Blog Assignment: Add some flare!

I'm starting to love working with couples more and more. There is always a spark, a justifiable passion that interconnects the two and places them in their own little remote bubble miles removed from where I stand with my camera. Jenn and Nate were the lucky ones who responded to my request for a local couple to model for this particular blog assignment and they definitely brought out their love and appetite for each other during our shoot. This past week was spent learning about lens flare. I know I've done it in the past, but I've never just sat down and played with the exposure and location of the sun flare for use artistically.

A few things I learned...

Always work on fully manual exposure. Use your display screen and histogram to determine whether you nailed the exposure correctly or not. Most of the time I was going against what my in-camera meter was saying was the proper exposure.

Block the sun either with your subject or your hand to let the camera focus on the subject, then bring in the light. The camera has a hard time focusing in such bright conditions.

Try to pay attention to where the sun trail is falling on your subject. A couple of shots I wasn't able to use because there was a overly bright sun spot right on my subject.

Avoid looking directly at the sun. I'm sure this type of assignment takes it's toll on your equipment as well, but I always tried to keep the sun behind my subject until the last second and then step out and frame the shot.

Here are a few shots. If you like these and want to see more from this shoot, head over to facebook and join the fan pages! You never know when I'll need another local model!