I need advice: how to make good pictures under these conditions?

[rumtscho]

I am making photographs in a greenhouse (because of the beautiful background) and they have to be very good (these will be the employee pictures on our web site). I don't have much experience with photography and I've never photographed people before. I did some test shots today and they didn't turn out good enough, so I need some advice from you.

Conditions: I don't have artificial light sources beside the built-in flash. The roof is somewhat opaque, but not much, so the light is quite harsh. I can place people under trees where there is an even shadow, but parts of the background get overexposured. The colours are quite bad, probably because of the green light being reflected from all the leaves. When I tried to remove the tinge in ufraw by changing the white balance, the faces become undersaturated and the background oversaturated (do you know any remedy for that?)

First of all, I think I need a custom setting for the white balance, but don't know how to do it. My camera lets me program my own presets using a matrix with two axes, A-B and G-M. I don't know the meaning of these axis names. Which direction should I use for a greenish light? I don't have a device to measure light colour exactly.

Second, I don't know how the camera exposure algorithms work, but they did a very good job with almost all shots of a blonde girl with a teal blouse. The shots of a dark-haired boy with a black shirt resulted in a well-lit face and a badly lit shirt (I think we can live with that). But the shots of a dark-haired girl with a bright yellow t-shirt had a perfectly lit t-shirt (in the original, at 100% zoom you can see the single strands in the weave!), underexposured hair and the face was a mess of overexposured nose/brow/cheeks and dark shadowed eyes. She also had the worst greenish colouring of all. Obviously, I cannot tell people to dye their hair, but which shirt colours will be best (as in: least likely to confound the camera light measuring algorithms)? Maybe something greenish, so the camera will count it as background and make the face look good? Will light or dark clothing be better?

Third, any other ideas how to make the shots better are welcome.

The tools I have at my disposal are: a D90 with a superzoom kit lens; a tripod; ufraw; gimp.

I am attaching 3 examples so you can see my problems. They are as they come from the camera, only resized and converted to jpeg.

[mlee]

Without an external flash and any sort of light reflector - it may be difficult to fill in shadows and light up your subject under these conditions.

What you can do is, adjust your white balance and ISO settings up a notch or two. Use spot metering and expose the subject instead of exposing the background.

Last remedy would be - post processing it in Lightroom to give the subjects the necessary exposure.

[i speak in math]

how to make good pictures under these conditions?

Hire someone that knows what they are doing.

[Digidave]

The first 2 don't look that bad except for the white balance. Did you shoot in RAW format? You can adjust your white balance if you did. The 3rd one is a different story though. You could try the Dodging tool to lighten the face, if Gimp has one of course. If you want to reshoot, I would get something to reflect light into her face to lessen the shadows.

[IABoomer]

Shooting RAW is going to require more processing to get the images sharp and the contrast right. Using an EXIF viewer on your first image, it looks like you had an exposure bias set to -2/3, which might explain why the images are a bit underexposed. You might want to get in a bit closer to the subjects so your flash has a chance to fill in some detail. You could look into a DIY flash diffuser like this:

DIY Digital SLR built in-flash diffuser

which might help soften up what is otherwise a harsh direct flash.

As mlee suggested, switch to spot metering to meter off the person's face instead of the matrix metering which takes into account the bright shirt and bright background and leaves the face underexposed.

[JAD40]

I would find a way to reflect light back at your subject using a white board, or something similar. That way they can pop out form the background some. Also like IABoomer suggested you can try building a diffuser for your pop up flash.

[rumtscho]

Thank you all for the good advice!

We tried again today. The results may be far from professional quality, but we are happy with them. I think that changing the metering mode helped most, as well as our luck - we had some light clouds today, so we didn't have to stay in the deepest shadows. They just didn't leave me time to build the DIY diffusor, or it may have been even better. I'm definitely going to try it out.

Sadly, things like reflectors, Lightromm, or an off-camera flash, are outside our budget (which is exactly zero), and I cannot afford to buy my own just now. But I'll remember them for the future.

Here is a pic of the same girl in today's shooting, I think the result is presentable. Remember, I haven't done any postprocessing yet, so it will improve a bit.

[Digidave]

For the next time. Check this out.

DIY Reflectors