Family portraits - C&C

[adamhiram]

I wonder what you might have gotten by using a reflector or turned more toward the sun? This sunlight is very strong, so you might even need to find some open shade on a day like that.

Good poses, good frame.

Thanks Designer, great catch and I definitely agree, some fill light would have been appropriate here. This reshoot was more of a quick test to see if a different lens would have given noticibly different results, which it did. It was pretty cold out that day and my family already spent the prior weekend hiking to different locations for pictures, so I really only had about 5 minutes to take these. I will definitely consider throwing a reflector in the bag next time!

 

[Derrel]

I wonder what you might have gotten by using a reflector or turned more toward the sun? This sunlight is very strong, so you might even need to find some open shade on a day like that.

Good poses, good frame.

Thanks Designer, great catch and I definitely agree, some fill light would have been appropriate here. This reshoot was more of a quick test to see if a different lens would have given noticibly different results, which it did. It was pretty cold out that day and my family already spent the prior weekend hiking to different locations for pictures, so I really only had about 5 minutes to take these. I will definitely consider throwing a reflector in the bag next time!

There's one thing that I hate to bring up about this particular photo (and potentially an unlimited number of others similar to it), because once you see it in a photo you've made, you can never again un-see it! And that is backlighted ears...which in this case are not too distracting. At times, in this type of back-lighting with sun-light (not sky-light, not strobe light, not fill-light usually), the rays from the sun can transilluminate the ears, and cause a pink to reddish coloration. On some people, this can be very noticeable. I never really used to see this, but some years ago, I started striving to avoid allowing strong, direct sun to hit the ears in such a way that they could be transilluminated; sky-light as backlighting will not cause this ear glow, but the light from the sun itself often causes it. Designer above references the rim-lighting as being stronger than the frontal lighting, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it always pays to make sure that the ears are not overly lit-up. In this case, your ears are small and not very prominent overall in the shot; had the pose been different, or this just a solo photo of you, the ear issue might have developed into a distraction.

 

[adamhiram]

once you see it in a photo you've made, you can never again un-see it!

Cannot unsee! I agree, it doesnt seem like too big of a distraction in this image, but definitely something to think about in the future. That building faces due north, so unless I can get there at dawn or dusk, there will be some backlighting from camera left before noon, or camera right after noon. Interestingly, that wasn’t an issue last week when all those leaves on the ground hadn’t fallen yet, and this location was in full shade.

If I wanted to reshoot with proper fill light from a reflector or off-camera flash, what direction should the light come from? Above and camera left to (kind of) match the rim light, or fill the shadows from the other side?

 

[Designer]

I wonder what you might have gotten by using a reflector or turned more toward the sun? This sunlight is very strong, so you might even need to find some open shade on a day like that.

Good poses, good frame.

Thanks Designer, great catch and I definitely agree, some fill light would have been appropriate here. This reshoot was more of a quick test to see if a different lens would have given noticibly different results, which it did. It was pretty cold out that day and my family already spent the prior weekend hiking to different locations for pictures, so I really only had about 5 minutes to take these. I will definitely consider throwing a reflector in the bag next time!

There's one thing that I hate to bring up about this particular photo (and potentially an unlimited number of others similar to it), because once you see it in a photo you've made, you can never again un-see it! And that is backlighted ears...which in this case are not too distracting. At times, in this type of back-lighting with sun-light (not sky-light, not strobe light, not fill-light usually), the rays from the sun can transilluminate the ears, and cause a pink to reddish coloration. On some people, this can be very noticeable. I never really used to see this, but some years ago, I started striving to avoid allowing strong, direct sun to hit the ears in such a way that they could be transilluminated; sky-light as backlighting will not cause this ear glow, but the light from the sun itself often causes it. Designer above references the rim-lighting as being stronger than the frontal lighting, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it always pays to make sure that the ears are not overly lit-up. In this case, your ears are small and not very prominent overall in the shot; had the pose been different, or this just a solo photo of you, the ear issue might have developed into a distraction.

Way back in the pre-history era of photography, we were taught to put your subjects in the sun, and the photographer turn his back to the sun, so his subjects would be front-lighted with direct sunlight.

Of course, that leads to the infamous squint that everyone did when trying to look into the sun. So then we learned to modulate the sunlight through various means, such as finding open shade, wait until the sun was low in the sky, or fashion a scrim out of a big rectangle of cheesecloth or similar.

Eventually the technology of photography gave us powerful electronic flashes that we could use to light our subjects faces, and still keep the sun off to one side. The very fast electronic flash is of such short duration that people didn't need to squint to protect their eyes.