Outdoor Portrait Photography

The West Yorkshire region is finally getting a bit of sunshine and I keep getting inquiries about outdoor portrait photography. As a wedding photographer I try and get the subjects outdoors in all but the worst of conditions but for some reason I don’t do a massive amount of non wedding outdoor portraits. I am not a great fan of the formal posed group shots at weddings, I always stress to clients I try and get these out of the way asap so the bride and groom can get back to enjoying their day and we can do the informal shots that I think work so well. I approach outdoor portraits with much of the same idea, especially kids, I find you get a lot more character out of kids running around playing than sat on a bench. Although I must say, we sometimes have to sit them still for some of the semi formal stuff.

Informal outdoor portrait photography by Wakefield Photographer Pete Barnes

These two recent non studio outdoor portrait photos I have taken. The first one is of my girlfriend, who also helps me out at weddings. This one was done when I got the shots of the lake (a few posts back) the sun was nice and low so I wanted a back light effect with a little sunburst. I had to use a reflector (a lastolite trigrip if you’re interested) to bounce the light from the sun behind to light her face, other than that, no lights were used. The settings were ISO160, 70mm, f/2.8 1/100 sec.

The next shot was of one of my nephews just in the garden, he’d been running about and just stopped for a drink, again pretty informal! I find black and white’s are great for portraits but if it’s for clients I always show them the colour versions as well. There is no fancy lighting to this one and hence, it is a little flat in lighting terms but I still think it works as the focus is nice and sharp on the eyes and you get a nice background blur (bokeh) from his hair, he is a bit of a deep thinker I think this comes across in his expression. The thin depth of field comes from the focal length used, 200mm, other settings were ISO200, f/2.8 and shutter speed 1/1250, because those kids can really shift when they want to!