In today’s fast-paced world of photography, you have to produce on demand, no matter what the conditions may be. This is especially true for wedding photographers. You can’t change the date of the shoot, so you must be able adapt to ever-changing lighting and weather conditions.

But whether you’re a portrait or wedding photographer, time is money; the more efficiently you can use your surroundings and enhance the light, the more effectively you can deliver consistent above average results. We practice and perfect our capture and lighting strategies so that we can tackle any assignment. We know them backward and forward so that we can implement them seamlessly.

Painting with light and shadow is a technique we use to manipulate the ambient light and create the ambiance that we want under any conditions. Let me start by saying that while the high end cameras that we use are amazing they do have a mind of their own when it comes to metering light, they meter everything to light grey. While this works out fine under the right conditions, it can limit your ability to create the eye catching images that you have in mind.

So lets start with the correct exposure in the way that the camera sees it.

Here we have a bright sunny day around 7pm so the light has softened and the sun is on the right highlighting the right side of Stephanie’s face (your right not hers) leaving the left side in shadow. While this image is exposed correctly at 1/200 sec at f/8, ISO 200 , it does not convey the feeling that I wanted in this portrait. 1) The background is too obvious and my eye is not drawn to Stephanie. 2) I LOVE skys and to expose Stephanie correctly the sky had to be sacrificed, i.e. blown out Loosing it’s ambiance.

 That’s the sky I was looking for! By underexposing for the ambient light 1 to 1.5 stops I not only get a sky that pops, I also get a less defined background that disappears into shadow. However, now Stephanie is also underexposed.

Perfect! This is the image I wanted. By adding an off camera Canon speedlite on high-speed sync to the left side of the image and adjusting for the soft golden ambient light coming in from behind and to the right of the image I was able to capture the image I saw in my minds eye and not the one that my camera metered as a correct exposure.

Thank you Stephanie!!