The $20 accessory that will dramatically improve your outdoor portraits

Photography is a notoriously expensive hobby (or profession!), but this post features a great accessory that is less than $20 :). I mainly do landscape, cityscape and wildlife photography, but this past weekend went out with the family to take some portraits in a sunflower field near Denver Airport. So I took along this reflector, which I bought a few years ago, and it really helped to get some nice pictures. Here it is in action with an iPhone!

The sun is behind Paula, off to the left hand side of the photo, but it is reflecting from the disk to cast a nice golden light onto her face. Here is how one of the iPhone shots looked with no editing – impressive for shooting directly into the sun! This also shows that the reflector can really help even if you are not using a fancy camera.

Though the disk is 43″ across when in use, it easily folds with a twist into a 15″ pouch for carrying, and is very lightweight. It’s actually very versatile – the disk I have can be solid white, silver, gold or black, or translucent white, to let you create a range of effects (the base disk is translucent white with a metal hoop, and it has a reversible lightweight cloth cover that provides the other four colors).

I think it’s a remarkably good deal, for just $18.50 from Amazon at the time of writing.

Here is an example of a picture I took of Paula and Nikki, this is the raw image straight out of the camera, with no processing at all.

Even though I am shooting directly into the sun, you can see that their faces are still fairly well lit from the left hand side. Here I am just holding my camera in my right hand and the reflector in my left hand, which is not ideal – it tends to work a lot better if you can recruit an assistant to hold the disk! The gold color is not too obvious here but comes out more with a little post processing. As a side note, I used a 15mm fisheye lens for this picture, which seems to work well shooting into the sun – I think this is because the sun occupies a much smaller portion of the overall photo than it would with a less wide angle. The other advantage of the fisheye in this situation is that it has a very large depth of field so everything stays sharp and in focus, which is what I want here, so we can see the sunflowers clearly.

The image below is the result of a quick one click edit using Seim Natural HDR presets in Lightroom, which I’m a big fan of – they often given nice results with a single click (this preset is called Big Sky Dynamics, which I use a lot for landscape pictures). I like the effect it provides here.

Finally I did a quick bit of cloning in Photoshop to remove the cars in the background on the left hand side.

The other plus of having a reflecting disk is that it makes you look like you’re a professional 🙂 !! Definitely a worthwhile thing to pick up even if you are a very occasional portrait photographer like I am.