Natural Light Shooting

To make shooting even more confusing for me (while starting to learn strobist shooting at the same time) is shooting in natural lighting.  There are so many varieties of natural light – set by time of day, overcast sky, rain, shadows or what have you.  So, I will begin to post my experiments into natural light to see what kind of affect it has on my shooting.

Bright Daylight

It’s funny – but some people think shooting the bright sun is the best time to take photos.  It’s actually the worst for portraits.    Without the help of flash (yes, flash in bright in daylight) or reflectors, bright daytime sun casts hard shadows and can easily over-expose skin, wash out skies, etc.  But sometimes you just can’t avoid shooting in the bright sun.

The photo above was taken with the sun high in the sky with no clouds and no shade.  But the moment was perfect, so I quickly adjusted the exposure and aperture to get the skin somewhat balanced.  But as you can see, the shadows are very hard.  To soften this more, the use of a reflector to the bottom right of the model would have reduced all the shadows and dark spots.  Sadly, I didn’t have one with me, but the shot worked.

Rainy Day = Soft Shadows

Overcast / Rain

These days provide some exceptional lighting for portraits.  Better than you can do with flash and diffusers – and best of all, free. This shot to the right was taken on a rainy afternoon – at about the same time of day as the one at the top.  But notice that the rain and clouds diffused the shadows to almost non-existent.  There was no flash or reflector here – just the naturally diffused sunlight.

The Magic Hour

The best natural light (in my book) is dusk.  Why not dawn?  Too damned early in the morning.  But dusk sunlight is very diffused – and best of all – very golden.  I am hoping to get some good examples of that up on my stream soon.  I thought I had some to show for examples, but sadly I don’t.  The ones I have taken at sunset seem to be B&W for some reason.  Maybe I’ll get my daughter out tomorrow to try again at dusk.  I’ll update this post when I do.