{"id":3330,"date":"2010-04-17T10:28:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-17T00:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=3330"},"modified":"2010-04-17T10:53:24","modified_gmt":"2010-04-17T00:53:24","slug":"natural-looking-outdoor-portraits-with-a-single-flash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=3330","title":{"rendered":"Natural looking outdoor portraits with a single flash"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned in a previous post<\/a>, last weekend I offered to help a friend shoot some beginner models for their portfolios in an outdoor urban setting on a freezing cold, windy day.<\/p>\n

I thought this would be a great opportunity to try my portable Westcott umbrella softbox and a flash in manual mode, much as how the excellent blog from Neil van Niekerk <\/a>advocates.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t matter which camera or flash you use – I could have done this with any flash with a wireless trigger and either an Olympus E510 with Olympus ZD 50-200mm f\/2.8-3.5 lens, or a Panasonic GH-1 with Olympus ZD 50mm f\/2.0 macro (manual focus only on this camera), but for this outing, I blew the dust of my Canon 1D Mark III and used one of my favourite (although often difficult to use) lenses – the Canon EF 135mm f\/2.0L<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Neil has some great pointers in his blogs regarding use of a single flash as the main light for outdoor portraiture.<\/p>\n

He manages to achieve this by ensuring ambient light on the subject’s face in only 1-2 stops underexposed from the main flash light, thus ensuring there are no dark shadows while using the flash in a softbox which ensures the edge of the shadows are nicely blended rather than being harsh – if you don’t have a softbox, you could bounce flash off a white cloth or wall.<\/p>\n

The first requirement is finding a location with an aesthetic background lit approximately1-2 stops more than the subject<\/strong> – and as I found, finding such locations out of the wind can be more difficult than it would seem – a sunlit background is generally too bright for the ambient light falling on your subject unless this is reflected sunlight from a wall rather than from open sky.
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\nOnce you have found your location, then you need to work out how you would like to render the background<\/strong>:<\/p>\n