Portrait photography on easter
5.4.2010  |   Add comment   |   No comments  |  Permalink
This easter we went to my in-laws in Rauma and for some reason I decided to grab my light poles, radio triggers and the whole arsenal with me. I'm lucky I did, because the weather was most beautiful for portrait photography.

The sun was shining warmly in between few scattered clouds and I decided to do some cross-lighting photography. It has been a while since the last time as it's known fact that Finnish winter is long and dark. So I had to take back the time I missed and start shooting.

First I set the ISO to th lowest possible, ISO 100 in my situation and max shutter speed that is syncable with my flash, which in my case is 1/250s. Then I set 1/4 power in my flash and tried test shots with shoot through umbrella. Because it was really sunny day, I decided to use shoot through umbrella instead of reflective in order to stay away from competing with the sun.

So the point in the photo shoot was to use sun as the rim light and flash as the key light. If the sun comes from behind and left of the model, you place the flash opposite so that it is to the right of you.

I then set the aperture based on the exposure of the model. If the model gets over exposed, you dial up your aperture to make the f-number bigger. If the model is under-exposed, you increase the aperture to make f-number smaller.

But what happens when the sun get behind the clouds? Easy. Because the model exposure is set by the aperture, you don't want to touch that. The ambient light is controlled by the shutter speed, so when it suddenly gets dark, you dial down the shutter speed. Just remember what shutter speed you had before, because when the sun comes back it's easy to get perfect exposure without trial and error cycle.

Here are some pictures of the easter session with my daughters:

Adele pose Aliisa laid back

And here are rest of the pictures at Flickr.