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Sometimes you will find a spot outdoors that has nice side lighting but the contrast between the shadow side and the highlight side is too great to print onto photographic paper properly. With digital you must meter carefully and expose for the highlights. I have noticed that with my Canon if the shadows are two stops less than the highlight side they will have lots of noise in them when printed onto photographic paper. There are a couple of ways I use to bring the shadow side of a subject's face up to a printable level. For one or two people a silver reflector works great. I clip it onto a light stand (or have an assistant hold it) and meter the shadow side while moving the reflector in or out until it is anywhere from 1 2/3rds to 1 stop less than the highlight reading. This is what I did in the image below. My reflector is a piece of cardboard that measures 20 x 24. It was a box the lab shipped a print to me in. I flattened it out, cut off the tabs and glued silver "Cracked Ice" onto it. This can be purchased from any prom supply place like Stumps or Anderson's. You could also use aluminum foil that you wrinkled up and then unwrinkled. It even folds into three sections making it easy to store in the back of my van.
Another way is to use flash. Monte Zucker teaches a method on his site www.montezucker.com. When using flash outdoors you must maintain the same shutter speed setting with the flash as the ambient reading was in order for the background to be the same as seen by the naked eye. This setting cannot be more than what your camera's shutter synchs at. |
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