What can I do about the contrast situation here?

A buddy and his new fiancée asked for me to take some engagement photos of them yesterday which turned out to be a photographic nightmare for me. Both are African American, well he showed up in white and she showed up in mainly darker tones with her close. To make matters worse it was very sunny out and they wanted the photos in this bright green field. I was having such a hard time finding the right exposure. I wasn't charging them so they were OK with me fumbling around with my camera. I told them that their cloths was the problem that I was working with.

What would you have done here?

I'm no pro, and learning all time. But couldn't you use a reflector or wait a sun screen of some sort to shield out some of the harsh sun beams?

This is a tough one, I've run across similar situations myself.

Yes, an assistant with a large reflector can work wonders in this situation. Just make sure the harsh sun is somewhere behind the subjects, and fill in with flash as well. But if nobody can help you...

I'd shoot in RAW mode, as you'll need as much dynamic range and processing room as possible. I would face the subjects with their backs towards the sun, set ISO to 100, and fill them in with flash. An external flash set to ETTL is best (SB-600 model or better), but if you don't have one, the pop-up flash will do in a pinch. In this case I'd set the ISO to 400 or more because the popup flash is weak. In terms of metering, try several test shots spot metered for skin tone, clothing, and a couple in-betweens, and see what would work best overall. A D300 has a nice big bright viewscreen, so viewing the test shots before the real shoot will be easy. Afterwards, process in adobe RAW using the recovery, brightness, and fill light bars to get the most detail out of the over and under exposed areas, particular attention towards exposure of skin tones.

This is the quicker way, and will get you good results in high contrast lighting, but there is a non-conventional way that's even better. It can be labor intensive, and requires a modern version of Adobe Photoshop and a computer with decent processing power. It's shooting people in HDR:

This isn't for just any camera, but you have a D300, which is a high performance machine capable of very fast continuous frame, up to a NINE SHOT BRACKET! You don't even need flash, and it can be done hand-held. Set the bracketing to 1 EV apart, meter for a value between the skin tone and clothing, have the people hold still, and shoot your shots on continous frame mode. Make a new folder for every set you do so it doesn't confuse you when handling the files later on. Then load the sets into the "Merge to HDR" function in photoshop, with the auto-align option on and let it do it's magic.

This example was done on "Nikon" Joe's own D300 with a nine-shot bracket and was intentionally overprocessed a little, but you get the idea...Nothing blown out, overly noisy, or underexposed. All the detail is there regardless of the lighting conditions.

Have fun
-Nick

Nick, excellent post! Very good information and the photo turned out fantastic

I will be trying that out myself.

your post is full of info...glad i stopped in and looked around!