Let’s start off with the basics
This is a good way to get some beautiful photography, simply using the sun. You can see from
this photo that the sun was very bright, and looks like a cloudless day. I had my model face
the sun, place her hand up to block the sun so she could see, and I took the shot. The sun was right
after mid day in the sky. Here’s a diagram below with the breakdown.
Key light from sun is usually coming from behind the camera, I usually have my model face di-
rectly toward the sun, then I have them rotate 10 to 20 degrees away from the sunlight to change the
direction of the shadow on their face, and to help keep the sun from beaming directly in their eyes.
For fashion and portrait work I will use a reflector as a backlight or sidelight to add a little bit of light
coming from behind the subject to create more dimension or lighting layers in the photograph.
Ok, that’s simple enough. Here’s a few more tips that I used to help give this photo such a brilliant look.
First of all, I used a Canon 5dII with a 70-200 mm IS lens at ISO 100, F10 at 1/3200th shutter speed. I also
used a Polarizer filter on the lens to help darken the blues in the sky and water. This gave an effect of
the sun in the morning and gave us a darker background.
Shooting in full sun has its challenges. First of all, for the subject, it is very bright. In this case we created
a shield next to her to block some of the light using a 4x6 white/gray reflector. That created a little
bounce on her dress, but not so much that you can see with the eye. You can also use a black scrim
to help subtract some of the light, and help the model to ease her eyes by being able to focus on a
dark area. The other challenge is for the photographer being able to see the camera settings, For
me as a photographer, I love shooting in this type of sun, and for fashion work it gives you a great light
and some dramatic shadows to work with. I’ll show some more outdoor sun situations in the next few
pages.