A quick and easy tip for photographing in bright sunlight

Seeing how hot and sunny the summer days are this year, I thought I would like to share a quick and easy tip for capturing your sunny moments in Santorini! Again, this is a tip for those of you who are interested in getting decent photographs of your vacation with little hassle, not an online course in professional photography.

Usually your point and shoot camera will calculate the settings automatically when you press the button. It works fine most of the time, but when facing the bright Santorini sunlight, many cameras get those settings wrong. Let’s imagine you want to take a picture of your friend in front of the sunny Mediterranean Sea. You push the button and the sea looks great but your friend is all black. That’s because the camera calculates the settings based on the full frame of the picture, and most of it is really sunny. The camera does not know that it’s important for you to see your friend’s great smile as well. The solution of this problem is really simple actually, but it seems a bit confusing for some. Just turn your flash on! It seems counterintuitive (why would you need flash in this magnificent, ultra sunny day!?), but it really works. The best thing, however, is to place your friend in some sort of shadow (from a building, a tree, a fence, anything really) and try to make a portrait of your friend keeping the flash on – ideally the flash should produce enough light to dissolve the shadow and make the foreground (your friend) as sunny as the background (sunny ocean, meadow, sky etc.) – this way you keep more detail in your photographs, the midday sun is really harsh and it is generally not the best time for taking photographs.

Professional photographers use the same principles, only their equipment is much more powerful and they have more control of the process. Following these steps should get you decent images most times!