OUR APPRENTICE SAYS…

We moved to some nearby dunes to take pictures of our second family in a more natural setting. Kate explained the importance of using fill flash in situations like this – without it, the strong backlighting would have left us with burned-out highlights and underexposed faces. For convenience, we used Nikon Speedlights mounted to the cameras’ hotshoes. Kate advised me to use Auto FP high-speed sync mode as this would enable me to continue using the largest aperture available on my lens in order to blur the foreground and background details. The fast shutter speed that we were getting from the large aperture would have been too quick for a normal flash exposure, but high-speed sync gets around this. As for the other shoots, we worked out the exposure for the ambient light using manual mode before using flash to lift the shadows from our models’ faces.