Nikon D300 w/ 35mm, f/4 @ 1/1000, ISO 100
Outdoor lighting is very tricky. Day to day changes are obvious and unpredictable, but even hour to hour or minute to minute changes can be tough to manage. So what do you do you when you don’t have a truck load of lighting and grip gear and can’t afford to rent?
Get a reflector.
While a reflector might not be the answer to all of your problems, it will solve enough of them for you to wonder why you took so long to get one. I recommend one that’s at least 32″ wide with multiple coverings that includes black, silver, gold, and white translucent. With one or two of these in your kit you’ve got a flag, a silk, and a reflector all in one product.
In this image, we were at Boulder Creek around high noon. Because it was still so early in the year, the mid-day sun wasn’t as harsh as it is in the summer, but I still had a lot of high contrast shadows to deal with. My solution? You guessed it: my 42″ reflector. I zipped on the gold and silver cover to fill in the shadows and stop down the background to minimize overall contrast. The gold created some additional warmth not available in the lunchtime sun and pushed the creek and trees in the background to about -1 2/3 stops from the subject.
In my next post, perhaps I’ll write about how to keep your child models from squinting when a big giant reflector is pointing the sun directly into their faces. Maybe.
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