Yes, You Can Do Outdoor Portraits In Winter!

Contrary to what you may believe, fantastic photos can be taken outside in Oregon any time of year.  Portland, although we tease her for her gray, rainy winters, offers some fabulous atmosphere for fabulous, edgy imagery.  Now I can hear you already… “What are you talking about?  How can you get beautiful lighting for portraits when the sun is not out?”

Lighting is a mysterious beast.  I’ll share a little tip with you – the more direct the light on your subject (you!), the worse it will look.  Have you ever tried to take photos of people in the sunshine?  It’s hard to even keep your eyes open for the picture when you’re looking into that bright orb.  On a bright sunny day, we’ll spend our session running around looking for shade, blocking light, and turning away from the sun.  Which is fine, when that’s what you have got to do…

On a day with even cloud cover, however, everything is fair game.  This frees us up to look for cool locations and backgrounds.  In order to make the images more dynamic, we’ll just introduce a little supplementary lighting and voilâ, it looks like summer, only better.

Check it out!  This is a head shot portrait Serra took last weekend on a dark cloudy Saturday.

Using supplementary flash to make beautiful light

Notice how even the light is on her face, and how open and bright her eyes are.  If this was a bright summer day and she was looking directly into the sun, she would be squinting, and there would be harsh shadows on her face under her eyes and nose which is highly un-attractive.

The faux-sunlight approach is one way to go in the winter, but if you prefer you can also go all winter all the way.  We absolutely  love accessories here at Bridge Town Photography, and winter offers ample opportunity for you to sport your cute coats, hats and scarves.  Check out this great series that Darren shot last year:

Senior Portraits With Cute Winter Accessories

Now she would have been cute in any outfit but we love the way she brought her personality to this shoot and made these portraits truly authentic.  Again, notice how gorgeous and even the lighting is.  Winter is one of our favorite time to do shoots, and it should be yours too!

As we’ve mentioned, we are looking for a few good young people to represent us to the graduating class of 2013.  If you like what you see and want to get involved, fill out our online application and we’ll do our best to get you into our senior model program so you can get your session for free.  Spaces are limited so act fast!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Tips & Tricks and tagged with Bridge Town, bridgetown, cloud, cloudy, cloudy day, cool, fashion, fashionable, free pictures, free portraits, free senior photos, free senior pictures, free senior portraits, free session, fun, High School, hip, light, Local, natural, Oregon, PDX, photography, Photos, Picture, Portland, Portraits, premier, quality, rainy, Senior, Senior Portrait, senior rep, senior representative, sun, unique, winter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.