the sun can be your friend

Here is a great Article on how to use the sun in different way from Eric Rechbaum

Using the sun to your advantage.

For most of the daylight hours the sun is harsh and gives off flat light, terrible for most photos. However, during what is refered to as the “magic hour” (more like magic 20 minutes) around sunrise and sunset the sun can be a better light source than all the Profoto lights and gear money can buy.
These four photos all use the sun in different ways, giving 4 completely different looks to each image.
These are some headshots/promo shots I did for my friend Alena this weekend in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. As we were walking along a trail I noticed a great shaft of light coming through the trees and had Alena walk up the trail and stand right in it. Perfect backlight on her hair. This is a great example of making the available light work in your favor. The sun was just low enough that it had a really nice yellowish glow to it, but bright enough that Alena’s face  and the trees behind her are still exposed well. 10 or 15 minutes later the sun would be too low and we would have lost those direct rays highlighting her hair. Perfect case of right place at the right time.

This next one is one of my favorites from the day. Alena’s dress is so bright and really pops out in the photo compared to the dull winter background of bare trees and dead grass. Her expression and posture is great. This is also natural light, with the sun behind me and almost completely under the horizon. This was one of the last shots of the day, almost didn’t happen, but this huge tree was calling us. I tried some shots with the wide angle to get in all the crazy branches above Alena, but it was just too distorted at that angle to make a nice portrait.

It was really hard to find any spots in the park where we could get the sun directly behind Alena’s head for some orange sky strobist shots, but we finally found a good spot just in time for the magic moment when the sun was nice and orange. This first shot was just a test shot to expose the sky without the flash. As a result Alena is pretty underexposed, but I liked the image so much, and it was my only one without the flash in this spot, so I tried to bring her up in photoshop, and ran the image through a cross processing filter, something I’ve been quite fond of doing recently.

For this last one, I setup a light-stand and shot a flash through an umbrella, camera left. Both this one and the previous shot were at 1/250th of a second, I just stopped down from f/3.5 to f/6 for this one with the flash to get a bit more color in the sky.

So there are four examples of different ways to take portraits using the sun to your advantage. Which one is your favorite? Leave a comment, and send links of your own magic hour portraits.