Mixing natural light and flash

Wedding portraits can prove to have very tricky lighting to work with. This wedding shoot was at the Brock House on  beautiful sunny afternoon. The location is spectacular - on old mansion right on the beach. But, the lighting proved to be tricky.

Being mid day and sunny, the light was very harsh and top down. The result was racoon eyes and really deep shadows. Here was our solution.

First thing was to look for an area with open shade. We used a giant tree. This gave us directional light coming off the water providing a nice portrait style light. Keeping the sun behind the subjects insured that there would be no mottling on the subjects and provided an interesting texture as it filtered through the trees.

At this point it looked good but the shadows on the subjects was still too deep. A gentle fill light was provided by a Speedlite to open up the shadows and the lighting was completed. The Speedlite was on TTL and set to expose 1 2/3 stops under.

The image was converted to a toned black and white in Lightroom and a texture overlay added in Photoshop to complete the image.