Prospect Park

Played around with some different outdoor lighting situations today - namely side-lighting, back-lighting and front-lighting. My wife was kind enough to stand still while I blinded her with the sun, and then myself.

The interesting thing is, while the side-lighting provided the nicest of the 3 choices, it was certainly still very harsh light. The blown-out highlights on the lit side of the face were hard to overcome on location - but also with the wonderful tools in Lightroom 3 (see below). Today's test was a pre-diffuser trial. I hope to be returning to the glorious light within the next 2 or 3 days to try this again with the Lastolite. Perhaps at that time I'll realize I should have bought a tri-grip diffuser with a handle...

                                                       Before                             After

                                                    

The front-lit shots felt a bit warmer than the others, though that could easily be corrected in post. Of course, as all the books state - your subject will squint. Correct! I found this light to be harsh, but not unbearbly so. Perhaps the position of the 5 o'clock sun was better than a lower-on-the-horizon shot would have ben.

The back-lit shots of course yield a shot loaded with lens flare. No matter if the hood was indeed on, those spots were all over the images. While I could have swapped out the UV filter for a CPL (would that have even helped much?) I thought of removing the filter alltogether, but that wasn't the purpose of today's exercise. I was concerned with the quality of light. And back-lighting is rough. My subject was dark, the entire image was washed out and dull. Certainly not high quality light.

Truth be told, these tests are about getting the shot right, in camera, the first time. I want to leave the least amount of work to be done in post. I have been using Auto Exposure Bracketing quite extensively these past few days (and learning that the AEB setting disables itself when the camera is powered down and need to be re-enabled the next time you power up). This trick from Jay Maisel has helped quite a bit when I am worried about obtaining the correct exposure values TTL.