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.

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.

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