A few weeks ago, my niece informed me that she had ideas for her senior portrait. Not such an unusual request, except her father is also a photographer. I got the assignment of something outside and lite!
When shooting outside, normally you'd have to deal with the the stray sumlight coming thru the trees. This really isn't a problem for the background, but stray sunlight causes problems with possible blown highlights if they fall on your subject.
What I did was use a large trasnlucent scrim to shield the sun hiitting her hair, and I also used a a black scrim in conjuction with the large white scrim to further control any specular highlights on her head. For fill I used a lard white reflector.
I did slight variations of this to get several different moods and looks to my niece. 
