Snapping in Sunlight: Tips for Photographing in Harsh Daylight

The weather shows its brighter side from time to time. When the sun is out, we all want to make the most of it. However, having lots of light doesn't necessarily make for great photographs. Direct sunlight is harsh and creates extreme contrasts between the highlights and the shadows. This presents challenges, but also opportunities as long as we learn to work with this light.

Here are some tips on shooting in direct sunlight:

Tip 1: Don’t

Harsh light which, depending on the time of day, could be falling directly downwards onto your subject often creates the raccoon-like shadows under the eyes (cast by the brows). Instead, find a spot of shade, as so much light is being bounced around from other surfaces, the shade will still likely provide you with plenty of light to work with. 

Another way to get softer light on sunny days is to wait for a little bit of cloud cover. Clouds in the sky act as giant softboxes and, although they still have a bright patch in the centre, they provide much softer light onto the subject. For landscape shots, patchy cloud cover can create much more interesting visuals, e.g. a shot of rolling green hills, where certain hills lit differently to others. 

By the light being bounced off of various surfaces, spread over a wide area, it will be far softer and typically more flattering for the model, especially female models. There are other ways in which we can soften that giant light bulb in the sky, here are a few.

Tip 2: Use your surroundings 

As mentioned, you can use your surroundings to find shade and avoid the sunlight altogether. However, another method is to use them to bounce and reflect light, rather than block it altogether. Buildings with lighter-coloured exterior walls, or windows, will bounce light back from the other way. 

Again, we want to avoid light coming directly down on our subjects and causing raccoon-like shadows around the eyes. The height of the building and the subject's distance from it will determine which angle light can reflect off of the building onto them. Standing further away from a short building means that light can only hit the subject from shallower angles and will result in less reflected light hitting the subject all together. Standing very close to a tall building will allow light to reflect onto the subject from very steep, unflattering angles. 

Tip 3: Make and shape your own light

The obvious alternative to looking around for buildings to shape your light is to take matters into your own hands. Here are my recommendations:

Reflectors

Reflectors can be bought very cheaply, and they’re an almost essential piece of kit for shooting portrait photography. In fact, it’s probably the best low-cost thing I’ve ever bought for my photography and it completely changed the way that I shot portraits. 

Reflectors come in all shapes, sizes, and colours. For results, bigger is usually better. However, you want it to be portable so check which size they fold down to and ask yourself if that is practical for you.

36 inch round 5-in-1 reflector and diffuser

36x24 inch 5-in-1 reflector and diffuser

Flash (Speedlights)

As for creating new light, use flash. In the case of shooting outdoors, I would highly recommend Speedlights (also spelt Speedlites) instead of strobes. I would also recommend flash over constant lights in daylight situations as constant lights don’t tend to be powerful enough to be very noticeable (If doing outdoor video, work with reflectors, bounces and location)

Strobes are better for a studio, being more powerful but less portable, typically needing mains electricity and lacking a battery option. Speedlights, however, can be mounted on top of your camera or controlled wirelessly through transmitters. I own two Yongnuo YN- 560IV speedlites and a transmitter which can control each flash’s power separately.

YONGNUO YN-560IV Flash (and colour gels)

YONGUO YN560-TX II Flash Transmitter

Tip 4: Shoot early or late - Golden Hour

You may have heard of the “Golden Hour” in photography. It consists of the half-hour after sunrise and half-hour before sunset. In this golden hour, the sun’s light is typically warmer in colour (more orange) due to the fact that the light needs to pass through more of the atmosphere to reach us, so only longer wavelengths (e.g. red and orange) reach us. Just putting that out there for anybody who cares about the nerdy science stuff.

The other beauty of the golden hour lighting is that it comes from shallower angles, meaning we can get more head-on light than top-down. When the light is coming in at these shallow angles, you can either shoot with it or against it. Shooting with it, you can use it to light your model evenly light less noticeable shadows. The opposite of this is to have the sun behind your subject and get creative with some silhouette photography.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve found this post helpful, remember to share it with friends.

If you have any questions, get in touch by commenting, direct messaging or emailing me.

Keep Shooting!