Your Best Portraits

The young girl in the image is McCauley. I was taking portraits of her and Ryan, her older brother in a very old Baptist Meeting House in Slate Hill, New York. I had been commissioned to take images of the meeting house for the local historical society a few weeks earlier and attained permission to use it to take these portraits. The challenge was getting a well exposed image in the setting with so much bright light coming through the window, so I spot-metered off the dark wall above and behind her head to set my exposure. It worked. Her face was properly exposed while the light outside the window was blown out, which was fortunate because it washed out the ranch house on the adjoining property! Serendipity at work, no post-processing required.