Outdoor Portraits

The Outdoor Portraits project is very popular and gets us out of the studio and into the open air with the model. This allows us to use available light in the wide open spaces with more varied natural backgrounds. It also brings into consideration the weather conditions, the direction of the available light, plus the time of day, all of which control where and when, or even if, we can shoot at all.

In a perfect world, we would select the early mornings and late afternoons for our outdoor portrait shoots as they generally serve up the beautiful soft lighting that makes the best of our model. However, there are the majority of times on location when, irrespective of the time of day, the light conditions or the weather are nowhere close to perfect, yet our timescales and client requirements demand that the shoot must still take place. We show how to cover all shooting options for success.

The use of supplementary lighting from speed-lights, diffusers and reflectors are an important part of this project as light levels in Bulgaria are extremely harsh and will generally need to be 'softened'.

The specialist techniques of High Speed Sync, the image saving skill that rescues many a photo-shoot in high light levels requiring a shallow depths of field, is also covered in depth as an essential photographic 'must have' skill for the photographer working outside the studio.

(Click on the images to 'Enlarge' or 'Holiday Projects' menu button above for more projects).