Making expressive portraits of people wearing hats with bills or brims, particularly at mid-day, can be very difficult. The high sun invariably creates deep facial shadows that can easily destroy the mood and detail of such portraits. I won’t use fill-flash in such situations, either. Bursts of artificial light can be intrusive, eventually making subjects feel self-conscious. They can also make people look unnatural. Some photographers will even bounce light off a reflector on to their subject’s faces. That might work with a model, but most of the people we photograph on our travels are not models, and it is often more natural not to pose them. I prefer to make portraits as naturally and spontaneously as possible, and when my subject’s face is in deep in the shadows, I will try to move my position to make the most of them by blending them with naturally occurring highlights. That is what I am doing in this portrait of a stagecoach driver. He was waiting on top of his stagecoach for a load of tourists to board. He was high, and I was low. I was underneath him, shooting up to catch the interplay of soft highlights and the shadow on his face. The highlights come from light reflecting off his white shirt onto the bottom of the nose, cheek, and forehead. His thoughts were elsewhere while I made this over the shoulder portrait. He was not posing for me, and I did not ask him to do anything for my sake. The leather hat and full beard, along with the vest and kerchief, take him back in time, and give us a portrait of a man with a hard job, yet softly viewed in gentle, indirect light.