Improving outdoor portrait lighting

BenM502

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I have been doing a fair amount of portrait shoots outside. I am of course trying to shoot either early in the morning or later in the day. My issue is, I just don't fee like I am getting enough "pop" out of my lighting. I am ducking for shade when possible to try to avoid wash out and such. I have started playing around a bit with an off camera flash to try to give me a little life in the shot. Is there more I can do to give a little pop while in the shade?

I notice in a lot of photos, folks will get the sun to work as a hair highlight which I am guessing is done by backing the subject up until the light is on the back/top of their head.

I am starting to wonder if I am just avoiding the sun to much..or maybe I need to find creative ways to get a reflector up since I am normally out shooting alone and do not have someone there to hold one for me.

Any tips would be grand.

thank Y'all!
 
Have a look at this tutorial. It demonstrates the advantage of having diffusers and reflectors for outdoor portraits. It's a Lastolite product video, but whatever you happen to have (or purchase) can be implemented likewise. Lastolite School of Photography has many, many useful tutorials that are worth a look. Get over the stutter of Mark though. One very cool aspect with Mark's videos is how to communicate with your model.


Using TriGrip Reflectors & Diffusers « Lastolite School of Photography
 
Post up a couple you think could be better and we can give tips that are relevant. it's hard to give generic tips for outdoor lighting because the circumstances vary widely.
 
A couple examples:
$Barrett Cooper 12-21-12dsc_0059.jpg$Leahdsc_0104.jpg$Christine Eppersondsc_0428.jpg
 
Open shade and overcast days...yeah...that's kind of what those weather conditions can easily create...like the shot of the baby in the shade; soft,even light on the infant, buuuuut a bright background that actually pulls the eye away from the baby. And the light on the baby? It is low-contrast and does not create any shadowing, and therefore there's not much "shaping" going on on the infant. Getting a bit of a catchlight in the subject's eyes would help some. You can create that by using flash, or by positioning the person so that their eyes are facing a light source or large reflector. Probably the single best tip I could offer would be to move the shooting right to the EDGE of the shady area...within a couple of feet of the edge. In that way, you can quite often create a BIG catchlight on the top of the eyeball, from the sky, and the light at that transition zone has more contrast than the light say, 40 feet inside the open,shaded area. You can also find this kind of light on the shaded side of a city street, or sometimes in between buildings at the ends of alley-ways. You can also find this where overhead porches, or awnings, or trees, create small,shaded zones which are very NEAR to brighter areas.

To create this kind of light, things like awnings, picnic awnings, and reflector panels and diffusion scrims, can all be used. Some of the reflector and scrim makers, like Lastolite, and Scrim Jim, PhotoFlex, California SunBounce, etc, have some videos on YouTube and their web sites that show how to do this. You can also search for the phrase "subtractive lighting" and see if that turns up some info.
 
I was pretty crazy unhappy with the shoot of the baby. It was after that shoot I started playing with the off camera flash outside. for example, this was an overcast day where i put the flash on the camera and held it out at about 45 degrees:
$Bennett Familydsc_0183.jpg

I am trying to come up with a portable quick set up reflector holder that I can take out and use on posed family shoots (even though some of my favorite shots tend to be the ones I get walking between locations or in between shots. My guess is for those to get the "pop" I am looking for I will have to use off camera flash).

Thanks for taking a look and the tips!
 
The lighting in the shot of the mother holding the baby girl (post #7) is MUCH better lighting than in the other,earlier examples...it has a very nice degree of delicate shadows, which subtly reveal shape and depth.
 
Scrim-Jim. Google search. Look at alllllll the wonderful equipment designed to make portraiture and catalog and promo photos prettier and better and easier to print!!!

Scrim-Jim - Google Search
 
Congratulations! you just sent me to a site where I am not going to help but to be able to spend more money! I am sure my wife will thank you too! LOL!

This is great! Thanks!
 
While the picture of the baby has a distracting bright yellow-green background, the light IS night and soft, and the foreground is nice and blurred and it's a good composition.

This is a great candidate for a b&w conversion.

R +41, G +37, B +35 in the channel mixer.

The OPs images are marked "NOT okay to edit"!
 
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The OPs images are marked "NOT okay to edit"!


Grr missed that. I had typed a longer response but when I clicked the image to look at it it threw out what I had typed. I guess I was so pissed I was seeing red and didn't check close enough after that. Sorry.
 
Here's something to think about: Your shutter speed doesn't matter so much when using a flash.

You've heard of 'dragging the shutter' right?

When using flash you can go the other way a bit to lower the ambient and in so doing lower it's impact on the subject.
 

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