3 Tips for Better Outdoor Portrait Lighting: What to Consider When Taking Outdoor Photos

Taking great portraits in a secluded indoor studio is a piece of cake. You can control the light to the "enth" degree and position your model anywhere you'd like. With outdoor portraits it can be much more tricky. Move your model too far in a certain direction and it may result in extremely harsh sunlight that is difficult to control. Having specific poses or particular positions in mind with the obstacle of harsh sunlight can require a lot of creative effort, but it is most definitely not impossible and sometimes it is visually way more stimulating when you have enough creative juices flowing. I personally know a lot of professional photographers that try to avoid outdoor portraits at all costs, but I've also got other friends who strictly work outside and have taught me simple techniques that allow room for an insane amount of control over natural light. The following are a few techniques that will help you easily manipulate natural light in any way that you'd like.

1) Use Diffusers and Reflectors

To get rid of harsh highlights/shadows, you can use a variety of diffusers to hold above your model's head and block 20% or more of the harsh light, depending on the thickness, color, and tint of the diffuser(s) you are working with. A diffuser can be a blanket, a semi-transparent piece of material, and some reflector kits have a circular diffuser as a base to hold the reflector kit jacket (black on one side, silver on the other, turn it inside out and you've got gold on one side and white on the other).

When you've got a nice sunny sky, you should always consider it to be your main source of light, whether it is your key (main) light or your back light. This way you can use reflectors to effectively act as fill light, or back light depending on how you use the sunlight (as a key light or as a back light). Some people prefer to use gold reflectors, some prefer to use silver, and there is no right or wrong one - It is just a preference. Gold will obviously give you a warmer grade of color, as silver will give you a colder grade of color. It is always great to experiment with lighting but in some cases it is even greater to experiment with the color of the light you are experimenting with.

2) Use Outdoor Locations with a Roof

Using the raw power of sunlight can be great as a key light but sometimes you may want a more balanced, natural looking style of light. At parks you can usually find an outdoor "shelter" that is used for picnics or a resting place for those hot days when the sun is blisteringly hot. If you position your model under a roof to avoid direct sunlight, and use a reflector as you would a key light but shooting ambient light on half of their face, it will give a great glow to their face that looks very natural but at the same time very photogenic.

3) Use Portable Flash Units

So far, the best way I have used a flash unit for outdoor work is when I use raw sunlight as a backlight and use a flash unit as a key light. This works especially well if you use a real-time sunset as your background and use a flash as a key light. The beauty of flash units is that you can directly manipulate and control the light itself, not only with diffusers (like a softbox) and gels, but controlling the over all brightness of the light. From my own experience, it is far better to invest the extra money to get flash units that are controlled by aperture steps, rather than a knob that says "Bright" on one side and "Dim" on the other. Instead of wasting five minutes trying to figure out the right settings on your flash, you can use a light meter and calculate the exact settings you will need and get the lighting right first try.

In Conclusion

If you use these tips to your advantage and master them, your chances of having a hard time with outdoor portraits will most likely cease to exist in general. All of these techniques work and I have been using them for years - The real trick is learning how to improvise with this knowledge when you're in a session.