Lighting Tips for Outdoor Headshots

When shooting headshots outside, it is important to light your subject, but also have a well lit background. Natural light does not always allow for this, so adding in extra lighting may be necessary. In the image below, my camera settings are set to get a great background and then I added a continuous light and a reflector to light up my model.

While using extra lights can be necessary, sometimes you get lucky and get amazing natural lighting. Below are two images where I didn’t need extra lighting. This first one only needed some saturation edits on his face. It was cold outside and his face was red in some places.

This last one is almost straight out of camera. I bumped up the saturation a little bit to color the background and give his face a little color as well and then lit up his eyes.

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