Some Shade, Some Natural Back Light, and a Single Speedlight

There are times when shooting conditions offer a challenge to a photographer. As a photographer you must learn to adapt to each situation and what might appear at first to be difficult, can be used to your advantage.

Back in May 2016 a friend asked me to assist her in shooting some prom photos of about a dozen or so teenagers. Turned out to be a wonderful experience as the kids were awesome and having a great time.

The shooting conditions at first did seem to be a bit of a challenge as it was a bright sunny afternoon with a lot of speckled sun filtering through the shade cast by numerous trees. As usual I brought along all kinds of equipment not knowing for sure what I might need. Turns out all I used was a single speedlight on a stand shot through a 20 x 30 softbox.

The setup was actually quite simple: The speedlight / softbox combination was placed at about a 45 degree angle from my subjects and about six feet away. Took a little experimenting with the output settings, but once that was determined it was a matter of finding the right place to shoot.

I ended up placing the kids in a shaded area where some of the afternoon sunlight was filtering through. This filtered light became my background and a source of back light used to place some subtle highlights on their hair. Behind them was a large patch of mottled light and shadow, which by using a long lens to zoom in on the subjects, became a great source of Bokeh or those nice softly out of focus blotches of light that make up the background. I set my base exposure for the background slightly under-exposing it to reduce some of the glare from all of the mottled light splashes. The flash itself, fired remotely from the camera, simply provided some extra fill light to brighten up the faces and to make their eyes sparkle.

On one of the shots I lined up the guys in a V-like formation and made the shot from down low. On this one I used all natural light exposing for their faces and allowing the rest of the scene to simply fall where it wanted to. This created a brighter background which contrasted sharply with the dark nature of their tuxedo's.

The first key to this shoot was simply a matter of getting the kids to loosen up and be themselves which wasn't all that difficult to do as they tended to feed off each others energy naturally. The second key was allowing the light that was already there to provide the base background lighting and then using the flash to simply fill in. From the time the first image was captured until they had to move on the prom location, we had a great time.

What made it easy for me was the simplicity of the setup; some shade, some natural back light, and a single speedlight.