"The Colors Of Autumn"

"The Colors Of Autumn"
©David A. Ziser

Fall is about the prettiest time of the year for a lot of people. In the Midwest we get to enjoy those Fall colors for approximately a 3 week stretch throughout October. It's a great time to schedule family and high school senior portraits and pictorial bridal pictorials.

This is an image I made at a recent bridal pictorial session. This year our Fall season was a bit short lived because of our very dry summer. Still, as a professional ,that is no excuse for not being able to pull off a nice portrait of our bride.

The challenge is to find that one spot of color that will make a great background for your image. Many of the leaves had already blown off the trees but I found this small patch in the distance I thought would work. I needed a long lens to really stretch out the background behind the subject.

I also wanted to use a large aperture to throw the background well out of focus so that viewers' attention would go right to my subject. Solving the problems were easy. Place the 70-200mm lens on my camera, rack it out to 200mm and walk away till I had the bride framed up in my view finder. Next set the aperture to f4.0.

How to light the bride - how about I use my super reflective SunSpotz reflector [link] to bounce the sun’s rays back into the subject. When used a reasonable distance from the subject, it is less apt to "blind" them. I find that about 15 feet away works pretty well.  Remember, I’m not using the SunSpotz as a fill light – it’s my main light.

I had the bride strike a pleasing pose, brought the light in on her face creating a flattering loop lighting pattern and shot away. With the shallow depth of field the background colors just blossomed and looked great softly diffused behind the bride.

The light reflected from my SunSpotz - which again was my main light created a pleasing directional light on my subject and brought out the finer details of her gown. I think I pulled off a pretty nice Fall bridal portrait for my bride.

Camera spec: Canon 7D fitted with 70-200 mm IS lens at 200mm, F4.0 @ 1/400 second, ISO 200. Enjoy! -David