Shooting beautiful portraits in harsh sunlight

Whether it’s an outdoors family portrait or a wedding session, every photographer knows how difficult it is to shoot in broad daylight. Photography is all about the right angles, lighting balance, and color tones.

So if your style is adding soft and natural tones to your photography, you most likely want every image to look like it’s been shot on a beautiful summer day. But when the big fireball in the sky doesn’t comply, it can be a little frustrating, trying to get everything right.

Fortunately, there are a few tricks that can make shooting in harsh sunlight easier.

Shoot in Manual

To properly expose skin tones in harsh daylight is by putting camera’s setting to ‘manual mode’. Despite the technological advances in today’s era, you will still face problems with a lot of light surrounding your subject.

Your camera’s light meter won’t give you exact readings in Program Mode or Aperture Priority. The problem with these settings is that your camera makes its own decisions. In order to get it to do what you want it to do, you will need to set your camera to manual mode.

Widen Your Aperture

Harsh daylight/sunlight creates hard shadows that make facial details prominent. These are mainly imperfections such as blemishes, pores, wrinkles, and discoloration.

This can make your photography unflattering because most clients want soft hues and skin tones.

So as a photographer, your responsibility is to create a soft-looking skin tone for your clients, without any harsh light or shadows highlighting imperfections.

If you’re shooting for a wedding, shoot between f/1.2 and f/2.5 because the wider the aperture, the more it helps soften harsh lighting.

Use Spot Metering

Switching your meter to spot metering will help expose a small area of your subject’s skin to the sunlight. In addition, it will help your meter give you accurate readings, and you won’t have to worry about harsh lighting.

Dealing with Overexposure

Your camera will try to underexpose your photos because there will be a lot of lighting going into the meter. It will try to automatically darken the area and reduce the amount of light. But you can take advantage of this because you’ve set your camera to manual mode.

By slowing down your camera’s shutter speed and overriding your camera’s meter, you can shoot beautiful, fresh skin tones.

Improve Your Photography Online is a community of professional photographers that helps beginners polish their photography skills with the right tools and resources. If you’re looking for online photography classes, visit their website today or check out their sample tutorials.

Maria Harris is an expert writer and love to shopping and music.