Sunset on Lake Winnebago gives a beautiful range of colors. The Eastern shore of the Lake has about the best sunset views in my part of Wisconsin – the Fox Valley.
Here we see a wonderful young couple enjoying each other and the sunset for their engagement pictures. So let’s do a tutorial on how to balance flash and ambient light and capture this kind of shot.
The recipe for this picture is fairly straightforward, but a little tricky. Shot with my Canon 50mm f/1.2 L lens. I picked a f/4.5 aperture to have my couple well in focus and to preserve some background details. The lake behind them is a little dreamy but still has details without being distracting. I set the exposure for the lake – sunset dark but not too dark – which worked out to a 1/100 second shutter speed at 250 ISO. I then positioned a flash with a softbox to light them without too much light spill on the grass. I set the flash so that her white dress was bright but not too bright. I used the histogram on my camera along with the highlight warning (blinkies) to set the flash a little bit below the point where her dress was overexposed.
Canon 5d mkIV | Canon 50mm f/1.2 L | 1/100s F/4.5
