How to Take Family Portraits Outdoors

Video Transcript

"Hello, this is Tom Sapp. We're going to talk today about how to take family portraits outdoors. Now this is something I do everyday. Usually sometimes twice a day. I try to do, the best time, we'll start talking about the best time to shoot first. What you're going to want to do, if you're in various parts of the world here, various parts of the land. I'm on the coastal area, so I'm dealing a lot with beach portraits which we're in wide open situations. If you're more into like the wooded area like say when I was in the mountains in the Blue Ridge, we would start shooting a little bit earlier like right here on the beach you've got wide open area. You have no shade out on the beach, so you have to deal with the sun or you have to deal with clouds being under the sun. You don't want to shoot when the light is bright because you get obvious things that happen that just make the experience, and the experience is 90% of it, these things make the experience unenjoyable, it will reflect on the photography. If people sweat, they're not happy. OK, if they squint they're not happy. You need to make people happy in the photographs. That's the primary thing that you're going to want to do. Because if somebody's enjoyable, if they're enjoying the experience, if they're having a good time, it's going to show in those photographs and that's the most important thing. When you're doing a family portrait, people simply want to see a decent representation of themselves enjoying whatever it is they're doing. The background in general needs to be somewhat related to things that they like, things that they're doing. Here people come on vacation to the beach, so I take them out and I do a nice sunset portrait or sunrise portrait out on the beach and that reflects their stay here while they were at the beach. It's something that they can put on their wall and say, hey you know remember five or six years ago, we went down to the beach and hung out. We had a fishing trip, you know, things like that. This portrait you're going to take has to be a memory and that's how you're going to make it special for people. So the most important thing and the easiest thing for photographers to do is to simply use shade or soft light. When I was up in the Piedmont area or up in the mountains of North Carolina or even when I was up in Connecticut area, we had a lot of parks that we'd go to like at top of the mountains. It was maybe two hours before sunset, it would be the best time. So because there was shade, there was trees, as long as, if you want to get like a rim like around people, that's what I do. I show up a little early and I get pictures with rim lights, that's back lit photos, so you put the sun to their back. And as long as the background isn't shade, it's going to match the skin tone because this part of their body is in shade and a lot of times I don't even use reflectors or anything. But the reason you would want to use a reflector is because that little halo that you get, that rim light that you get around people's heads when you back light them, it sometimes blows out the hair, especially on the older generation where you have white hair. You need to bring the detail in the face, the level of illumination closer to the level of illumination that's in the hair. You want to kind of bring those two together, and the way you do that is to simply reflect light into the shadows, raise that level of illumination in the shadow area. Now the trick with doing sunset portraits and sunrise portraits is if you get there right in the morning at sunrise, you simply turn the people into the sun, and that way you get direct light, and that is the most beautiful light you're going to get for portraits is when the sun is up just a little bit and it's just basically glowing. It's called morning glow or evening glow. Some people call it the golden time. I've heard it called various different things, but that's the best time to get portraits is when people can look directly into the sunlight and just enjoy themselves out on the beach in a nice cool temperature. Sometimes at the the end of the day I tell people to bring bug spray just to prevent that, but really bugs is really the only thing that causes an unenjoyable experience at sunset here in North Carolina where I am. So if you want to take pictures of people, long lens usually helps cause you can get that compression factor if you want to get the background closer behind the subject. You can do, I usually use two cameras, I'll do the wide lens, I've got the 14 to 24 that I throw on. And I'll shoot it 28 with the wide lens and then I'll throw this one on and as long as there's maybe three or four people I'll do 28, if there's more than that I'll try to do five, six just to make sure I get everybody in focus. But usually I stick with the 200 millimeter if I'm doing like a group, or I'll switch if I want to do something creative. I'll do a wide angle lens and you'll run up into and tell them to scream or have fun and make it fun and play some photo games, get into it a little bit. There's a lot more that goes into to taking family portraits, dealing with children, dealing with animals while you're doing it, large groups, older people, trying to get everybody's attention to keep their attention on you. So a lot of different stuff that goes into it, but we'll talk about that a little later if we can. Hope you're having a good day. This is Tom Sapp, how to take family portraits."