Clay
It's a Walk in the Park....when your prepared!
We just returned from an engagement session at the Cherry Blossoms in the Nation's Capital, When we work outside we always take a battery operated off camera strobe. My favorite is the Quantum T5d connected with the Free Wire transmitter so that we can work easily with no wires getting in the way. Flash is often my choice over reflectors for a couple of reasons. First, I can work alone with a stand and some times that's what it takes when everyone is busy and I have to shoot by myself. A reflector fill can be gorgeous, it just usually has to be feathered carefully to look natural. However, the most important reason is that flash is balanced for daylight and gives me great prints from NAP. The early light as you will see is cool and blue/gray. The flash will warm things up and shapes the face beautifully.
Picture 1 was made with the early morning sweet light, (before the sun) and using a Canon Mark III at ISO 800 with the camera set on AV things got off to an easy start. The early morning light just sparkled on the bride's face. Knowing Frank had the flash fired up and ready to go, I asked him to use it in a back 45 degree position to light the tree and her hair at the same time for picture two. It is so subtle and that's what I wanted. Picture #3 Illustrates exactly how we positioned the light. My exposure was 60th at f8 and the flash was at 5.6 or about one stop under the ambient. I do use a Sekonic meter to get everything just right, however, I have done it so often, I am usually using the large LCD monitor for accurate visual adjustments.
To meter a flash outdoors and be perfectly accurate an ambient reading on the face is the first thing we do. We use that reading and set our camera for that. Then, we use a Sekonic flash meter, setting the shutter speed up to 250th of a second to eliminate the ambient light we take a strobe reading. We are always attempting to keep the flash 1 to 2 stops under the existing ambient light. If you change the meter to 60th of a second you will see immediately that the reading changes higher, as the ambient flash is contaminating the actual burst of light. Sometimes we take the reflector off of the Quantum T5d and use bare-bulb, usually when we want to balance low light situations. With the reflector on, we try to feather the light by aiming it out in front of the face a bit. Our goal is to use the back edge of the light.
For the most part we always keep the flash a stop under the ambient...except when we want to see the background as in Picture # 8. This is a proper average exposure for the background with no flash. Then, we place the flash on the same side as the women, just as in the studio, and match the light on the faces to the background. In this scenario it's match the F's, F-stop and Flash. A fast shutter speed darkens the background. So, we expose for the background and bring the light up on there faces to match. This works great at sunset and sunrise to keep the color in the sky.
