Shooting in harsh midday sun

Vaughn said:

I like working with the light as I find it...I do not want to change it into some other kind of light. Experiment, make more mistakes, and have fun!

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I totally got your point but as I do mistakes anyway I’d like to minimize the risk. I got some really great ideas here and will do my experiment.

jeffreyg said:

Living in sunny south Florida we have "midday sun" most of the year so I prefer to photograph early in the morning or evening as well as still life in a room that we have askylight. My best "technical advice" is to find a shady spot and have a cold beer or gin and tonic and wait for the clouds.

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/

http://www.sculptureandphotography.com/

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Good point!
Awesome websites by the way! Congrat!

Paul Howell said:

In general, expose for what most interesting part of the shot, what will tell the story and fix the rest in the dark room or in LR.

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I copied and pasted this in my mind.

wiltw said:

If you 'have to' shoot in the bright and contrasty conditions of direct sun, you can use techniques employed by some...

• use supplmental flash to reduce the shadow contrast, so the scene is not as contrasty
• 'create shade'...shoot under an overhead building in the shade, or even under a translucent white panel

You can even combine the techniques...put the human subject into a shaded area, but with direct sunlit surrounding, then use flash to brighten the shaded area, which would otherwise be -3EV to -4EV darker than the sunny surroundings!
You do not have to stop shooting during the peak of day.

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Create shade and use flash to brighten up the darker areas. Great!

Work with the light you have, and use it to your advantage. If you've got strong, directional light, then use it to make contrasty, graphical compositions. Don't try to force a scene into being something it isn't, especially through manipulating the exposure and development (unless you're shooting sheet film where you can develop each individual exposure as required).

TheFlyingCamera said:

If you've got strong, directional light, then use it to make contrasty, graphical compositions.

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I take a note of this.

More than excess contrast, the problem I tend to encounter over here, especially when photographing on the coast is that of the midday sun not picking out any details, so that you're left with a rather hazy, washed-out look, obviously this depends on prevailing weather conditions as well.

Midday is probably least contrasty time of day - theres very few shadows and scenes are typically flat unless your shooting indoors with windows or as in that very fine shot above of the rock pool under tree canopy where things get tricky quickly.

If the OPs negatives are difficult to scan then it sounds more like a camera settings issue than a scene issue - if for example you are shooting high speed film at f2.8, 4, 5.6 at midday then you will definitely run into problems of gross over exposure if the shutter maxes out at 1/500 as with some compact cameras or 1/1000 as with a lot of slrs.