Bonneville Salt Flats Portrait

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 50mm 

Aperture: f/2.8  Shutter Speed: 1/4000

This was a shot from an engagement session I did. The couple wanted to do it out on the Bonneville Salt Flats. It is a pretty cool place to go shoot. This was shot in the afternoon and the light was still pretty harsh. I would have liked to have shot it early or late to get better light from the sun, but unfortunately that just wasn't an option. When shooting at the Salt Flats you will want to overexpose just a bit maybe +.5 or +1 ev, otherwise the salt flats will be a sort of gray color instead of white. For a lot of shots during this session we used a 5 in 1 reflector. In this case we positioned the translucent part of the reflector to the left of the camera to take out the harsh shadows and give some directional light to the couple. I used an aperture of f/2.8 to get a shallow depth of field to isolate the couple from the background. If I had tried a wider aperture the shutter would not be able to fire fast enough so f/2.8 was the widest aperture possible. For a wider aperture you would need to use a neutral density filter (think of sunglasses for your camera) it restricts the amount of light going through the lens without changing the color of the image.

During the entire shoot I was shooting with my 50mm lens that I mentioned in my last post. It is really great for portraits.

For post processing I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. It is an incredible tool for converting images to black and white. 

If you shoot a lot of portraits I would really recommend getting a 5 in 1 reflector. They are a fantastic tool that can be had very cheap. Like my 43" set cost less than $20. I use the Neewer Reflector and it has really worked great for me. It does have a few drawbacks but for less than $20 it is well worth it.