I am excited about this blog post not only because Jesse and Nate made this engagement session super fun, but because I get to write about photographing in different lighting situations: full sun and golden hour. Most photographers prefer to shoot closer to golden hour (about an hour before sunset to a half hour after sunset) and rightly so because of the soft, warm, directional light. But what do you do if you are unable to schedule a session at that time? Well, I am going to share with you how I shoot in both situations.

The sun was still pretty high in the sky so we began our shoot in front of some good ol’ American Beachgrass! I positioned Jesse and Nate on a large piece of driftwood in front of plenty of beachgrass with the sun directly behind them. With the sun behind them, I was able to get nice soft expressions without squinting eyes. Backlit photos are some of my favorites because I love the way the sun creates a sort of halo around my subjects.

Another thing I like to do when the sun is blaring down, is to have my clients do something fun while looking and laughing at each other. This also helps to prevent squinting eyes in photos.

These next two sets set of photos were taken during the golden hour. I played around with two different techniques where I exposed for the subjects and where I exposed for the background.

In this first set, I exposed my camera for my subjects. You can see that Jesse and Nate are exposed but my background and sky has lost some detail. I could have used off camera flash to properly expose for both, however I prefer natural light photography to flash.

Also notice in the very last photo in this set, my subjects were positioned facing the sun unlike the rest of the images where the sun was behind them. This almost mimics flash photography in that the light of the sun is falling on Jesse and Nate and I am able to expose for the sky to keep the detail in the background.

In my final images, I got these amazing silhouettes when I exposed my camera for the backdrop of the sky. The results are these dramatic and gorgeous portraits which was a perfect ending to this engagement session!

Thank you Jesse and Nate for being so amazing! I absolutely love when clients are open to a vision I have for a session!

I hope you found this post helpful, if so, please like, comment, and share this post! 😘