How to use the beauty of sunset to shoot beautiful portraits

When taking portraits, the beautiful background can add icing on the cake and make people more beautiful, and the sunset is the most beautiful moment of the day. Why not combine the sunset with the portrait? The light of the sunset is soft and natural, which provides a saturated warm tone for the whole picture; Rich and bright colors provide a beautiful background; The characters are painted with a layer of golden red light edge by afterglow, which looks fantastic and gorgeous. So how do you take advantage of the beauty of the sunset to shoot a good-looking portrait? Let's learn together:

1

Enjoy the sunset

If you want to take a good sunset portrait, you must first take a good sunset.

You need to prepare all the necessary equipment for shooting the sunset: tripod, cable releaser and medium gray gradient mirror.

Adjust the appropriate settings: aperture priority or manual mode, spot metering for the sky outside the sun, and save it as RAW format for post-processing.

2

Off-board flash

Ready to shoot the sunset, the background of this sunset portrait is ready, and then we start to think about shooting the portrait.

Sunset shooting against the light, not aiming at people, people are always black; Aiming at people to measure light, the background is easy to be overexposed. It is necessary to fill the characters with light.

The flash of the camera can only shine on the front, which makes the lines of the characters stiff and leaves shadows on their faces; The brightness of the light is high and white, which is not in harmony with the overall warm color.

Off-plane flash can effectively solve this problem. It can control the luminosity, freely place the position and set the light direction, which can meet a variety of shooting needs.

Another advantage of the off-board flash is that it can adjust the color temperature of light, which is usually used with several color cards. By changing the chip, light can display different colors.

In sunset portrait photography, we stick orange CTO color film on the lens and add warm color to the light to make the color of the characters coordinate with the background as much as possible.

When shooting, it's best to let the characters tilt slightly, and the off-camera flash is on the opposite side of the characters.

Try different flash distances, angles and brightness for many times to get the best fill light effect.

three

Peripheral exposure method

It is natural to have a suitable off-board flash. Just because there is no off-camera flash doesn't mean you can't shoot. It can be shot by peripheral exposure.

Surround exposure method, that is, taking multiple pictures of different exposure value for the same picture, and then selecting the normally exposed parts of each picture in post-processing software for integration.

This method is widely used in sunset, night scene and other shooting environments with strong contrast and easy exposure problems. At present, many cameras have their own surround exposure shooting mode.

However, the camera's own enclosing exposure synthesis processing function is not strong enough, so it is better to put multiple photos with different exposures on the computer and synthesize them with later software.

Choosing two photos with clear overall figures and slightly underexposed background as the main photo can ensure clear figures and bright background.

However, no matter how high the synthesis technology is, such photos are the result of many different photos patched together, and there is always more or less disharmony between the parts.

So, if possible, try to shoot with an off-board flash.

four

Shoot a silhouette

Off-board flash and surround exposure are too much trouble? There is also the simplest and quickest creative play: taking a silhouette.

The theme of silhouette photography is more prominent, the picture is more concise, and the mystery is created through implicit expression, which brings association and aftertaste to people and greatly enhances the artistic appeal of photos.

The key to taking a silhouette is that the silhouette should be completely black, not partially blackened and looming. The foreground that is not completely blackened is not a silhouette, but an exposure error.

Choose the place with the brightest background, such as the sun itself, to focus light to ensure that the foreground is completely black.

Pay attention to the sky background when taking a picture, so as not to distract attention from the foreground silhouette; At the same time, the foreground silhouette should also try to choose objects that are easy to identify and well-defined.

In addition, the foreground scene area should not be too large and too much, and try not to exceed one-third of the picture. A picture with too many black parts is not good-looking anyway.

Too many prospects not only affect the beauty, but also run counter to the purpose of silhouette photography itself, which is "highlighting the theme, concise and lively, mysterious and subtle".