My Sunday series on outdoor portraiture continues today with a portrait of Krystyne, who I photographed twice over a two year period at group model shoots that were held in Phoenix. Arizona.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
The classic way of exposing images on sunny days is the famous Sunny 16 rule. The concept is based on setting the lens aperture to f/16 and using a shutter speed that’s closest to the ISO number selected (or film used.). If your camera is set at ISO 125, the sunlight exposure would be 1/125th of a second at f/16.
According to the Current Results website that summarizes published data and research on weather, wildlife and the environment, the Denver area has 300 sunny days a year. By comparison, Miami that’s located in the “Sunshine State” has 248 sunny days and Phoenix, where I made today’s featured image, has 286 days. The US average is 205 sunny days.
I firmly believe that the best photographs are going to be made from images the receive the best possible exposure . Modern camera technology has relieved us of any guesswork for checking exposure under most common lighting situations, including sunny days but the ability to tweak exposure can make or break an image’s quality. Yet I’m surprissed at the number of people who don’t care about correct exposure, saying, “I’ll just fix it later in Photoshop.” You can always use digital darkroom techniques to correct exposure problems and I will admit that I’ll use them when I make mistakes.
The problem with making portraits on sunny days and the biggest mistake some photographers make is having the subject face the sun. Their idea is that this kind of pose will put the most light on the subject and while that may be true, it also produces world class squints from the subject and nobody except Clint Eastwood looks good squinting. I prefer to have the subject relax and will turn her around with back to the sun and use fill flash to illuminate her face. When used correctly fill flash won’t look out of place and can add a little sparkle to the subject’s eyes. This is something I’ve talked about before and plan to do in next Sunday’s post as well—with a twist.
How I made this portrait
As I’ve mentioned before, when working with portrait subjects outdoors, I like to use a hand held light meter to measure the light on both sides of a person’s face to determine the lighting ratio and then used an average of the two readings to set the exposure. After clicking the shutter and I’m not happy with what I see in the EVF or LCD screen, I may bracket a bit in one-third stop increments or use the exposure compensation control up or down.
This portrait of Krystyne was shot using a 6.3-megapixel Canon EOS D60 and one of my favorite lenses at the time, the EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens (at 28mm) that I stupidly sold. It’s been discontinued by the manufacturer but you can pick up used copies of this lens from many sources, including KEH Camera and MPB.
The camera’s pop-up flash was used to add some fill producing a final exposure of 1/200 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 200. The image was originally captured as a JPEG file, before I fully embraced RAW+JPEG capture. The file was lightly retouched and then tweaked in Vivenza and Color Efex.
This image was made during the first time I photographed Krystyne. I also photographed her a year later at another group model shoot and she was, again, wonderful to work with but she confessed she was considering giving up on modeling since her career had not taken off as she hoped. I told her not to give up because she was so young and had a bright future. The age I thought she was—and I’m pretty good at guessing women’s ages—was ten years younger than what she admitted too. I again told her not to give up but I sadly never had a chance to photograph her after that.
Krystyne is one of the many wonderful models I’ve photographed and who appear in my book Available Light Glamour Photography and right now Amazon is reporting it as “Temporarily out of stock.” Used copies are, however, available for around twenty-five bucks, as I write this, and Kindle copies are \available for $27.12 for those preferring a digital format.