February 12: Fill Flash in Bright Sun

A few weeks ago we looked at doing some fill flash at dusk. We covered some good techniques for blending the light so that it is subtle and looks more controlled than a big bright flash feeling. In this tutorial we are looking at working with a very bright sun. It is sometimes daunting, but we hope to show you some techniques that will make it easier to understand. Here is the image we are working with today. (click left image to see it larger)

The Photoshop Movie below will cover these and more. If you want to skip down to watch it first, we don't mind. Here are the Contact Sheets discussed in the video:
Sheet #1
Sheet #2

The image we prepared. This is what we ended up with. As you can see, it is a bit more warm and has a nice feel to it.

The image as it came out of the camera raw with little modification.

This Movie will show you the thougt process behind the image selection. It is a look at the contact sheets and a discussion of the overall process of the lighting.

When you are working with bright sun, you must make sure you have the flare controlled and the light strong enough to fill the shadow side. Getting the light in close is a challenge that we all face, and I have a few ways of working with my speedlights. On this shoot, my assistant hadn't shown up yet and the sun was going down. I put a speedlight on the top of a stand with a clamp and two bungee cords. I attached a wireless remote and tested it. It fired so we headed down toward the water. I brought a second one and we started shooting. Here are the contact sheets we looked at in the movie above.

I placed a strobe on both sides of the camera at about 3 feet on each side. I set them on 1/8 power and did my tests. The back part of the scene looked good at f-22 at 1/100. So I wanted the main light to be f22 at 1/200. That would give me the look that I wanted. The f-stop was controlled by the flash, and by increasing the shutter speed by one stop, I was able to darken the sky around the sun. (Praise to my 20-35mm 2.8L... what a smooth flare)

The video discusses the different challenges of the shot, but here is a look at some of the images that didn't work and why...

Here Briana wasn't jumping high enough to block the sun. Since she was already jumping amazingly high, I decided to move myself and the camera in a bit. I also noticed that her feet and calves were being lost due to them going straight back. I decided to turn her sideways.	Here's the one that looked good for exposure, but as you can see I have moved her to jumping to the side so I can see her legs. We knew the hair was going to be a challenge. You can see why. I had her turn her head when she jumped in the succeeding images and that would sweep it out of the way n most cases.
And here is what it looks like when the flash doesn't fire. I thought it was important to see what the body was doing in front of the sun, and went for a silhouette. This is the best way to make sure you aren't getting destructive flare on the edges or the hair.	This is the one that is shown in the video above. As you can see the light was tilted down a bit, making the face too dark. While it could be a cool effect, I am not that crazy about it.

Thanks for visiting the Lighting Essentials Tutorials pages. Please let me know if there is something you want to see explained.

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