^{photo by gradyreese via iStock}

Taking photos in harsh sunlight creates challenging situations with regards to exposure choices, camera settings for bright sunlight, and other aspects of photography.

When you walk around and you’re squinting, you can be pretty sure that qualifies as harsh sunlight. Here’s how to deal with it.

What is Harsh Sunlight?

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What exactly is harsh sunlight? In addition to the squinting clue, I would define harsh sunlight as direct, unfiltered, unmodified direct illumination from our home star, the sun. 

Some examples could include shooting at or near noon, shooting on a cloudless day, taking pictures in the city with bright concrete, the beach with bright sand, or a snow covered scene on a clear day.

We might also run into bright sunlight indoors or in an otherwise shaded area with unfiltered sunlight streaming into the scene. This may cause additional things to consider such as staying within a usable dynamic range.

Just as there are multiple scenarios for taking photos in harsh sunlight, there are multiple methods and techniques we use to capture good images.

Find Some Shade

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For many situations, finding shade is the simplest solution. For other situations it doesn’t work at all, but we’ll get to those in our next points.

If we’re photographing people in the direct sunlight, a major problem, how to take photos at noon, is to avoid the direct sunlight altogether. 

There are many items outside that offer shade, sometimes a sliver of shade is all we need. A tree, a house overhang, a gazebo, a tall building, a covered porch, awnings, or an umbrella can provide the shade we need to avoid our subject squinting in the bright light.

If that isn’t an option open to us, turn the subject to face a direction that doesn’t have the sun right in their eyes. Even at noon, there is often a little bit of directionality to the sunlight. We can add a foldable reflector to provide some good catchlight, opening up the shadows and putting sparkle in their eyes. Be careful not to focus any really bright reflection right into their eyes!

Learn More:

• Portraits in Harsh Sunlight: Tips for Success
• Improve Your Landscape Photos by Shooting Toward the Sun

Lens Flare

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Sometimes the issue isn’t the subject position or eye squinting. We might be photographing something else, a landscape, architecture, or flowers.  

The problem might occur that the direct sunlight isn’t affecting the subject but rather the lens. When sunlight, or any bright point light source, strikes the surface of our lens elements, it can cause reflections and refractions that are described as lens flare. 

Lens flare manifests itself as a light streak, a halo, or maybe a ghost image of either the light beam itself or some of the internal components of the lens, the lens aperture blades are a common culprit. You may not actually see any lens flare as a specific image element, but it can also cause a loss of contrast or a color cast to the image. This is especially problematic with zoom lenses. 

There are a couple of simple solutions for this problem. One, embrace the lens flare, make it a part of your image. To be honest, most of the time this comes out looking goofy, but sometimes we can frame another part of the scene with the flare. It’s worth at least playing around with.

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Two, change the camera position. It may only require a slight turn of our camera direction to avoid the lens flare. So instead of wondering how to take photos in direct sun, we eliminate the directness of the sunlight. 

Finally, and what I think is most effective, use a lens hood. Most of the lenses I’ve purchased or reviewed over the years have their own dedicated lens hood. It may be built-in or it might be a removable lens hood. 

The hard lens hoods for many zoom lenses are reversed for storage, so make sure to mount them in working position when actually taking photos in harsh sunlight. A lens hood is also great physical protection from accidental damage.

A word of caution for buying lens hoods not specifically designed for your lens is to watch out for the hood intruding into the image area. Using a lens hood made for a short telephoto lens on a wide angle lens will result in noticeable vignetting.

Bright Scenes with Lots of Sun

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Knowing how to take good pictures in bright sun may also involve lens filters, extra processing, or both. This will require some spending, both of money and time, but filters are usually pretty affordable for most photography budgets and current post processing programs are easy to learn. 

Plus, you can find YouTube tutorials on most of these ideas. The makers of the software programs tend to have great online training available, some for free and others at minimal cost.

ND Filters, GND Filters, Polarizers

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Lens filters allow you to be more versatile as a photographer. The top three most useful lens filters for most photographers are neutral density (ND), graduated neutral density, (GND), and circular polarizers (C-POL). 

Neutral density and GND filters add density to or subtract brightness from a scene by means of a colorless tint in various strengths. An ND filter is one strength all the way through, a GND filter is clear in part of it with a transition area that either be hard or very quick, or soft, very gradual.

The way to use an ND filter is to have it bring down the entire brightness level of the scene, as far as light passing through the lens to hit the sensor. So if a scene is very bright overall, we can add an ND filter to tone it down or to be able to use exposure triangle values that we prefer.

 ^{photo by Ignacio Ruiz Casanellas via iStock}

GND filters are used to take photos in harsh sunlight when a portion of the scene is not in full sunlight. The reason we might need to be concerned with this scenario is that the part of the scene in deep shadow and the part in direct sunlight are so far apart in exposure value that they are outside of the range that the sensor can capture. 

That is what is known as a dynamic range issue. A GND filter is used to bring down the exposure value of the brighter part of the image by blocking out some of the light so that the entire range of brightness levels can be captured properly by our sensor.

A polarizer filter is beneficial for taking photos in harsh sunlight in that it adds about 2 stops of neutral density as well as being able to help control reflections in glass or water plus adjusting contrast levels and removing the effects of light scattering haze.

Post-Processing

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There are two general ways to use post processing to allow us to take good photos in harsh light. One method uses the slider controls to adjust highlights, midtones, and shadows, the other is a more involved method known as bracket and merge or HDR (high dynamic range) photography. 

HDR photography uses multiple image files of the same scene, taken at different exposure values, and blends them together for a balanced view of everything in the scene. The effect can be subtle, as you may see in real estate listings, or you can choose to make it very artsy and interesting.

For HDR photography, you will need a tripod or some sort of tripod alternative, manual control of the exposure settings, and RAW image files for best results. Also, you will either need a program specifically designed to make HDR images or one that has those functions of blending exposures. The special use HDR programs are more versatile and are friendly to most budgets.

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The slider control method uses only one image file, but you’ll be able to control and adjust a lot more of it when you record our images as RAW files. RAW files hold more exposure information than compressed JPEGs do.

Choosing a well exposed image file, we can then adjust the different light values, highlights, midrange, and shadows, up or down by means of their separate controls. In most of the programs I’ve seen, these are adjusted with easy to access slider controls, using either keyboard shortcuts, a mouse, or a tablet input device.

For either of these post processing techniques, it’s a lot simpler to actually do the method than to read about it, though we have several excellent articles discussing the ins and outs of various post processing methods and techniques.

Harsh Sunlight Can Be Tamed

 ^{photo by Tom Merton via iStock}

Photography is literally defined as “writing with light.” Sunlight is a major tool for all sorts of photography, though at times it may seem hard to control. Take control by using these methods and techniques for making great photos in harsh sunlight.

Learn More:

• A Step-By-Step Guide for Killer Sunrise Photos
• Harsh Sunlight? No Problem! Try These Tips for Shooting Landscapes in Bright Lighting