Checking the map

Last weekend brought me to Killarney for a weekend away with family and we were lucky that it coincided with hot and sunny weather – weather that was too hot or sunny to be spending lots of it taking photographs, but on Sunday when we headed in the direction of Killarney National Park (my first time there) I did sling a camera over my shoulder.  With that strong sun, I knew that any portraits I might take would suffer one of three problems, though I found a solution to one of them in the most unlikely of places: a map.  Let me explain.

The three scenarios that I was likely to encounter when taking any portrait, even an informal one, with the sun shining brightly in the cloudless sky (making it a very hard light source) were:

1. If the sun was in front of the subject he/she would most likely be squinting
2. If the sun was behind the subject, that would solve the squinting problem, but I’d end up with a well-exposed background and an under-exposed face if I exposed for the (sun lit) background or…
3. …I’d end up with a well-exposed face and an over-exposed background if I exposed for the (shaded) face.

I really don’t like photos of people squinting, so my preference would be to keep the sun behind the subject.  That leaves me with the problems outlined in points 2 and 3 above.  A few options would normally be possible to solve these problems. I could move the subject to open shade, beneath trees or along the north side of a building for instance. I could use fill flash to bring up the subject’s face and go with exposing for the background on the camera.  Or I could use some other means of filling the shadows on the under-exposed face.

As it happened I had no flash with me on the walk… it would have been more weight that I didn’t want to carry.  At the time I took the photograph above, there was no area of open shade nearby, so neither was that an option.  However, I did find there was another means of filling the shadows on Matthew’s face.

Take a look again at the image, and if you haven’t already spotted what’s going on in terms of the lighting here, start by taking a look on the shadows of my brother-in-law and niece in the background.  You can see from those that the sun is pretty much straight in front of the camera, and reasonably high in the sky – enough to put it out of the frame at least.

Now look at Matthew’s face in the foreground.  It’s lit from bottom camera left – i.e. from the direction in which he is looking.  You can tell this by the lack of any significant shadow.  What is actually just out of the frame at bottom camera left is a white laminated map that is placed near the entrance to guide visitors around the park.  In fact, you can see this quite clearly from the following image that I took just before the photo above.

The way it reflects light – and the way it aligns with the sun, the camera and Matthew’s face – makes it act as a second light source and it effectively becomes the fill light for the photograph.  And does so really well. And the best part was I didn’t then have to cart the map around with me for the rest of the afternoon.  A few hundred yards down the path I found some of that open shade I mentioned earlier, where Abbie posed for me and the light had a very different characteristic.  We’ll look at that tomorrow later this week.