Advantages and precautions of taking portraits on cloudy days

Lead: Shooting on rainy days is the weather that photographers don't like the most, and it has become the most common shooting test. However, if you are flexible, you can still see the tricks. Next, I will talk about the benefits and precautions of taking portraits on cloudy days.

Advantages of cloudy shooting

In fact, there are some objective advantages in taking portraits on cloudy days:

1. Soft light quality

2.Flash effect is very fun.

3. Late charm First of all, on cloudy days, the light quality of ambient light is very soft, and sunlight is blocked by clouds and enters the shooting environment in a diffuse way.

This can be imagined as if a soft light device with excellent scattering effect was installed in front of a big super flash (referring to the sun), so you don't have to worry about dealing with the quality of hard light in the big sun on weekdays.

Moreover, due to the weak light, if you use your own external flash, even if there is not much flash output, the ambient light is still easily affected. This is the time to play the flash skills (especially multi-flash). On the contrary, in sunny days, small flicker is limited by the objective factors of output, and the effect is often only on smooth contrast.

Cloudy images are very similar to those in low light. Sometimes the light looks flat, but if you look closely, you will still see the levels of light, especially when you find the scene of light-dark transition. The light level is very different from that on a sunny day. This type of image has a lot of room for later development, and it is easy to create a very attractive feeling. On the contrary, Gao Fancha's image leaves little room for later period.

Matters needing attention in cloudy shooting

The most common problem that many novices encounter when shooting on cloudy days is that the image has a gloomy feeling, so they will take cloudy photography as a fear.

Basically, the "gloomy" or "bright" feeling of an image depends first on the metering and exposure of the camera, and then on the color tonality of the scene, not on sunny or cloudy days.

If the image is dark, you can add some EV compensation to increase the exposure. If you want to eat more ambient light, you can increase the aperture and improve ISO. For modern DSLR, night scenes are not a challenge, let alone cloudy days.

For the problem of cloudy light color, we can make a choice between adding chroma and not adding chroma. After all, not all images should be bright and have high chroma. Reverse thinking, if you don't add chroma, but reduce chroma? Will it make the image feel more? Another possible problem in cloudy shooting is hand shaking caused by light or shooting with telephoto lens, so special attention should be paid to keeping the shutter above the "safety shutter". One of the simplest inspection methods is to use the reciprocal of the focal length, for example, when shooting with a focal length of 200mm, of course, it is best to keep the shutter above1/250 s.

The third problem of cloudy shooting is that the color temperature of ambient light is too cold. To tell the truth, for portrait photography, cold ambient light is really a good shooting situation. As long as the main body is supplemented by warm light (to be uniform), the whole picture can be quite prominent!

Post-consideration of blurred images

According to the characteristics of cloudy images, the brightness of midtones can be slightly improved, and the color temperature (RAW file) of images can be adjusted. In addition, cloudy images are also very suitable for making LOMO or negatives, or a touch of Japanese style, which are all directions that can be played.