usually the answer to these problems, but that in itself may not be practical, or may not suit the final image that you are trying to achieve.

So, in these situations, I always setup clients with their backs to the sun. Set up the scene with a nice background, expose for their face and you’ll end up with some beautiful back-lighting accentuating their hair, adding a nice dream-like quality to the images, as per the image above.

Now that all sounds nice and easy, but actually getting the exposure properly balanced can be quite a problem as you’ve basically just put their faces in shade. If the sun is extremely bright the sheer range of exposure may make it difficult to get a properly exposed and balanced shot without blowing out the background or having too much shadow on their faces.

Here we now have a couple of options – we could use a reflector or use fill flash.

Now reflectors can be fine to throw light around on cloudier days but on bright sunny days all we end up doing is simply reflecting all that sunlight back into their faces and you end up with your subjects squinting again – yuck!

So my preferred option is fill flash. On most decent camera body and flash combos its a fairly automatic setting. You can also adjust the flash output -/+ to properly balance the exposure. (Always use the minimum flash possible to retain that natural look).

But wait. That lovely f2.8 or f4 aperture setting you were using to throw the background out of focus is fine when your shutter is way up there in the 1/1000’s, but stick that flash into the equation and your shutter speed suddenly drops to your standard flash sync speed of (probably) 1/250s. That f2.8 ain’t going to work no more and suddenly your dialing in an aperture of f8 of f11 and you’ve lost that lovely narrow depth of field.

There is an answer – High Speed Sync – this allows you to break out of your default flash sync limit and push the shutter speed higher. Be aware though that this is not usually an obvious setting on your camera, hence a number of people will often overlook it.

On my Nikon D700 and SB800 combo it’s pretty easy to setup and its all done on the camera – Custom Setting E1 – Flash Sync Speed – All I need to do is select a flash sync speed with  the suffix (Auto FP). This also works in wireless mode so I can get the flash off the camera body as well. On Canon’s I believe the setting is controlled at the flash itself, however I’m not a Canon shooter so this may well be incorrect.

So now we’ve dialled in High Speed Sync we can get back to our nice shallow depth of field using an f2.8 or f4 aperture. Be aware though that due to the physics of what actually goes on here, the power of your flash is reduced (somewhat significantly at the really high shutter speeds). This is the reason you will often see photographers using a bank of 2, 3 or even more strobes all in the same position – especially if shooting through a diffuser panel or umbrella.

So there you have it. Let’s all be like Mad Dogs and Englishmen and go out in the midday sun.