Many times (especially around midday), we encounter lighting situations where the contrast of the scene is too high to capture with a camera. What can we do to create a useful picture in such environment, besides completely blowing the highlights or shooting a silhouette?
Here, I went with the sky.
Answer
This is my attempt to summarize various ways this can be handled:
You can reduce the contrast by lighting up shadow areas by fill flash (on- or off-camera). This required having a flash, and if you use on-camera one the resulting areas (faces) may look a bit flat if on-camera flash is the only light source. You also may run into color correction issues (neutral daylight flash vs. slightly orange evening sun). See Matt's answer for example.
A well-positioned reflector can light shadow areas with reflected light of your main source. For this you need a reflector and something/someone to hold it in place. [Kendall]
Sometimes it's best to change the scene completely and perhaps shoot a portrait in the shadow instead of in the midday sun. Or wait for more favorable time of day. [ysap]
Especially in landscape photography, a graduated ND filter can be used to darked top part of image with bright sky. [John]
Shooting RAW might help use more of your sensor's dynamic range and later use some of the in post-processing. [ysap]
Finally, you can shoot several pictures, and combine them into one tone-mapped HDR photo. This can be done either manually or with various automatic tools and settings. Matt's answer provides a tone-mapped alternative to fill-flash photo.
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