Midday Photography

It seems that event planners never consider photographic requirements when planning their spectacles. Often we are caught out in the midday sun where utilizing a diffuser is impractical if not impossible. While the displays are often outrageously colorful with dramatic motion and even more exaggerated expression a photographer’s typical take is replete with darken eyes, stone stiff shots, and hideous shadows beneath the nose and chin. What are we to do?

Unless Mother Nature cooperates and gives us an overcast sky, we are going to have to accept the frozen shot for all but the fastest such as motorcycle and car races. And even those are highly dependent on our point of reference. I have used as much as 3 stops of ND filters and still not been able to get the motion blur I wanted. Sometimes you just have to accept what you have and go with it.

At a recent Renaissance Fair the jousting was taking place at 3:00PM while sunset wasn’t until after 8:00PM. The absolute worst kind of lighting I could imagine for such a striking event. So with the field basically on an East/West line I positioned myself on the West. I placed my flash on Manual and Full Power which forced me stop down significantly since I was limited to a 1/250 shutter speed. Fortunately the Polarizer allowed me to use a reasonable aperture of around f/16. I took a few test shots during the Parade of Knights when a young man dressed in Middle Age garments, a terrible English accent and sporting a walkie-talkie informed me that it would be improper to use flash during the event.

What do I do now? My initial reaction was to give up but I thought I would give it a try anyway. While the results were exactly what I expected I started to think about what I could do with them during post processing. Since I shoot exclusively in RAW I simply boosted the fill light slider in Adobe Camera RAW processor and the harsh shadows quickly went away. But if you shoot JPEG you can use the Shadows/Highlights adjustment in Photoshop to obtain similar results.

I get acceptable results using the fill light slider but I much prefer to use flash except on wide angle shots. Even the best flashes start to fall off perceptibly once you start asking them to fill too much area. Fill flash is simply more my style. But we do need all the tools we can get for any given situation.

Doug Loman

Check out Doug’s photography at http://douglomanphotography.com/ or catch up with Doug on Facebook. He’s the one in Las Vegas.