Shooting into the sun

A commonly-held belief is that shooting into the sun is a bad idea, and often it’s true. Lower spec/point & shoot cameras don’t cope well with direct sunlight and even when using a DSLR with a good lens (and a hood) it takes careful control to avoid horribly loosing contrast and going crazy with lens flare.

Using a flash is nearly always essential, depending on the effect you’re trying to achieve, but balancing your subject with the background is not easy when using a flash in bright sunshine. This is the key to getting a good photograph. There are a variety of ways to do this and I’ll let better photographers than me explain it. Go and read anything on the subject by Joe McNally, David Hobby or Neil van Niekerk.

Joanna and I took our son Harvey to Blackheath today to enjoy the last of the year’s sunshine (the obligatory single-day “Indian Summer” we always seem to get around this time of year in London).

I was lying in the grass with the 5D MkII with a 24-70 f2.8 lens and 580EXII flash attached and Harvey was held aloft so that the sun was directly behind his head. When I shoot into strong sunlight, I go to Manual mode at the flash sync speed of 1/200 (for the 5D MkII) and dial down the aperture to get a good exposure for the sky behind Harvey’s head. It was so bright today that I needed to be at around f11 or f14 to kill the light at 1/200. I’m happy to let the flash do its TTL magic but in this kind of severe light I knew I needed to increase flash compensation a full stop to punch enough light into Harvey’s face.



Very little basic editing was needed on the RAW files in Lightroom other than some cropping and slight adjusting of exposure and fill light. The major work was done by creating a drastic shift downwards in the blue Luminance slider to create that almost otherworldly, nearly-way-too-far-over-the-top darkening of the sky, which creates the halo around Harvey’s head and makes him pop. It is this adjustment together with the successful balancing of ambient and flash light and the stressing of the colour blue, which really makes this shot work. It almost looks like it was shot in a studio.

I was wary of creating “banding” in the subtle gradation of light that forms the halo around Harvey’s head so I exported the files out of Lightroom as 16-bit TIFs. Had I exported as 8-bit, I would have lost some of the information in the file which might have damaged this key area of the photograph.



I now want to do some light edits in Photoshop. Thanks to the strong shift in the colour of the sky from editing in Lightroom, Harvey’s hat was too blue. I brought it back to white in Photoshop by first selecting it with the wonderful Quick Selection tool in Photoshop (W key) and the creating two masked adjustment layers: a warm colour filter and a simple Curves layer set to Screen blending mode in which I pushed up the highlights on the hat slightly. I also needed to bring some punch back to Harvey’s jersey so I Quick Selected it and added a masked Curves layer, set to Screen blending here too.

A useful tip: to brighten something up in Photoshop very naturally and easily, use a Curves adjustment layer set to Screen mode and leave it there; you don’t even need to make an adjustment to the curve itself, just mask out everything but the area you want to lighten and play with the Opacity of the layer until it looks right. Easy.

Harvey has wonderful blue eyes and it probably goes without saying that blue tones are a key element to these images, so I also used another masked Curves layer, set to Normal blending mode, to dab in some extra brightness and contrast and bring out the colour in the eyes a little more. As with all my portraits, I also added some extra sharpness to the eyes only and left the rest of the image at the default sharpening setting from Lightroom.

(Thanks to Harvey’s Mummy for holding up our handsome model -x).

All in all, a nice quick edit and I’m pleased with how these images came out. The moral of this story: when the sun comes out, make sure your flash does too!

PS - Harvey’s natty skullcap is Danish - a present from friends who live there. Looking good!