Shooting with sun and clouds
You may have heard the term, blowing out the background, This means that you expose the sub-
ject and basically ignore what the camera settings want for an even exposure in the background.
This style of photography is common in modern wedding photography, and offers a very romantic,
natural style of photography. So don’t be afraid to shoot this way, it will give your photography an
artistic approach that people will love. It offers a timeless, classic style too.
My personal rule is to try to expose to the dress or brides face, in the case of our photo across the
page, you can see all of the detail in the dress, but the sky and even most of the grooms head is
over exposed with the bright sunlight creating some lens flare. For this type of photography, you
don’t want to use a flash or even any reflectors, just set your camera to spot metering as I men-
tioned earlier in the book, and let the camera exposure vary from frame to frame. For this image
I hand held the camera down low without looking in the viewfinder, I was walking in front of the
couple and keeping pace with them, simply firing lots of shots and varying my camera position until
I had them targeted just right.
This may not be the most technically perfect photo, but my goal with shooting some images like this
for the couple is to offer them some very real moments that are not so posed. I shoot these when
they are not aware that I’m taking shots of them, and the only thing I suggest to them is that they
hold hands and walk together. Most of the times I do this, the couples are laughing, relaxed and just
enjoying themselves on the biggest day of their lives.
For this photo I used a Canon 5d II with a 24-105mm IS lens, ISO 800, f5.6 at 1/6000th. I’m in full sun,
but I’m exposing to what would be a shade setting, as I want to expose the front of the dress. I blow
out the background and try to get as much lens flare as I can on purpose.