Evening light photography

I get asked all the time when the best light is for pictures.  Unfortunately, in Albuquerque where we live, the sun is really bright and strong, and we have like 4 cloudy days a year.  (Maybe the weather channel website could be more specific - I may be inventing my statistics here...)   Full sun is tough for pictures!  It's hot, it's unflattering light, and it obscures details.  That said, I do pictures in full sun all the time - but it's not my preference.  The best light is when the sun is low in the sky, either very early in the morning (who is up for 6:30am family portraits?) or in the evening about 15 minutes before sunset.  If you have children who are old enough to be in a good mood at the end of the day, that's the easiest and nicest light to work with.

If you know me very well, you may know that one of my favorite Mother's Day gifts is that we get to do family pictures and everyone happily cooperates. :)  It's lots of fun.  (For me.)  This year it was cold and stormy on Mother's day, so we did it a couple of weeks later instead.  We went to a new location that I just found and I was really excited about.  I've been working a ton, it's been really busy here, and finally just got around to working on my own family pictures. I wanted to post them to show an example of that beautiful evening light.  We did these shortly before sunset, and it was actually a little overcast too, which helped us not to be squinty.

 



Sometimes photographers call it "golden light".  We did some family pictures (I use a tripod and a remote, if you are wondering how I take my own family pictures) and then a bunch of stuff with the kids. 


We throw marshmallows at them to make them laugh.  I have a bunch of pictures where the marshmallows are actually pelting them, but I will refrain from posting everything.




I just realized that you can see the marshmallows on the sand in this picture.  I guess you can't catch them all in your mouth.


My kids love to show all the emotions when we do pictures.  I think this is their favorite part.










And now I have an example of one of my favorite light, backlighting!  This is extreme backlighting, where all the detail is lost and you can only see our silhouettes.  I was so excited for family silhouettes, and then the night we did the first pictures we ran out of light before we got to it.  My long-suffering wonderful husband agreed to haul us all out another night, and we had so much fun doing these.






We did the family pictures in about 10 minutes, including time to run back to the car to get the letters that we'd forgotten.  Then everyone *my husband included* posed for various silhouette pictures.  Many of them included jumps.






Notice the robot hands run. :)  I love how silhouettes remove all the distractions and you can really capture a fun view of their personalities.


So - if you love the idea of evening light family portraits, or senior portraits (I've been trying to schedule all my seniors in the evening), or really anything except babies and toddlers :), I'd love to talk with you about a session! My website has lots of info that you could look through, or you can call or email me if you have questions or would just like to chat about it.

I love doing sessions at parks like these, but for lots of other session locations, see this blog page here.