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:
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Yikes. Tall ceilings and three different colors of light:
- Sometimes when you add light it actually makes it worse.
- Fluorescent is greenish, Tungsten is orangish, Flash is blueish.
- You never want to mix colors of light unless you know what you’re doing.
- If you match colors of light, your editing will be SO much simpler.
- SO! First, turn off the offending light. If you can’t do that, try to orient yourself so that the bad light hits the far side of your client (so you won’t see it’s effects as much)
- High ceilings suck.
- In that situation, I want to try to NOT bounce the light off the ceiling. So I’ll grab my umbrella setup and that way the light can head directly towards the subject instead of trying to bounce off something else.
- Please don’t use on-camera flash and point your flash directly at someone. That never looks good. Ever. EVER.
- Small modifiers (gary fong, other small flash diffusers) do nothing. Because what really affects shadows is the SIZE of the light. If you’re not dramatically changing the size of the light, you’re not doing much at all.
- Main rule of thumb: don’t mix different colors of light!
- If you really can’t get rid of the other color lights, you could try blasting your flash and have that color “win” over the other colors
- Hit me up on twitter if you want to get your question featured on the Quick Photo Tips Podcast!