Wedding Photography: Overpowering the Sun

One situation where this has come up in the past while I was doing a wedding is when the bride and groom come out of the Church and are just stepping into the sun light. There is no controlling where the sun will fall on their face and if it is a harsh sun it can blow out (be really bright almost to the point of white) an area of the subjects face while keeping the other areas properly exposed. The camera is limited in its metering ability and struggles with very light/dark area contrasts. If you try to properly exposed the blown out area the other areas will become too dark and lose detail. Either way you lose detail in either the blown out area or the too dark areas.

One thing you can do is properly expose the blown out part (making the other areas dark) and use a speedlight to expose the dark area and bring back out the details. On camera flashes will not be powerful enough to do this especially considering you might not be able to get right up close to the subject. Additionally, I believe the D3200 is menu driven and this can be slow to work with when shooting in rapidly changing environments. While your outside waiting for the couple to exit set your camera on center weighted metering (as opposed to matrix metering) and use a small focus area. When the couple comes out you can focus/meter on the blown out area and the camera will adjust for that area only. Then you can quickly re-frame the shot and snap away.

With a little bit of practice this is very easy and will allow you to work with varying blown out areas (dress, hair, skin, etc.) very quickly. When using this technique you will usually be outside with strong sun light and already be using a high F-stop but make sure not to go to low on the F-stop as you want a large depth of field area. Sometimes when you focus/meter on an area it might not be their face. You want to make sure that the face is in proper focus and a shallow depth of field will make this very difficult. Everyone wants soft backgrounds but proper exposure is way more important.