Outdoor Portraits

Note: I have written before about shooting portraits outdoors and my technique. Here is another article on the topic.

 Outdoor Portraits

by William Lulow

I love to do portraits outdoors as well as in the studio. You might think that it’s harder to control natural light, but if you keep a couple of ideas in mind, you will see that it’s not as difficult as it might appear. The trick is to let the sun or ambient light make your highlights (accent lights) for you. The way to do this is to put your subjects’ backs to the sun. This sounds contrary to everything you might have learned about making photographs of people outdoors, but if you think about it for a second, you will see that making people face the sun produces a lot of squinting and makes for conditions that are really difficult to control such as highlights and shadows. Turning your subjects’ backs to the sun immediately opens their eyes and allows for much better images. The problem is that when their backs are facing the sun, their faces are often in shadow. Once you study a bit about lighting, you will see that shadows of people really need to be transparent if you hope to see people’s facial expressions. So, you need somehow to “fill-in” those shadows caused by the sun.

This image of a large family was made in the subjects’ back yard. Notice that you can see everyone’s expression and that the sun is providing beautiful highlights on everyone’s hair and shoulders. The shadows in this picture have all been filled in and all the details of facial expressions are visible.

The one thing I try to do when I shoot any portraits outdoors, as above, is to place the subject(s) so that the sun acts as an accent light. It just gives the photograph some extra “pop.” It entails placing the subjects with their backs to the sun and makes it necessary to fill in the shadows with some extra light. In the above family image, the sun supplied the necessary highlights on the subjects’ hair and the entire shot was filled in from the front with the addition of two portable speedlights. Here are more examples. This one of singer/songwriter Susan Kane, was shot on the deck of my old house:

The one below of the wedding couple was retouched to add the dramatic sky!

As a matter of course, I always use a flash for outdoor portraits. Sometimes, if I don’t carry extra lights with me, I use the built-in flash on the camera to provide a little fill in light where it may be necessary:

This shot was made as I was losing light. There was a hint of the sun off to the right which provided a faint highlight on the subject’s hair, but I just popped up the camera’s flash to fill in the shadows in the front a bit.

Again, whenever I have a portrait to do outdoors, I always bring one or two extra lights with me. This image was made with the camera and telephoto lens quite a distance from the subject because it was a long telephoto used to make the background blurry, but the light was placed closer:

This was the lighting setup for the above image:

Here is another setup using the umbrella as fill-in:

That’s my 85mm lens on the camera, the bag was a weight used to keep the light steady. The image is below:

Here you can see a bit of the highlights from the sun on the hair and shoulders.

There are many things you can do with light when you are shooting outdoors. As I mentioned, I am always aware of light and especially when on location, I use the sun as a highlight. In order to do this, you must fill in the shadows it causes. The best outdoor light is cloudy bright, where the clouds produce a soft light, but the sun still adds the highlights.