Sorry Rosemary,

I just saw your post. How'd it go?

Hi Steve,
Here's the first post, the description:
A Bride and her sister, the maid of honor, want to do a shoot in advance of the wedding to create images to have on display at the reception. The shoot will be mid-to-late afternoon, shooting into the bright New Mexico sky in a South-Southwesterly direction - bright sky, subjects in shadow.
I'll have the images posted before the deadline - (nothing like waiting until the last minute, right?).
Jodi

Hi Jodi,

Better late than never! How do you plan on balancing the shade with the sunlight behind them?

This was the retake of the "shoot from hell". These kids were the most challenging little "bleeeeeps". Okay, here's the scenerio. I had a partly cloudy day. The sun was bouncing in and out of the clouds. I usually would not use a flash at all (because they scare me, but I'm getting better), but I really wanted to get a bit of a catchlight to liven up the image and to create a little dimension.

I set my light meter to ambient/flash combo and metered from about 10 feet away. I set my 550 EX light, which was on a stroboframe, to manual at 100%as I wanted about 30-40% flash in this image. I set my shutter speed to 125 for two reasons. 1) I wanted to freeze any movement of these two little "angels" and 2) I didn't want my background going too dark (not to mention my camera doesn't synch any faster than 125. I just went with the aperature on the meter, f5.6, to get the 30-40% flash. I also feathered a gold/silver reflector to camera right for a little extra fill. FYI: I will probably never shoot outdoors without a flash again.

Welcome to the contest!!!

Attached are the before and after shots.

The Sunpak flash (with a Lumiquest ultrasoft lightmodifier attached) and the aperature were set 1 1/2 stops above the ambient light reading-(ambient reading at F11 1/2, flash and aperature set to F22). This allowed the clouds to expose beautifully, while using the sun as the fill and the flash as the key light.

In Adobe Photoshop, the brown dress was lightly burned-in with the burn tool where the sheen of the fabric had picked up too much light from the flash, and a stray hair was removed from the brides' face using the clone and patch tools.