Photographing in the SUNSHINE!

Ok, if you know anything about my work, it's that I avoid the sun AT ALL COSTS! All my photo sessions take place either first thing in the morning, or later in the evening when the light is softer and the air is cooler (seriously, who wants to hang out for a few hours when it's 105 outside?!). Avoiding the sun is not an easy thing to do when you work in the Bay Area in California.

Photographing a session at noon is dreaded among photographers because it creates so many lighting problems - the sun is so high in the sky that it creates really harsh shadows under everyone's eyes, nose and chin, which leads to pretty unflattering images. To combat this, the easiest thing to do would be to find shade - either from trees or buildings, or have the person stand with their back to the sun, but I wanted to see how well I could do with throwing every impulse to shoot like this out the window and have the sun directly involved with creating these portraits.

You'll notice as well that there is some pretty sweet haze and light leaks going on in these photographs - these are from either a copper pipe held in front of my lens, or with a glass prism (you can see more of my prism work here)

Thanks to the lovely Jessica Boynton for putting up with my silly ideas to photograph a session in the crazy heat! I'm so pleased with how these images turned out, and I can't wait to implement these techniques in my next senior session.