The Golden Hour: A Portrait Session

I had the opportunity to do a last minute shoot with a friend who will be heading off to college. Recently I have been getting a lot of people who want to schedule family, modeling, and portrait sessions. Most of the time a person will suggest something that sounds fine until they realize that a photographer sees a situation from a much different perspective. One of the main things about photography would be to understand your camera; the next would probably be to understand light. There are a handful of light sources that a photographer wants to understand so that they could take the best possible image. I wanted to go over a few different forms of like and give you an idea of why we might sound strange when there’s a picture you might think is great but would drive us nuts!

Soft light: this is the light that most of the time you are looking for in your images. So most of you might be asking what is that? Soft light would be a diffused light (I’ll get to that in a minute) that brings a softer shadow on a person, for example on a bright sunny day, the clouds can become a natural diffuser that reduces the intensity of the sun on a subject. A great way to shoot with the sun’s natural soft light effect would be to shoot during the Golden Hour (Magic Hour). The sun is less intense early in the morning and around sunset, where you will get a softer light a warmer hue, and a less intense sunlight.

Hard light: this tends to be when it’s a bright sunny day, not a cloud in the sky and here you are with the sun that causes bright highlights and dark harsh shadows. When you get what I call raccoon eyes (dark shadows in the eyes) you will usually have to compensate with a fill flash or by using a reflector. It’s still usually difficult to work with because you having to adjust for overexposure to skin tones as well as the background if you are over compensating. I try to stay away from this but most of the time there isn’t too much that you can do, like for instance the time of a wedding. Light can be problematic in places like that but when you do have the ability to be in a well-shaded area it makes it possible to get better pictures.

A few other ways to work with these types of light would be to to reflect hard light onto a diffused subject. This is where you are using a reflector; which can be a silvery, golden, or even white surface that you can either purchase or create your own (using a white poster board, foil board,, or a car sunshade DIY). If you can understand and interpret light better your images will be better. Once you master exposure photography goes from a hobby to an art/profession.