It’s well enough into spring that trees and grass are changing color. Obviously, now’s a great time to start taking outdoor photos. Remember, golden hour is a great time to take photos but if you can’t time that right or are close enough then find some shade. The sun should light up the background for you. If you want to go a step further, then get an off-camera flash to bring your subject out.
When working with younger subjects remember to keep it quick and keep it fun. Otherwise, you will get tantrum town. Keep quick by having a general plan of what poses you want to try. Don’t expect to cover every pose or that every pose you know will work, but a few of them should work if you have practiced enough. As for keeping it fun, that just takes trial and error but eventually you figure something out that works consistently.
This was a two-light setup. The sun being the backlight and my strobe with an octagon soft box being the key light. The advantage of my strobe is that I could do high speed sync with it, this allows me to up my shutter speed. Without it, the best you can do is around 1/200, which is fine for subjects that stay put. In this case my subject wanted to move around so being able to get up to 1/400th worked better.