Windows

A post about natural light

A few weeks ago, a brief discussion with Matteo Franchi gave me the idea of a post about portraits using natural light. Also Clee Images showed interest stating that she loves natural light.

The conversation started as I explained that all my photos in this post

were taken with only natural light. Matteo reply was that his studio doesn’t have large windows. I do understand and I do feel his pain, he has to limit at what he has available. At the time, half of me wanted to be cheeky and say: “You don’t need large windows, you need old ones” knowing what I did when I had the opportunity to use old windows. Didn’t say anything but I’m going to show you a few results of using just the window as a light source.

The only trick in the above examples is how to meter for the light: letting your camera to chose, will end up in a failure as camera will “see” that you are shooting straight into the light and will expose for that. A compensation of one or few stops will help but still won’t give perfect results. My option is to take two spot metering readings from model’s skin: one where the skin is in the light, one where is in the shadow, than manually set my camera at half way between the readings and start shooting. And because I always shoot in raw, post-production is child play.

There are situations when just the window light is not the perfect choice and the following images are the best example. Last minute I found that the model in the photos is on tour so I booked a session. Because I don’t own a studio and didn’t have time to book one, I just booked a meeting room in a hotel. Everybody knows that in the new-ish hotels windows are ugly so I couldn’t take a photo to show that. On top of that, being a sunny day and the model leaning against the window frame, created a strong contrast – I compensated that by adding a reflector on the opposite side. And that’s it the rest is history. The difference between the shots is that the first one is a bit heavily retouched as it was used in advertising.

So Matteo, you don’t need large windows, you need old ones 😊

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