It’s one of the big struggles when shooting outdoors. You’re fighting with the sunset for a good exposure and your subject comes out too dark. In other words, the sun always wins.

Unless you have your own sun.

Augmenting lighting with a flash to shoot models in the late afternoon or during sunset can produce some very pleasant results for a few reasons.

1. Colors are nice and warm
2. Sunlight is softer (diffused)
3. Sunlight is less bright (easier to match with your own light source)

Let’s make a quick example using the shot below. I’ll go through how it was created, what elements when into it, and why each element was used.

Don’t Fight the Sun

First thing is first, and that is, meter for the things you can’t change. In this case, the sunset. Unless you have enough light to blast the clouds (don’t worry, no one in their right mind would try this), or some trickery with a gradient filter, you’re going to need to meter as if you’re shooting your background alone, no model.

In this case, I’m shooting f 5.6 at 1/320 second to get a good sunset exposure (be wary, as some cameras have a flash sync speed limit of 1/60, 1/125, or 1/250). Use shutter priority or full manual settings to get a good exposure, and keep in mind the flash sync speed limitations of your camera body. After you have that background exposure, then you can start worrying about matching it with your own light on a model.

The Setup

Here’s (roughly) the setup I used for this sunset shot:

• Off-Camera Flash – I used a Nikon SB-800 for light, but any other powerful flash, pointed AWAY from the subject, into an umbrella will work fine. A cable to your flash or some type of wireless flash technology (CLS/Pocket Wizard) is going to be necessary. If your flash is lacking the power to light your subject sufficently, you might end up pointing the flash straight at them, although you’ll loose the soft diffused look.
• Orange Gel – Placed over flash to approximate the warm color of the sunset.
• Umbrella – Placed with the center of the umbrella at roughly shoulder height. In this case, the umbrella is used to bounce light back at the subject. With most umbrellas, you could also use it to shoot through.
• Light Meter – You may find a light meter handy. Just keep your sunset exposure handy as a reference and meter from the position of your subject until you get a good match. If you don’t have a light meter, that’s fine too, so long as you have a digital body, you have the luxury of burning through several shots until your histogram looks good. Yup, use that histogram…you can’t always trust the results you see in that tiny screen on the back of your camera!
• Camera – I shot this with a Nikon D300 which makes this setup easy with integrated remote flash control (CLS), but any D-SLR body will do you just fine so long as you have a way to trigger that off-camera flash.

Alternatives?

This surely isn’t the only way to get this shot, it’s just the way I chose to do it on this particular day. In a pinch you can try to use a reflector disk in place of the strobe lighting, although you’re not likely to get the same brightness. You could also fool around with filters, positioning of the light source, etc…

Don’t use these examples as “the way”. Go out and get creative with your bad self!

-PL

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