I am going to shoot a mother and daughter friend of mine in an outdoor setting. This will be my first time shooting people and if that is not challenging enough the people I'm shooting are complete opposite in complexion. One is very light skinned and the other is very dark. I really don't know how to shoot two people and now I'm totally confused on how to expose for them. Any help would be greatly appreciated .
Thank you.
The reason I ask the question is because I read so much about white balance when shooting weddings with black tux and white dress. I don't think of it as a dumb question but apologize if you see it as one.
Hang on, is your concern about exposure or about white balance?
Exposure
Fundamentally you set exposure for the
strength of illumination upon the subject/scene, not for the shades and tones of the subject/scene. It is true that the you can finesse the exposure, especially if you want to dig a little more detail out of the darker tones, but by and large a good starting point is to expose for the mid tones and let everything else, darker and lighter, end up where it may.
There are all sorts of techniques for how you arrive at the correct (or preferred) exposure, but I do not believe that regular dark skin (i.e. not ebony) and regular pale skin should present a big problem. The difficulty you may face is deciding how to meter the subject/scene, but it's no different to any other "normal" scene. I have my preferences, often involving spot metering and manual exposure, but they won't suit everyone. What is your normal method for metering and how does it turn out?
White Balance
Fundamentally you set white balance according to the
colour of the light upon the subject/scene, not for the colour of the subject/scene itself. You can finesse the precise WB value for a more pleasing aesthetic, so that a tungsten lit room doesn't look like an operating theatre, for example, but the subject doesn't change the requirements, only the light itself and the aesthetic intent.
Since we already have exposure examples above, here's one for white balance. I shot raw with the camera set to Daylight WB. As you can see, the subject was in the shade, rendering a very cool/blue look to the photo. I tried using cloudy and shady presets in Lightroom to adjust, but did not like the result, so in the end I manually adjusted to suit my eye.
The exposure, with which I am happy, did not need adjusting at all.
By the way, my seated example above does raise another important point for your shoot. Watch your perspectives. This was shot with an 85mm lens on a full frame body. To get the framing here I had to be fairly close to the subject. This has meant that the hands look quite exaggerated in size because they are much closer to the camera than the rest of the subject. The solution would be to step further back and use a longer focal length for the same framing.
p.s. I don't think the question is dumb. I only asked why you thought it was any more complicated than shooting most other things. I can appreciate that your mind might be whizzing around worrying about posing and lighting and so on, but I don't think you should be fearful that differing skin tones will be something to add to your worry on top of everything else. So long as you know how to nail exposures in general then the skin tones ought not to add any extra complication, IMHO.
p.p.s. If you are truly worried then, as you are in control of the shoot rather than shooting an event which is going at its own pace, take the time to check your histogram and adjust and reshoot if necessary. Better to get it right whilst shooting than to rush through it all and make mistakes. Or, if you'd prefer, maybe just fire off bracketed burst of shots at around -2/3, 0 and +2/3 or something like that.
