So I have been playing around with off camera triggers for a while now. I honestly if you haven't tried it you should. It gives you a whole new sense of what you can do with photography.
One day I found a great blog, strobist, I have to say the value on the content is just amazing. It's free and the knowledge you can get, the ideas, experience is just phenomenal.
You might be wondering how this is done. Well first off think of what you have to work with: the sun then either you just have access to a reflector (if nothing else helps it could be as simple as a person with a white shirt) or you can use a strobe.
Today we will be focusing on a light source. The best way as I was saying is to get your strobe off your camera; this will give you the best result. Ok so we are basically looking at a two light set up: your strobe and you guessed it the sun. For obvious reasons the only control you have on the sun is the way it hits your subject. You can' t change it's intensity (other than coming back later) so we are going to use it as a background light. Yes you will be shooting with the sun in front of you, behind your subject. By now you think I am crazy and remember the old saying that you should always shoot with the sun behind you. Yes it is true that if you just take your camera on auto ad snap a shot chances are you will get a nice silhouette. The sun and background will be blown out and your subject will be dark void of all detail. So how do we fix this...
It's all about placement. You will position your subject so that the sun is hitting your subject at an 45 degree angle. The light will bounce off your subject's hair and shoulders. Now opposite to the sun you will place your strobe. So basically this is what we call cross lighting.
Just like the diagram. 
The key here is to balance your strobe with the ambient light. The picture was taken with a Canon 580EXii, in external metering mode. This is a manual mode that we will talk about later.
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