Getting Creative with Photos in Your Backyard

Spin it. Some of the times you look through magazines and you see these great shots of, ya know, incredibly beautiful people out on the beaches in the Caribbean and ya think geez I'd like to get a shot like that. You can get a shot like that and the great thing about it is that you can get it right in your own backyard. So we're in the backyard today and I've accumulated a few pieces of equipment. An umbrella, a friend, Brynn, who has shown up to stand under the umbrella, a hose, which is gonna put some water down on us and Lisa, who's over there holding the hose crimped so when we're ready to shot she can release the pressure and we can start getting shots.

So this is how easy it is and of course, like all photography, light is everything and so I'm here as the afternoon light starts to come down the sun is starting to drop, I got great light behind and the reason I'm shooting it in back like this 'cause when they turn the hose on and she sits under the umbrella I want that white light from the raindrops coming down which looks like it's a rainstorm, a summer rainstorm. So it's absolutely perfect. So it's always easy to do this no matter where you go, right in your own backyard, but you can't lose sight of the traditional photographic reasons that make good photographs great photographs. So, to give you an example, I'm using an umbrella, we could just be sitting there with the water hitting her face but we're go with the umbrella because it's spreading out the light allowing me to fill the frame better with one model. Okay, so that's one of the reasons.

The other thing is, we started off with a red and white umbrella. The problem was, the red and white umbrella had white, red, white, red and the white was too bright. So we went oh my gosh, well can we turn it towards the red? It still didn't work. So what was happening is that, remember your eye goes to the brightest and the sharpest spots first in a photograph.

So if immediately I'm using this white and red umbrella and your eye goes right to the white spot which was getting blown out, it hurts the photograph. So we went to a green and slightly off white. It didn't work. It was still too bright. We ended up going back to the traditional old black umbrella absorbed the light, now I'm seeing the shape of the umbrella and the water coming off, as it's back lit from behind.

It's perfect. The other thing is that I've got two locations here and if you've noticed now if you can see Brynn now I've got her set up amongst dark trees in my background so the white is really gonna show. Well, to help it accentuate the fact that we're in the backyard here there's another view just 10 feet away that I can go over and I can change my background by only moving 10 feet getting away from the dark trees and moving into the area where it's just the green grass behind the backyard. So two radically different shots in the same spot and you'll be amazed. You can get these right in your own backyard.