Shooting portraits under hard, direct sunlight is generally not a good idea. Unfortunately, those are exactly the conditions I faced much of the time while taking photographs at the Gettysburg reenactment. So, I was looking for alternatives.

My first solution was to try to time the capture as a cloud would pass in front of the sun. This can be challenging, especially when it's important to also manage the background and to press the shutter while it is temporarily free of spectators walking through it! Here's one of the rare ones that worked (although in large part due to the patience of the woman in the frame):

Union camp

One solution is to simply get the subject out of the sun. The tents in camp provided that opportunity.

Confederate camp

In the above portrait, one final touch was adding some bounce flash. I bounced some light (-1.7 stops EV) from my Nikon SB-900 into the overhead white canvas of the tent. This helped even out the exposure a bit--and added a catch light into the eyes for some of my subjects.