Using a reflector to add light

Sunny days create shadows, they can't help it. Unfortunately, our cameras can't quite "see" into those deep shadow. That's where strategically adding a little bit of light comes in. Sure, you might be able to use the fill light or shadows slider in Lightroom, but you stand the chance of making noise more visible. Plus it might not look natural.
The easiest, quickest, and often more satisfying solution is to add light at the time of capture. We can do this by either using fill flash or a reflector. Today we're using a reflector. A reflector can be just about anything that will reflect light. A white piece of mat board or foam core will work. A piece of cardboard with some crumpled and flattened aluminum foil works. Or you can buy commercially available photographic reflectors. The reflectors useful for nature photographers in the field are made of nylon cloth mounted on a hoop that folds up. I like those made by Photoflex. They fold up and can be stored flat in their pouch, are easy to carry, and easy to use. Reflectors come in different flavors: white, silver, gold, and combinations. The one I have is white on one side and "soft-gold" on the other. Soft gold means that it alternates gold and silver in a zig-zag pattern.

Notice the dark shadows on the right hand side of the barrel cactus in the picture below. Click on the picture and see what happens when I add a reflector. Admittedly, this amount of light being tossed in might be a little too much and look a little unnatural. I did this intentionally to make the use of the reflector more obvious. It's very easy to adjust the amount of light used by just moving the reflector around a bit.
I prefer using reflectors over fill-flash whenever possible for the simple reason that you can easily see what the reflector is doing, aim the light where you want it, and control how much light is added. With fill-flash it's not so predictable.

Notice anything else here? I've also added a polarizer to the second image to help with the sky.