Solar Noon and Why Outdoor Portraits Look Terrible Then

Open any beginner photography forum and you will see this question every week: "Why do my outdoor portraits look so harsh?" Nine times out of ten the answer is that the photographer shot at solar noon because that is when they had a free hour. The sun is at its worst angle for faces, and no amount of lens choice fixes geometry. Here is what is happening and what to do instead.

What solar noon actually is

Solar noon is the moment when the sun crosses the local meridian — that is, when it is at its highest point in the sky for that day at that location. It is rarely exactly 12:00 on your watch. The difference comes from time zones, daylight saving, the equation of time, and your longitude inside your time zone. Wikipedia's solar time article has the formal definitions.

For a city like Sydney, solar noon in summer (during daylight saving) can be as late as 13:10. For somewhere like Mumbai, solar noon stays close to 12:30 year-round. The clock will mislead you. Look it up properly in sunhour, where it appears as a labelled tick on the timeline.

Why faces look bad at solar noon

The sun at solar noon is, roughly, directly overhead. The specific angle depends on the latitude and the date, but in temperate latitudes in summer the sun reaches 60-70 degrees above the horizon. Tropical noon can put it almost straight up.

This causes three problems for portraits, all at once.

• Eye sockets fill with shadow. The brow bone casts a hard shadow downward across the eyes. Subjects look like raccoons and you cannot dodge it in post without it looking fake.
• The nose casts a vertical shadow over the mouth. Subjects look like they have an unwanted moustache.
• Shoulders and the top of the head are bright; the chin and neck are dark. Skin tone goes blotchy and uneven.

None of this is about the camera. It is about a top-down point light source meeting a face, which is curved with overhangs. A studio photographer would never light a portrait from straight above. The sun does not know it is being unprofessional.

The workarounds, ranked by quality

1. Don't shoot then

The honest first answer. Move the shoot to golden hour (an hour after sunrise or before sunset) and the geometry solves itself. The sun is now a low side-light, which is what portraits want. Skin reads warm, eyes catch light, shadows are flattering.

2. Find open shade

If you must shoot midday, get the subject out of direct sun. Open shade means under the shadow of a building or tree, with the open sky still visible to the subject. The sky becomes a giant soft light source. Make sure they are facing out of the shade toward the sky, not facing further into it (you want the light, not just the absence of it).

3. Use a diffuser

A 5-in-1 collapsible diffuser held above the subject's head softens the top light and removes the worst of the eye-socket shadow. Need an assistant or a stand. Effective and cheap.

4. Use fill flash carefully

Pop a small flash to fill the shadow under the brow and chin. Done badly, it looks like a flash. Done well, the photo passes for golden-hour soft light. The trick is to keep the flash output well below the ambient — maybe 1.5 stops under — so it lifts the shadows without turning into the key light.

5. Backlight, expose for face

Turn the subject so the sun is directly behind their head. Now the face is lit by ambient sky-bounce, not direct sun. The hair gets a halo. You will need either a reflector to bounce some light back at the face, or a flash, or to expose for the face and accept a blown background.

The hidden tip: "solar noon" is not the same as "midday"

People assume the bad-light window is 12:00 to 13:00. It is not. The harsh-light window is roughly two hours before and after solar noon, because the sun is still uncomfortably high. So in a typical mid-latitude summer that is 11:00 to 14:00 (or 12:00 to 15:00 during daylight saving). Check the actual solar noon time and add a buffer either side. The Time and Date sun page gives this number for any city.

The summary

Outdoor portraits at solar noon look bad because the geometry of overhead light meets the geometry of a human face. Avoid the window if possible. If unavoidable, control it with shade, diffusion, or fill light. Do not pretend the camera will save you. It will not.