If you are a golden hour photographer like myself, taking photos in the bright mid-day sun is probably one of your worst nightmares. Harsh midday light can create shadows that are nearly impossible to correct in post-production, you have crazy blown own highlights, and you probably can’t figure out your settings to save your life.
In today’s blog, I am going to give you my tips for taking photos in the mid-day harsh sun. This will be a 2-part blog series. This first part will cover how to the best way to take a mid-day photo and part 2 will cover the editing process
Shoot in RAW & Manual
Taking all of your photos in the RAW file format & manual mode, in general, is a good idea. Let me explain why they are extremely important for full sun photos.
The RAW format allows you to have more editing freedom. Mid-day photos can create some harsh shadows or exposed areas that can make it pretty difficult to recover from in post-production. Shooting in RAW will allow you more editing freedom that you would not otherwise have with a JPEG file.
Shooting in manual mode will permit you to have better control over your settings. While the lighting during mid-day does not change nearly as fast as it does during golden hour, you will still find yourself adjusting the longer your session goes to accommodate for an ever-shifting sun.
Select the best location
When shooting in a bright and sunny location, it can be tempting to attempt to take photos under the one or two lonely trees in the area. I DO NOT recommend this at all. Why you may ask?
Taking photos under trees will give you some shade, but it will not give you complete shade. Your subjects will have dappled light on their faces or in unsightly places. You will also run into an editing nightmare; your subjects will be underexposed and your background will become horribly overexposed as you will have to select which part of the photo you are going to expose for.
Place the sun behind your subjects
That may be confusing since you are going to be shooting in full mid-day sun but I promise you, the sun is never directly over you for too long even at high noon. I recommend placing your subject in the full sun and pay attention to where the shadow is falling. I would have them face the direction their shadow is going. This will prevent your subject from squinting as much as possible and it will allow you to have an even shadow over their face, which is much easier to edit than a face that has dappled light over it.
If you are determined to take photos under the canopy of trees, this technique can also be applied, you will have gorgeous light coming between the trees but a subject that is not covered in dappled light.
These 3 tips will help you in your photography journey, especially if you find yourself in a situation where you are unable to have a say in when you can photograph- whether it be you are on vacation, you are photographing at a location that does not allow sunset admittance, or it just happened to be the only time available for you to take portraits.