Light

It was about 09:00 am in the morning, we couldn’t have had more of a beautiful day! There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it was a very comfortable tempature. Part of preparing your shoot is making sure you have the weather that you want. I was hoping for more of a sombre day, but that wasn’t in the cards. If I would have checked the weather, I could have prepared better or picked a different date.

If I would have done a physical reconnaissance, I would have been able to see all the lighting issues present at this location. Where do I start, well first the time of day. It was early morning the sun was just cresting the city line, we had the sun at our back, which caused long hard shadows as seen in the picture. There was even areas where we had hard shadow from shoulders down on the model and hard sun to shoulders up! Part of correcting for this we moved the camera along the fence looking down the street in an area where there was only shade, which got rid of the long shadows for now.

Well next on the list for completing physical recce is looking for any obstructions that may cause lighting issues. You name it we had them, trees, bushes, buildings, traffic and people. The killer was you had hard breaks in the obstructions, which gave you hard light, then hard shadow. Talking about fighting the fight!! I did manage to find a big enough spot between the gaps in the shade to be able to take some pictures.

Ultimately, I should have selected a different time of day for this location. Doing the physical recce would have allowed me to see all the lighting issues I had, such as obstructions, seeing the location of the sun that early in the morning and just checking the weather and realizing the strength of the sun. One of the reasons I did select this time of the day though, was I knew how busy it is at this location, but that is for another discussion.