How to Overcome Harsh Sunlight by Shooting Outdoor Portraits With Flash

Golden hour is great and all, but if you limit your outdoor portrait times to those narrow windows during the day, you're going to quickly be frustrated by the limitations. Learning to shoot outside with flash is an essential skill, and this great video will introduce you to it. 

Coming to you from Tony Northrup, this helpful video will show you how to shoot outdoor portraits with flash, which will allow you to either overcome or balance the sun. This in turn allows you the freedom to shoot whenever and still get great results. The important thing to note here is that Northrup is shooting with a Godox AD600, which has high-speed sync. This allows him to push the shutter speed well past the sync speed of his Nikon D850, which lets him more easily kill off the ambient light. If you don't have a flash that supports high-speed sync, he talks about how to overcome this limitation later in the video. If you haven't yet purchased your strobe system, I do recommend looking into one with high-speed sync. Though it has its own drawbacks, I personally think it makes life way, way easier when shooting outside, and you don't have to use HSS if you don't want to for a certain shoot. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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