FAQ Post - Shooting in harsh sunlight: Loudoun County Photographer, Northern Virginia Photographer, D.C. Photographer

I thought it would be fun to share some shooting tips for those out there that may be starting out or just want to learn some basic photography skills.

This one is on shooting in harsh sunlight. It's normal to shy away from shooting in harsh light. If you are used to shooting in automatic mode on your DSLR, you notice that often when you shoot in harsh sunlight, your subject turns out to be dark. That's because your camera has a built in light meter (it reads the light levels coming into the camera sensor). It looks at the light from corner to corner and tells it over-all how to set the shutter speed and aperture.

If you really want to have success photographing in harsh light, learn how to shoot in manual mode. This allows you to set the shutter speed and aperture yourself. A book I highly recommend is Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Exposure."

Assuming you have that mastered let's move on to some examples. In the first example photo, I faced my subject with the sun almost directly behind her. Usually in this instance I would want a light modifier like a reflector or the flash to bounce light back onto the subject. In this instance, the subject was standing on white concrete which served as my natural reflector. Using the spot meter function in my camera, I took a light reading from the subject's face and adjusted my shutter speed and aperture till the camera read a correct exposure. Voila! Time of day 3 p.m. ISO 100 f 2.8 S/S 1/500 sec.




In this next example, I used my speedlight mounted on my camera. The example on the left shows the properly exposed shot and the one on the right shows the shot without fill light. Whenever I use my speedlight for fill, I stop down my shutter speed by 2/3, otherwise I find that the shot is over exposed. Lots of trial and error. This was taken at 11:30 a.m. in very harsh sunlight. ISO 100 f 9.0 S/S 1/160 sec.



In the last example the sun was coming from the right at 4:30 p.m. I placed a large reflector to her left, and my speedlight added fill flash from the front. Sometimes two light modifiers are required to achieve the desired results. Again with the flash, I stopped my shutter speed down by 2/3. Shot at ISO 100 f 2.8 S/S 1/100 sec.