cgardner
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 p.1 #3 · outdoor music shoot- clouds/light | |
Outdoors the nemesis is contrast. Your camera can record about a 7 stop range of detail, but a typical outdoor scene might have a range of 10-12 stops. Since exposure must be made to record highlight detail that results in a loss of several stops of shadow detail and the rendering of the midtones much darker that seen by eye: i.e., they look darker than "normal" in a photo with optimally exposed highlights.
There are several possible contrast reducing strategies to overcome that camera limitation: 1) use flat natural lighting, 2) artificially flatten the natural lighting by using a scrim, 3) shoot into the shadows of the natural light and use a reflector for fill, 4) shoot into the shadows of the natural light and use flash for fill.
You'll get the most dramatic lighting effect by shooting into the shadows and adding fill, but that's also when the natural light has the most contrast and you'll need fill from a reflector or flash. Conversely flat lighting has less contrast and will allow the camera to record a greater range of detail in the shadows when the white textured details are retained with correct exposure, but pulling off a interesting looking shot in flat light is a bit more difficult, requiring planning to contrast the parts of the subject you want seen against the background. Pray for an overcast day which will have lower contrast. Using a scrim is way to create artificial overcast but probably isn't practical for your situation.
Fill flash is the simplest solution logistically and the easiest to control. All you'd need to do is keep the flash on / above the the camera, shoot into the shadows of the natural light and first correctly expose the backlit highlights, then add flash power in the foreground until you get sufficient detail revealed. The net result is a photo which has well exposed natural highlights and a full range of shadow detail revealed by the fill flash.
The important technical things to realize about "fill" flash are:
1) Its not really fill outdoors: When you shoot into the shadows of the natural light the sky the subject is facing becomes the fill and the flash becomes the "key" light which creates the shape revealing highlights. Thus in that situation you need to position the flash as you would a key light, above the head of the subject, to achieve a flattering highlight /shadow pattern on the face.
2) Flash exposure is only correct at one distance: When shooting in natural light its quite easy to use foreground objects to frame something further back in the scene. But because flash power falls off 2 stops (more or less) each time the distance is doubled that doesn't work. The foreground objects will either fool the ETTL metering resulting in underexposure of the middle-ground, or if flash is adjusted to correctly expose the middle-ground the foreground will be over-exposed. Bottom line is that you need to keep what you want correctly exposed with the flash (i.e. the face and hands) closest to the flash, and also keep everything you want to be correctly exposed a similar distance to the flash.
For example, you wouldn't want to shoot a pianist with flash fill from the far end of a grand piano over its length because when the flash is adjusted for correct exposure of the face and white clothing the foreground of the piano would be blown out. Instead you'd want to compose the shot as a side view so the artist and piano are equidistant from the flash, or alternately compose the shot so the artist is in the foreground and the piano is visible behind, with the flash falling off and making it darker and less distracting.
One final piece of advice: bring a ladder. When shooting from eye level the high angle of even indirect natural light will cause the eye sockets to be shaded by the brow. Fill flash can't really help much in that situation because as you add fill to the sockets the same amount of light gets added to the highlights next to them. The solution to the dilemma is quite simple, raise the face up into the light so it reaches the eyes. You'll then need to raise the point of view of the camera to capture a flattering facial angle; hence the importance of the ladder.
Raising the camera is also a good strategy for dealing with distracting backgrounds, near/far size distortion, and flash fall off. In a situation like described earlier, shooting over the length of a grand piano at the musician if shooting from the top of 8ft ladder the downward angle would result in more even lighting because when elevated over the camera the light would be more equidistant to both ends.
Chuck
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