As wedding season continues in full force we’ve seen a common trend emerging of less time given to photographers for couples portraits. Sometimes we are forced to work with time constraints and miss golden hour limiting us to the low-light of dusk or even early evening.

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Our Recreating Golden Hour Workshop gives you the run down on how to create the sun when you clearly just don’t have any of that golden light to work with. Since new lighting gear is coming out monthly, we’ve updated our gear list to include some newcomers in the industry.

The Gear You’ll Need to Re-Create The Sun

These are our recommended tools for recreating natural light or golden hour, but of course if you’ve tried a technique with the gear you have and see no reason to upgrade then do what works for you. The above image was created with the Godox AD200 at full power.

We have at least one option listed for all budgets:

Pocket Strobes

Monolights

Profoto B1

Flashpoint Xplor (Nikon), (Canon)

Accessories

Should You Upgrade Your gear?

Perfect the technique and then consider it if your budget allows. Many think the fastest solution to better imagery is higher quality gear acquisition. Invest in your education first and see how you can best use the gear you have to make it work for you. This is the primary reason why we started SLR Lounge Premium, to prove that education should be valued higher than any piece of gear. We’ve shown you how to recreate the sun using high end strobes and simple pocket flashes, so gear shouldn’t be the excuse to nailing this technique.

Enhance in Lightroom with Targeted Editing

Regardless of what gear you are using, the most important factor in realistically recreating the sun or golden hour is to dial in the right camera settings to ensure that your added light isn’t blowing out your scene. The image on the right was shot on a Canon 5D Mark 4 with a Sigma Art 24,mm f/1.4 ISO 100 at 1/200th of a second in order to maximize dynamic range in the scene and preserve our shadows to make the added light as realistic as possible.

With a simple click of the SLR Lounge Signature Color Preset and added brightness via Exposure in Lightroom, we arrived at the final image on the right. You can see that at full power the Godox hits both trees and even gives the subjects that sunkissed flare.

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