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How to get beautiful golden sunlight for perfect portraits even on cloudy days

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The city I live in boasts 300 days of sunshine a year. Except on days when I have a photoshoot booked and need sunshine, it seems! So what to do when you’ve got a client and you want beautiful golden hour light, but the weather just won’t cooperate? You fake it of course!

That’s the beautiful thing about learning to shoot with any kind of light. You aren’t beholden to the whims of metrology. In this video, Lindsay Adler walks us through her setup to create a very natural-looking golden light for her portrait shot.

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How to create the ultimate fake sun with a strobe (with lighting diagrams)

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Some shots need a sun. Sadly the sun is not at the optimal angle at all locations. Heck, if you are indoors (say at your studio) there may not be a sun at all. This is why there is a need to create a fake sun.

Creating a fake sun is easy, once you know the light qualities of the sun, and really, there are only two of those. It’s (1) small, and (2) orange. Actually, the sun is not really that small, it’s huge, but it is so far away that it small in relation to our field of view. The sun is actually not orange either, it’s white, But the light that gets here to earth becomes orange after it goes through the atmosphere. So while the Sun is neither small nor orange, it is small and orange for us. And this is the light we are going to reproduce.

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Create amazing night portraits with orange gels and white balance tricks

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Using gels to correct your flashes to match the ambient, or as creative effects is common. It’s something many of us do from time to time. Sometimes we use creative gels want that cool colour contrast. At other times we just have to deal with really horrible lighting and need to compensate with corrective gels. But, corrective gels can also be used creatively.

Japan based Photographer, Ilko Alexandroff regularly brings orange CTO gels along with him to his night shoots. They allow him to get a little more creative with the harsh sodium glow of the background while still getting perfect colour on his subject. In this video he talks us through how and why.

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Fake Sunshine Glow – Warm Up Your Fall Photos With Strobe Sunlight

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I was just raking up the last of the fall leaves and though that I’d like to get some photos of the kids jumping in my big leaf pile.

The image I had in my head was one of those amazing fall days where that gorgeous warm glowing late day sunshine was back-lighting the leaves and highlighting the kids.

Problem was: by the time I was done raking the leaves, it was petty late in the day so most of my yard was in shade, and the ambient light that was available was coming from the wrong direction.

To get the photos I wanted, I decided to fake that late day warm sunshine glow with strobe sunlight. In this article, I will show you how to do it yourself (its actually pretty easy to get great results)!

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Using CTO & CTB Utility Gels for Creative Effect

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As a lot of you may know, I like to use the occasional gel in my shots to add a bit of interest. Sometimes these gels are rich and vibrant colours that drench an image in saturation and other times I just want to add a little something extra colour-wise without overpowering the whole image with a synthesised coloured look.

For a more subtle colour look you’ll want to use tones that our eyes are more accustomed to seeing, for example orange and blue tones are heavily present in our daily visual journeys already. Orange tones are found in sunrises and sunsets and blueish tones are often found in twilight and overcast days. These are what I call ‘natural’ colours compared to the rich pinks and purples or reds, these are great for adding effect but can sometimes overpower an image quite quickly. The ‘natural’ tones that I am referring to are measured in Kelvin and we use this value to adjust the white balance of our shots in our cameras.

So to add a more natural colour effect to your shots what better place to start than by looking at the tones already found in the Kelvin values in your camera via the the white balance. I’m sure we all know we can add a little extra warmth to a shot simply by increasing the Kelvin via the white balance  and conversely we can cool down an image be decreasing the Kelvin value.

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Using Everyday Objects For Making Outstanding Backdrops

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I am a big fan of using simple objects or DIYing solutions in my photograph. One thing I always like doing is using a Gobo (photography lingo fo go-between) to make any plain background stand out. Nowadays, I am using a device called the Light Blaster which can act as a dedicated gobo projector, but before I got it, I DIYed my own patterns for the background.

So here are examples of everyday objects I use to create some cool patterns on the background.

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Awesome Cold Look With CTO Gel And Tweaking White Balance

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A few weeks back I wrote an article about stopping down the ambient light by 2-3 stops and using flash to expose for your subject, kind of a Magic Bullet look. Today I wanted to make an addition to that article – how you can add a CTO gel to your flash and change your white balance to get a different feel and add “Whapak” to your shot.

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