Using Flash Outdoors

A lot of people think that when they're outdoors on a sunny day that since there's plenty of light, that they wouldn't need to add light.

However, bright sunny days are one of the most challenging to get good pictures in because of the super high contrast between highlights and shadows.

Now there's an old photography trick that tells us what our exposure should be when we're outside in full direct sunlight. It says that in direct sunlight, if we set our aperture to F16, then our ISO will be the same as our shutter speed. So ISO100 means, SS=1/100, ISO200 means SS=1/200 and so on. Click here to watch a video that demonstrates this.

Let's visualize this by starting off with our subject facing directly into the sun. Notice that we have great exposure, great contrast, great colour saturation, but our subject is squinting into the harsh light and uncomfortable. Which creates a not so great facial expression. We also don't have great separation between the subject and background.

Direct Sun F16 ISO 100 SS-100

So the next thing to try is to turn the subject away from the light so their face is in shadow. When we do that, our background is properly exposed, our subject has a great comfortable facial expression, but now, since they're facing into the shadow, the face is significantly underexposed.

Back to the sun F16 ISO 100 SS-100

If we adjust our exposure to get more light on the shadow side, we can get our subject properly exposed, but now the background is way overexposed and "blown out".

Back to Sun F4.5 ISO 100 SS-100

In order to balance the background and the subject, since the background is already lit with a super powerful light source that we can't control (the sun) we have to add light to the shadow side to match it. Now, we could use a reflector to bounce some light back, but light will always be weaker when reflected than direct from the source, and then we'd be right back where we started with that problem of a harsh continuous light shining smack into our subject's face making them squint.

Some flashes are very powerful and can get F16 from 10-20 feet away, our speedlight flashes are not that powerful, so how do we make up for that? Well, knowing that flash is all about distance, we know to move the flash closer to the subject. The closer they are the brighter they'll appear on the subject.

Direct bare speedlight flash on camera F16 ISO 100 SS-100

While our exposure is now fixed (the same on the subject and background), the pattern of light is pretty hash and not flattering.

Side note, this is why we don't use the popup flash except in extreme emergencies as a last resort.

In order to get the best light on our subject we have to get the flash off the same axis as the camera and get the light to come from a different direction (ideally 180 degrees from the light in back).

Remember once you take the flash off the camera, you need some way to trigger it when you take the picture, like our little flash radio triggers.

So, let's move that flash 45 degrees to the side of the subject and 45 degrees up from the subject.

Bare flash off camera F16 ISO 100 SS-100

Now we're getting there!

Notice however, that the light is still pretty harsh, creating hard shadow lines which are not always very flattering or visually appealing.

Small light sources like a flash head create very harsh light with high contrast shadows. (that's why when we're inside, we normally bounce it off the ceilings.)

We know how to solve that- we DIFFUSE the light to create smoother transitions from highlight to shadow which has a very professional pleasing look!

Flash in softbox 45° off camera F16 ISO 100 SS-100

If you speed up your shutter even more, you'll make the background slightly underexposed, which will make your sky bluer, and subject pop nicely as the brightest point in the frame.

Flash in softbox 45°off camera F16 ISO 100 SS-160