I took this portrait of Erin a couple of years ago at the beach. It was an overcast March day, so I did not have to worry about shadows. But on the other side of the coin, I would be having to deal with lower contrast as well. Not to mention no catchlights in the eyes, a no no in portraiture, even if you have to add them in PS. Fill flash is the perfect way to add contrast and provide a catch light for the eyes. Now I will be the first to admit that I know essentially nothing about cameras with "smart" strobes which calculate OTF/OTS automatic fill for you so if this is what you use this may not be all that helpful for you. What I do use, however, are manual Sunpak 544's (superb old handle mount strobes) along with an ambient/flash meter. I usually use the strobes without umbrellas because, especially at the beach, it is always windy and I usually work alone so I don't have someone to keep the flash and umbrella from being blown over. I have gone as far as to take a generator out on a shoot with me and used my 550 WS studio strobes (AC) in their softboxes. But I don't do that often at all because the generator weighs about a hundred pounds and it is noisy and I also have people helping me out. The Sunpak strobes are placed on manual and because these strobes are very powerful, GN80 for ASA 25, and I set the power setting at at least 1/16 or 1/32 power to start. I use a flash meter to measure the incident levels to set the base exposure. I then trigger the strobe, in the "cordless" mode of the meter and adjust the power setting on the strobe to give me about a 15 - 20% contribution. This is enough to fill shadows, without creating hard edged shadows of their own. If you balance the ambient and fill flash, the results will look very natural. The image below is a perfect example. Even though fill was used, you have to look really hard to see any shadows from the flash. Just a faint one behind her right arm. Any ones which are there can be easily handled in PS.
This image was taken with a D700 and 105mm f/1.8 AIS Nikkor. The EXIF says the exposure was 1/60 at f/5.6. I wanted just enough depth of field to render her in sharp focus, but shallow enough to throw the background completely out of focus. I did essentially nothing in post processing except crop to 8x10 proportions, which I do with all of my portraits. I did not adjust the brightness or contrast of the image. Good prior planning and execution took care of that for me. I am pleased with the result, though it required a lot more work and planning than just "point and shoot".
This image was taken with a D700 and 105mm f/1.8 AIS Nikkor. The EXIF says the exposure was 1/60 at f/5.6. I wanted just enough depth of field to render her in sharp focus, but shallow enough to throw the background completely out of focus. I did essentially nothing in post processing except crop to 8x10 proportions, which I do with all of my portraits. I did not adjust the brightness or contrast of the image. Good prior planning and execution took care of that for me. I am pleased with the result, though it required a lot more work and planning than just "point and shoot".
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