The downside to shooting in the shade of trees is the greenish cast that comes from sunlight filtering through green leaves. Shooting in camera raw helps. ISO 400 1/160 @f2.8 80mm setting on 80-200 zoom lens. Available light only not Speedlite used.
When photographing people outdoors, besides the esthetics of your location, the time of the day is probably the single biggest factor in determining how good your picture will look.
Lighting especially its intensity is critical because available lighting in any scene outdoors determines
if your subject will be squinting
if you can overpower the ugly patchiness of your background
if you can control the contrast between your shadow and highlights
Asia was photographed with a studio strobe WL800 inside a Photoflex Octodome gelled with 1/4 CTO. Lens was fitted with a fader filter which I could darken by turning to dial in a shutter speed and aperture combination to give me a handholdable shutter speed and wide aperture to blur out the palm trees in the background.ISO 100 1/350sec @ F2.8 80-200 zoom set at 140mm
I am a fan of Westerns.
But I always wonder why their directors choose to film gunfights at high noon.
I suppose it makes sense from the gunfighter’s perspective.
The entire scene is lit by the sun.
As long as a gunslinger doesn’t have eyes that are too light-sensitive and those eyes are shielded from the glaring sun overhead, it totally makes sense.
Lizelle photographed by Steve Fetbrandt 1/250sec f4.5 55mm. Notice the background and how distraction abound because of the available light. Notice the highlights? Those are from the sun on the right.
Overpowering our sun is a tall order even with the most powerful of studio strobes.
So to attempt that with small flash units or speedlites that run off 4AA batteries requires either the sun to be covered by clouds or one has to wait till the sun is past its most powerful noon hour.
In case there are those of you reading this wondering why is this desirable, the answer is for control.
One of the techniques I teach during my Small Flash Lighting workshop is how to change the mood and feel of a scene.
When relying strictly on available light to make pictures, you constantly have to find backgrounds that are not lit or backgrounds that are lit in such a way it is less subdued against your subject.
Remember, in your scene, whatever isn’t lit is less of a distraction.
For my pictures below which were taken at about the same time as Steve’s, I made sure to use my longest focal length lens so I could blur out the backgrounds. (The longer the focal length, the shallower the depth-of-field)
Steve used 55m to 200 mm Nikon lens but set his lens at the 55 mm setting.
