flash + existing outdoor light--making a portrait pop

[bfmelton]

<p>So the other day I was shooting an outdoor modeling session. Lighting was late afternoon, in shade/diffuse, with a 580 EXII firing through an umbrella at between 1/4 and 1/16 for the most part. A bunch of the pics came out rather flat-looking. The pic here is a good example: weak catch lights, muddy darks. (The model actually has great hair, which did come out when backlit with sunlight, but it doesn't show here--given the angle I couldn't figure out how to add a hair light.<br>

Postprocessing experimentation in Lightroom hasn't helped. So what would you have done with this pic regarding flash ratio and placement, given one or two flashes to work with, to make it pop?</p>

[leicaglow]

<p>One problem I see is that the image is not sharp. If you look at the catchlights in the eyes, it is out of focus. That alone can be enough for the image not to pop. Furthermore, it appears there was movement with the camera or model. Are you using your camera's fastest shutter speed?</p>

<p>As for lighting, it appears you were struggling to bring together the ambient and flash lighting. The hair needed it's own light source because your camera or film didn't have enough latitude to capture details in the hair, background, and light skin. The hair is essentially in a shadow for which there is no illumination. And while the extended wall makes a natural place for which to put the hand, it doesn't allow light to reach the hair. Shooting against a flat wall may have helped slightly.</p>

<p>If the diffusion from the ambient light was coming from frame top left, you should have positioned your light somewhere on frame right. It appears your flash was on frame left, where the ambient light was also coming from. Thus you sort of added to the light that was there, rather than used the flash to give you more contrast.</p>

<p>On lighting balance, the shadow around the nose (for example) is very soft. Since you were using less than half power, you could have backed the flash away from the model a bit and caused the light from the flash to give you slightly more contrast. This is where tethered shooting would help over trying to chimp on a small LCD. The hair lighting is a separate problem, and with the dark hair, you probably should back her away from the wall and place a light from behind. In fact, you could have placed a light from behind and fairly high, and warmed it up with a CTO gel and gotten a slight sunlight effect. Sorry that these thoughts are somewhat scattered, but this is my initial impression.</p>

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[lornesunley]

<p>The image looks out of focus. I think you had some camera movement and the 1/50 shutter speed was too slow to stop it.the f/5.6 should have provided enough depth of field so that the wall and her hands, face etc would be in focus.<br>

You could try having a flash set to hit the wall above her head (angled down) to provide the hair light. The bounced light would be reddish but that probably would not be an issue with her hair colour.</p>