07/16/2025
I got some questions about my lighting in my son’s aviation portraits I shared the other day, so here is a fun before and after with a little explanation. Skies can be super tricky to expose when you have a subject you also need to expose correctly. In the case of clouds like this, you have to expose darker to capture the details in the shadows and the highlights, but doing that means your subject will also be underexposed. But, if you expose for the subject, your sky will be blown out and the detail will all be lost. So… there’s a few ways to do this. 1) you can do what I did here and shoot 2 images. One exposed for the subject and one for the sky, and merge them in post production (along with a lot of masking to blend them), OR you can add external lighting, which is what I did for the other images I’ve shared from this series and what I prefer for numerous reasons. I took these pictures when we first arrived on location to check my exposures prior to adding my other lighting. I don’t like this method near as much as OCF, but it did turn out cool for just a quick reference photo. I knew the cloud would not keep this formation long, and sure enough, by the time we got the lighting all situated, it had already changed. Long story short, getting a great dramatic sky AND a properly exposed subject can only happen a few ways… either you add additional directional lighting to your subject, or you do multiple exposures and merge them in post production.
