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If you have ever taken pictures outdoors in bright sunlight, you’ve probably seen the old standard - the family all squinting at the person taking the picture, with their foreheads overexposed pure white and the shadows under their eyebrows, noses, and chins underexposed to pure black. You may have seen photographs taken indoors with flash even though the window behind the subject was fully sunlit. Of course, we’ve all seen the odd color cast and lighting of pictures taken in deep shade on sunny days. There’s one tool that will help you solve all of these tricky lighting problems, and it’s a very inexpensive one. No, you don’t have to go buy a new flash, or a new camera, or some kind of fancy light. All you need is a simple, inexpensive reflector.

You can make a very useful reflector inexpensively using the white foamcore board you can get at almost any craft store. A medium sized piece will work for individual subjects, but you might need a big one for a group. Get some tape, a knife, and a weight (in case it’s windy!). Cut the first layer of the board about 1/3 of the way up the front, then fold it into an “L” shape. Tape the corners so that it will stay bent, and put the weight on the short end of the “L”. Now, put the reflector out of the picture below your camera’s line of sight, and examine your subject. Move the reflector until you see the shadows lighten, and take the picture. You’ll see that the contrast has come down quite a bit, and everyone looks much more evenly lit.

Sometimes you can get away with laying a large white reflector flat on the ground so that the light is reflected up into the shadows of your subject. Be careful, and experiment - you can get too much of a good thing and end up with flat, odd looking pictures.

Another good alternative to the white foam core is the collapsible silver windshield reflectors for the front dash of automobiles. They’re designed to reflect the sun’s light (and heat) back out of the car, and they’ll do a very good job reflecting light for us, but again, be careful! It’s even easier with these large silver reflectors to overwhelm the lighting in your image.

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Written by: jstevewhite
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