Tips For Outdoor Videography/Photography

We've been shooting a lot of people outdoors and on the fly lately. So I thought it might be helpful to offer some tips and thoughts on what I do to get good quality photos and video when I'm shooting outside in uncontrolled circumstances.

1. If possible, shoot either in the morning or in the evening when the sun is not directly overhead. The harsh overhead light from the sun in the middle of the day makes for hard top light and ugly pictures and video.

2. Position the sun behind your subjects and not in front of them. If it's really early in the morning or late in the evening and the sun is low, you might get some unwanted lens flare from this. Lens flare can be very cool, but if it's not what you want, you should be able to position the sun behind and to the side of your subject to eliminate this problem. Or, you can always hold something like a piece of cardboard up and in front of your lens to block out the unwanted light. Putting the sun behind your subject gives you a great backlight which helps pop your subject out from the background and aids in giving the image more sense of depth. You should still have plenty of light on your subjects face to get a great picture.

To get an even better looking image, you can use a reflector (or some white foamcore board that you can buy at any art supply store) to bounce sunlight back onto your subjects face. These techniques will give you much better results than putting the bright sun at your back and right in your subjects face. Besides getting a much more appealing image, your subjects will be able to look at you or the camera without squinting!

3. When the sun is up overhead and you have to shoot, place your subjects in the shade and try to make sure the background in also shaded or dark. By keeping everything in the shade, you'll have plenty of soft diffused light to get good images and you won't have that harsh overhead sun casting terrible shadows under your subjects eyes and causing all kinds of contrast issues.

4. Try and create depth in the frame. Film and video are 2D, two dimensional. Filmmakers and Photographers create the perception of 3D by drawing your eye into the frame. They accomplish this through the use of depth. A background that draws your eye deep into the frame gives the illusion of three dimensions. If you place your subject right up against a wall, it flattens the frame and highlights a 2D feel.

I pulled the following photo from my library. It's a photo I snapped of my family a couple of years ago. It's not a perfect picture by any stretch but the circumstances under which it was taken make for a good illustration here:
The photo was taken out in the open, in direct sunlight at about three o'clock in the afternoon. By placing the sun behind my subjects as best I could, I was able to accomplish a couple of things. Even though the light is somewhat top heavy because of the time of day, I was able to give them a nice backlight, which helps them look pretty and pops them out from the background. And, maybe more importantly, I was able to get my kids to have their eyes open in the picture. Move the sun in front of everyone and they're squinting into the light and you don't have anything but a harsh, flat front light on them and big ugly shadows cast from their eyes, their noses, etc. In a perfect world this would have been taken later in the day and I would have had an assistant there to position a reflector to bounce some nice, soft fill light into the subject's faces. But it's not a perfect world and we often don't work under anything near perfect circumstances. When you're running and gunning as we all so often are, you've got to work hard to do the best you can with what you've got.

Let me know if you find these tips useful or if you have any questions about them. I would be happy to answer any questions or debate people on the subject :).