Photographers have been fighting with harsh mid-day light since the birth of the camera. Excessive contrast, blown highlights, hard shadows, washed images and other generally unflattering features are common to mid-day light. We’ve actually written a couple of times here at dPS about working in mid-day light, but it’s a popular question from our readers so I thought I’d rehash the topic again from my own personal experience using a recent test shoot as an example. Here are a few tips I’ve found useful for working in mid-day light.
Perhaps the simplest way to avoid mid-day light is to get out of it. While we can’t ask the sun to speed up, we can certainly hide from it under the shade of buildings, trees, structures and any other number of items both natural and man-made. However, not all shade is created equal. There’s speckled shade and deep shade, wrap shade, side shade, overhead shade, etc.
Remember that shade isn’t the absence of light. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to take a photo of anything in it! Instead, shade is a diffusion of light that is bouncing from or through another medium to reach your subject. It’s important to determine the direction from which light is hitting your subject – often it’s more than one. Generally whatever is the closest reflective object or the thinnest diffusion of the light is your key light source.
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