Outdoor Portrait using Off Camera Flash - First Post

Good effort. You have approximately matched the light levels on your subject to the background, although she is a bit bright if I am honest, particularly her right hand and her face. The colour of the natural light is also warmer than the light your flash has produced. For such situations I would suggest carrying a selection of lighting gels in various subtle grades to add warmth and or other effects, either to allow you to match or to create colour contrast with the available light you encounter. Of course, the colour difference would be less obvious if you had dialed down the flash power, moderating the over exposure of the girl at the same time. A win win solution.

Remember, to set the exposure for a flash lit part of the scene you adjust the aperture or flash power then you adjust the shutter speed to balance the ambient light aspects to the flash lit areas. Generally you will want to keep the flash power pretty low, as you will always be adding flash to ambient unless the subject is in a shaddow and the background is in full light. In this scene you could have stopped your aperture down, say 1 stop, to darken the girl, then decreased your shutter speed by a step, from say 1/250 to 1/125, which would then keep the background correctly exposed, at the same brightness as in the above image. Having said all that I like the fact that the hair has highlights in blue and gold and I like the warm and cool light on her dress, creating a very 3D effects locally.

You could darken her in Lightroom or Photoshop and warm her up, too.

This is always going to be a technique that you will have to experiment with but that is part of the fun and you will learn every time you shoot this way.

You have created nice modeling with your flashgun. Altogether a pretty good result.