Have you ever tried to use rim lighting?
It's a great thing to know if you haven't learned yet, and here's a short refresher if you already know.
When there's a light on the far side of someone, the light leaks through right around their head illuminating their hair or hat. Sometimes the line can be so crisp that it looks as though they're being cut out.
Rim light is beautiful, and it adds a ton of visual interest to a photo. The real win here is taking an extra second to try and look around your environment for some kind of rim lighting.
Don't settle for the light you're given, find better light.
And also plan to show up during golden hour, instead of trying to do photoshop later and add in something fake.
More about rim lighting from New York Institute Of Photography:
The type of your shadow is so important with flash photography, and there’s an easy way to learn how to change that shadow type: just check out the Slideshare below.
If you’re impatient though, here’s a quick rule of thumb:
The larger your light source is, the softer the shadow will be. Now, this doesn’t mean ONLY just the ruler measurement size of the light, because the SUN is obviously bigger than the earth, but since it’s so far away it’s just a small point in the sky, we would call it a small light source.
So let me try that again:
The larger your light source is in relation to your subject, the softer the shadow will be. If you put a tiny light RIGHT UP NEAR your subject, it takes up more space in the subject’s vicinity, so it would “become” a larger light source in relation to your subject.
Want to understand more about it? Here’s the Slideshare:
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