Photography: Portrature During The Golden Hour

orginal post by dps blog

If you seen my flickr, or my work else were, you may notice that I m not a big fan of “following” waves of photography, I like to try out new things all the time, to the extent that I don’t really a signature type of photography so to speak. But this doesn’t bother me, because there is just so much for me to learn out there still.

If you’re into portraits, you’re probably going to enjoy this read, if you’re not you might as well continue because you already read more than two paragraphs.

The golden hour isn’t only there to pull of those great landscape shots, but you can also use it to your advantage to get a different type of light on your portraits, neat huh?

Well how do we go about this?

Mornings:

Here I am referring to when there is enough light out to work with some decent shutter speeds, often that time during the day when its “misty” outside, and the sun is just breaking over the tree canopy. That’s the time I m talking about.

Now there is BIG problem with mornings, and we all know what that is (unless you’re a morning person) that is dragging your subject out from their bed and have them pose for you!

For some reason I have noticed that the direction of the morning light tends to highlight textures in general, thus adding a very nice feeling to your images, so you can incorporate this into the shot.

Evenings:

The time frame I am talking about is about 1h to 45 before and after sunset; this will work as a great background and not to mention that the light will be gorgeously directional. Not to mention that people are probably going to prefer being your models at this time during the day! I was browsing some wedding photography the other day, and noted that a lot of photos where taking at the sunset time, stunning background with a very lovely subject matter.

I have a few tips for the evening shoots, so what I suggest you doing here is that you try to force your camera to have somewhat a faster shutter speed and use a flash, either on or off camera, what this will do is that it will give you a very nice colorful background if you choose to use the sky as the background, and the flash will expose your subject correctly. If you can bounce the flash or diffuse it somehow so you don’t cast those really strong shadows, because that will not in my opinion work with the harmony of the background. Another thing to add here is that you could use some color filters for your flash, I would recommend using warm colors because that would make the photo more “believable” so to speak, if you don’t have the color filters for your flash, you can always fix that in post process, but it´s always very nice to get the photo perfect from scratch!

That’s it for today ladies and gents!

I will be heading for my lovely bed,