Sunny Field Portrait

Well this was definitely NOT in ideal conditions. The family picked the spot, I hadn't seen it before, they said it was a big open field. I was like "great" but when we pulled up it was in the center of a block with homes surrounding it, meaning it was really hard not to get the back of some suburban cookie-cutter house in the background. This was the only spot, but it worked out. I think it was probably the brightest day in the history of the world.
I brought my light meter and relied on it heavily.

Another one from the same family group. The light conditions were changing so rapidly it was hard to keep up. They wanted a large family group in front of an old truck and a barn, but the sun was shining right on it head on, I couldn't just back light it with the sun like these so we had to wait until the sun dipped right below the horizon then we worked super fast. We actually started posing the large group as the sun was setting and then we had to wait about two minutes to actually shoot.

By the way Marian, not only was it super bright it was well over 100 degrees. AND there were pokey little sticker bushes all over the ground and I was wearing sandals, my feet were so torn up by the time we were done.

Corey, that's why I used my light meter so much. I had to shoot the whole thing in manual which isn't really my style.

I shoot a lot in P mode and use the exposure compensation button depending on the scene.

Right, I could have used flash to fill it so we didn't have the blow outs on the sides of their faces.
I had one flash unit with me, Nikon SB800. I didn't use it on these.