Augmenting the Sun - Walla Walla Engagement Photography

Ira and Jerry are childhood sweethearts. To stay consistent with their wedding this fall, they wanted a "grade-school" theme for their engagement session (many more photos to come). When I heard this, I couldn't help but suggest that we photograph in a school bus.

The pressure was on. I suggested the bus; now I had to find one. After some searching we found a small bus (thanks to Liberty Christian School), and I started scouting locations. I wanted to make a couple of images that felt a little more "editorial" than "engagement," and this location along 5-mile Road was perfect. With any luck we could create a bright, cheerful look while maintaining saturated primary and secondary colors in the sky, bus, clothing, and green fields.

Shooting into the sun gave us a wonderful separation light on our subjects and beautiful saturation in the green fields, but it also created a problem. We could either expose for the highlights to maintain saturation in the sky, fields, and bus, or we could expose for the skin tones so we could see our wonderful couple. 

In many cases it is perfectly acceptable to underexpose the subjects, but this was an engagement photo. It's about the people. But exposing for our subjects would wash out the colors that make this image so striking. Anticipating this problem, we brought along a portable flash. With this we could set our exposure dark enough to get the saturated background and then add light to our subjects.

The sun is just out of the photo, behind the hill visible on the left. We set our flash at about the same height as the sun but just over five feet to the left of the camera and adjusted its power to just less than the brightness of the sun. Putting our light close to the direction of the sun helps it blend into the photo. It almost looks like there is only one light source in the finished image. 

Here's the finished photo again followed by one taken without the flash. I know which one I prefer.