SNAP LOVED ONES: GOLDEN HOUR LIGHT
- Shivani Sharma
- Sep 12, 2017
- 3 min read

As a fashion photographer, my literal job is taking pictures of people. However, off duty, I love taking pictures of people around me! Clearly the passion is there 24/7 haha. I feel like I'm a provider for peoples history sometimes. I want to look back 50 years from now and know that I was responsible for taking beautiful images of people I love!
This is Ashley, she's my rock, roommate and was my classmate for 4 years as we met at OCAD University. She's always been kind of my guinea pig here in Toronto but I also love helping her build content for her up-coming Instagram account too so it works both ways!
If you got a camera, which you 100% probably do regardless if it's a phone or a quick point and shoot- just start snapping photos! take pictures when they're not looking, capture them smiling and laughing and enjoying the moment their in. It's the best feeling as an artist when you're able to capture someones happiness, and freeze it in time. As cheesy as that sounds, as I'm writing this- I feel all the passion pouring out!

Taking portraits can be as easy as eating pizza, and thats real easy for me!
All you need is some beautiful natural light, the trick is knowing what time to be shooting to get that perfect natural light. Sometimes the sun isn't your best friend if you can't shoot with it's harshest light (trust me it took me a lot of time and practice) , but no worries that's not something to be intimidated by. My advice to you is, to go out roughly 2 hours before sunset, because when the sun does set it's a race against time. Also known as GOLDEN HOUR!
The next step, is focusing on where the light is hitting on the ground, I try to place my subjects in area's where I can see the light touching them. This allows you to see if you're getting light hitting their face to hard or to soft. In this case with the image below, the sun was setting and I made sure to look at the water behind Ashley to see what direction it was coming from!
I got her to sit on a rock (because she wanted pictures on the rocks) but with her back facing the sun. This causes a flare and what we like to call Halo Light, Beautiful right? In my opinion, halo light erases imperfections on the face so much easier because the flare is the star of the show in this case!
From then- work with your shutter speed. I always leave my ISO at 100 to keep the noise to a minimum and my aperture is usually set to 2.2, which is just enough to focus in on the subject but still give that intense blur of a background! So all that's left is shutter speed, this will control how much light will be hitting the sensor of your camera, because the light is so strong in this image my shutter speed was probably at 600th/sec -800th/sec. Even though the water is slightly over exposed- It doesn't bother me because the subject is lit perfectly as well as the background. Sometimes light is just gunna be light and you can't control it. Unless you do an HDR photo but that's pretty weird in my opinion with people in the image.

None of these images are photoshopped by the way they were just put into Adobe Lightroom and exchanged the file form from RAW to JPEG with a preset that I made, I don't usually do very much post work on pictures of family and friends because I like to showcase them as they are. Especially because none of these images are going to be used for commercial work, that I know of!
If you're an aspiring photographer that wants to get into fashion, weddings, portraiture- than I suggest you start shooting anyone and everything around you with permission of course. It's the best practice out there, you only learn as you keep shooting, OH! and another tip when shooting portraits is make sure your images are STRAIGHT I can't stress enough when I see people crooked in photos and horizons falling side to side like the earth is on a slant (which it is but we can't literally show that haha)

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