Sunny Days and flash

Picture it - 2pm on a very sunny day. You're asked to take a bunch of pictures on a beach that faces directly into the sun. What would the expected picture look like? Well, in most cases it would silhouette the subjects. They would be very dark and the background would be nice. OK, so instead you can try to compensate for the subjects. You get them to have a great skin tone and see the detail in their clothing - but oops, now your background is blown out with no definition and you can barely tell where the water ends and the sky begins.

This past weekend I faced just this situation - on the fly. We ended up getting some amazing pictures.

I heard people wondering, why is he using flash when it's so bright out? Well, notice the shadows above. They're heading toward the camera. The only way to compensate for the sun is to push back with an equal or greater amount of flash. Not to sound weird, but really not many wedding photographers do this. Look at these below. The first was purposely taken to show how the camera would take the shot without any modification to the settings or addition of secondary flash:

In the above situation I'm using natural light trying to get a sunset shot. The sun is still a little high. Their skin and clothes look fine (a little dark but can be fixed) but the sky is blown out. Not very appealing, right?

Here we used a side flash and adjust some settings on the camera and get a very dramatic sky with perfect lighting on the two of them. This is the kind of stuff you need to look for when determining who to hire. When checking out photographers look at the lighting, the composition, the detail. Don't be swayed by the fact the bride has nice bridesmaid colors of the architecture of a building is nice. Look at skin tone compared to the definition of the sky and clouds. Most photographers don't shoot a wedding with a second flash. We wouldn't shoot a wedding without.

I only put this in the blog so people can know what to look for when checking out photographers. Anyone can pick up a camera and shoot, but sometimes you can be faced with a tough situation and you've got to know how to work it. Also, every picture presented needs to be better than any other picture taken by any guest who happened to buy themselves a nice camera.