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About This Class
Using natural light to photograph portraits can be a wonderful thing, whether you are shooting with a phone, compact camera or an SLR.
Your camera’s light meter will usually do a great job of recording the brightness of the image and, because you are recording the available light, what you see is pretty much what you will get.
During the daytime natural light is everywhere.
It means that we don’t need to bring any extra lighting gear.
When we look at a natural light portrait, our brain is happy because the light looks “natural”.
In this class I will show you how to lift your natural light portraits to a much higher level.
You will learn how to recognise, control and manipulate the natural light to get beautiful images.
I will be covering both indoor and outdoor situations and you will see me shooting portraits in both these locations.
You will also see over one hundred of my natural light portraits as examples of how you can achieve similar results.
Understanding light
Shooting people with natural light seems the easiest thing to do….it’s not actually the case.
To shoot quality natural light portraits actually takes a fair amount of skill, not only in exposure control, posing, expression, cropping and composition but in controlling and manipulating the natural light to suit the purpose of our image.
That is what I am going to teach you here.
Firstly some basic lighting principles:
There are four characteristics of light that we need to understand for all of our photography.
Quality of the light…………..
Direction of the light………..
Intensity of the light……….
Colour of the light……….
What are we trying to do here?
We are usually trying to produce a flattering portrait of our subject.
Our subject’s eyes are the key to creating a successful portrait so, lighting those eyes is a major consideration. Using light that is coming from above will usually result in dark eyes because the eyes are shadowed by the eye brows.
We generally don’t want to use direct sunlight because it is very harsh and will make our subject squint.
Soft light from an indirect light source such as blue sky or a window tends to work best.
Natural light can be amazing when used for portraits, but, like many other skills, it has to be practiced and perfected.
It is one of the creative lighting options that we can use to produce great images.
A photograph is simply a record of light reflecting off our subject so, if we understand how to use light properly, we can produce more powerful, emotional, beautiful, story telling images.
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