Summer afternoon
Oct, 2021Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken in a campground just north of the Susquehanna State Park in Maryland. There is a small pond there with a small dock at the edge of the pond, where this image was taken The combination of location, lighting, trees, and of course a beautiful model made this outdoor, all natural-light portrait successful!!Time
This image was taken at 10:20am in the morning. The sun was still low in the sky and provided a beautiful warm light. rewarding.Lighting
This, like most of my outdoor images, was taken with all natural light. The model was positioned so the sunlight provided a nice hair light / rim light for the photo. You can see in the image the nice light on the leaves in the background and on the model's hair. While you can capture great images all day long, earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon always provides a nice warm sunlight that makes natural light photography very rewarding.Equipment
This particular image was taken with a Canon 5D Mark IV, a Canon 24-105 f/4 lens. Camera and exposure settings were lens set to 70mm, aperture f/7.1, exposure time 1/100, ISO set to 160, and exposure bias set to -1/3 stop to help control the highlights in the image. The lens used is a zoom lens with a minimum aperture of f/4 at all focal lengths, but to ensure the whole subject and part of the background was in focus, I deleted an aperture of f/7.1 for this shot. The photo was taken hand held (no tripod or camera support), using only the natural light in the scene.. no flash or reflectors.Inspiration
This particular photo at this particular location was inspired by the great sunlight and the natural background by the small pond. The combination of the warm sunlight, the greens and browns in the background and of course the model's beautiful blonde hair combined to make this shot really special.Editing
I performed minimal post-processing on this image using Lightroom. The primary adjustments were reductions to the highlights in the image and a bit of additional contrast. Also, some minor cropping was used.In my camera bag
I have been a Canon user for many years. This image was taken with my Canon 5D Mark IV. I have also moved to Canon's mirrorless camera bodies recently and am not shooting with the Canon R5 mirrorless most of the time. As for lenses that are always in my bag, they include the trusty Canon 24-105 zoom, a 100mm marco lens (that I use for macro as well as portrait images), a 100-400 zoom telephoto, and usually an 85mm f/1.2. Other equipment that I carry includes a variable ND filter, circular polarizer filter, a ColorChecker Passport, and a Peak Design Travel Tripod. Regarding the filters, I usually buy filters for the largest lens I carry, then use step up/down adapter ring to mount the filter on smaller lenses... Saves a lot of money that way ;-) Regarding the ColorChecker Passport, if you do a lot of outdoor shooting where there is a lot of green from grass / trees, etc., these are very handy tools to have. You can capture an image of the ColorChecker and then create color correction profiles for most of the popular editing software that enables you to easily remove color casts that often occur when shooting under trees, etc.Feedback
I enjoy taking natural light photos like this one, using only the ambient light. For me, the key to making this kid of image successful is making sure that you position your subject in the light in a manner that makes the light an integral part of the image. In this image the subject was positioned so the warm sunlight served as a hair / rim light on the subject and the leaves in the background. One thing I often do is to just walk all around a particular location and get a sense of how the light is interacting with the background etc. And I'll ofter try different angles, different positions with respect to the primary light source. So I guess the bottom line here is to really look at / think about how the light is interacting with the image, try different combinations, and be willing to take the time to experiment a little..
