It’s Taylor again…..
As I mentioned last week, I have a few posts I am going to be publishing soon with a few thoughts to help you plan for your family sessions. Today I pulled up a few photos that kinda show the different lighting situations we can find ourselves in.
I will be using mini sessions photos as many of my examples. I think it easier to see how the light affects a photo, when you compare images shot in the same location, same day and you can see how the light moves. During mini sessions I try to change sessions up a little bit, so the exact spot may change a little bit, for the purposes of lighting, these work great! One thing to remember is that with mini sessions, we can work really hard to plan the perfect day, but unfortunately we cannot control the weather, so as much as we may want a sunny day, on our scheduled day, we may be given a cloudy day. The good news is that clouds actually work in our favor many times!
This photo was taken at a little walking path in the late afternoon (4:30ish). You can see the shadows from the sun coming in through the trees in the back ground.
These two photos were taken on that same afternoon in the same location a few hours apart (left 3:45 and right 6:45). You can see how the the lighting is basically the same, but the lighting is more dappled in the earlier photo, when the sun was higher in the sky. It amazing how quickly the sun seems to drop in the last hour or so around sunset!
This next set of photos was taken in the same area a short distance away, but the one of the left was taken in the morning (3 ish hours after sunrise) and the one on the right was taken at the end of the evening (2 ish hours before sunset). They are so similar, you can hardly tell a difference, but at this particular location the lighting was more dappled in the evening. But overall a few hours before sunset and after sunrise, give you two very similar looks.
These next sets of photos are really interesting and are helpful when considering shooting on cloudy days verses a sunny day. Both of these were taken at the same location as above. But you can see that the photos on the right were both taken on a cloudy day. You can see that the greens are a little richer and the lighting is more even on the cloudy day. In the photos on the right, we had a limited space to walk, because we didn’t want the sun shining on anyone’s faces. We always want the light to be even across the entire family, so we position you in a direction that uses the sun and all of the shadows to our advantage. In the sunny photos, the light and shadows create some interesting textures and variations in the background. So while sunny days are great and give a certain depth of field to the background, our shooting space is usually more limited.
All of these photos were taken on that cloudy day of mini sessions. We had lots of space and flexibility, which was so nice!
These next few photos are coming from my mini sessions a few years ago. I had a client offer for us to use their private property to shoot at and it was so lovely. I decided to pull an image from each session I shot that day. So all 16 are here… I wanted you to be able to see the progression of the lighting throughout the day. All of these sessions deserve to have their own blog post, because they were all so great!
We started around 8 am, the sun was up, but not high enough to create any shadows. By the second session you can see the sun is starting to shine! The colors in earliest minutes of the morning are so deep and rich. By the time the third image was shot around 9, the sun is really starting to make everything brighter!
These were shot late morning (9:30, 10:15, 10:45). The lighting is all very similar for these photos. The sun makes everything very bright and there are lots of shadows and depth in the images.
Right after lunch the sun was out and everything was bright, you can see in this first image (1:30) that the lighting is similar to the late morning photos. But shortly after this photo was shot, we had some cloud cover. Both of these middle sessions were completely shot with the clouds on a bright and sunny day! You can’t see shadows in the background, but the the colors are bold. And then by this fourth photo (3:15) the sun was back.
These next sessions were shot in the middle of the afternoon (3:30, 4:00 and 4:30) the sun was still high, so the images are bright and we had to move around to keep the lighting even and shadows off the faces!
These last few shots were shot in the evening (5:10, 5:45, 6:15). You can see the progression of the sun… the shadows leave and the lighting even out again.
As you can see there isn’t an easy answer to the questions of “what time of day is best for photos?”. That is something that every person could have a different opinion about, but hopefully seeing how lighting can change throughout the day will help you when you start to book your session. An easy place to start is to ask yourself what you like better, light and bright or bold and rich? But as you can see there are lots of other factors that go into every image like location and clothing. So choosing a time of day won’t always give you the light and bright photos you want, if you are wearing bold, dark colors. So… as with everything, there are lots of things to consider and I’ll be touching on some of these other things over the next few weeks!
If you haven’t booked a mini session and are still interested, you can still book at this link!
