Newborn | Natural Light Photography

© 2013 Wazari Wazir | Little Princess With Grandmother | 24mm | ISO 1000 | f/2.8 | 1/40

Photography is about light. The term comes from The Greek word phos, photos – light and graphos – writing. The word photography means writing with light but most photographers claim they are painting with light!

This ‘writing with light’ or as us photographers say ‘ painting with light’ was first reputed to have been termed by Sir John Herschel to William Henry Fox Talbot in letter in 1839. Herschel was an English astronomer who also devised the words negative and positive. A lot of his work involved chemistry which was the forerunner of the black and white processes. Henry Fox Talbot was the inventor of the negative positive process of photography. He was an English gentleman, chemist, mathematician, linguist and archeologist.

I like to call myself as a natural light photographer because normally I like to use natural lighting in my personal photography except for my official assignment. I think DSLR is a Godsend to natural light photographers, back in the film days most photographers have flash in their possession because sometimes the lighting was too dark to take a photograph, furthermore once you load your camera with Low ISO film like ISO 100 or ISO 200, you are stuck with that ISO, yes off course you can always push the ISO to a bit higher and do “Push Processing” when you develop the film but once you have already exposed the film in half at ISO 100, it is almost impossible to do push processing, you can only do so if you decided to “push” the film from the 1st frame, otherwise it will get mix up.

Nowadays with DSLR, we can use a wide variety of ISO depending on the lighting situation, you can use ISO 100 for first few frames and you can use ISO 2000 for the next few frames, in fact you can try whatever ISO available in your camera for each frames. Flash is not something that a photographers these days “must have item”, I don’t have flash and I’ve took thousand of my son pictures without using flash, some of them were printed wall size and some of them were chosen as a cover for a Novel.

Anyway flash photography has its place, like in advertising, food photography, fashion, especially studio shot, official portrait photography for artist, musician, politician and all kind of things but if you don’t have a flash, there is no reason for you not to be able to get a great photograph, you just need to see the light differently and understand how the light have an impact on your photograph.

The photograph of my mother with her little princess were taken with a “door light” which coming from the right hand side of my mother, I just open the door a little bit to give a little light coming through and the front light were from a window light, it is not strong because it was covered with a curtain. The lighting was not very strong but like I said, I can still be able to get a good exposure by increasing my camera ISO to ISO 1000. The shutter speed was a little bit slow which is 1/40 and I use the aperture of  f/2.8 with my 24 mm prime lens.

Off-course I can always increase the ISO to a little bit higher like ISO 2000 – 3000 so that I can use a little bit higher shutter speed but I wanted to minimise the “noise” so I try to keep it at ISO 1000, yes there is few photograph that was blur due to camera shake because of slow shutter speed but my mother is not going anywhere, she just stood still there looking at my baby and I can take as many frames as possible until I get one good picture from few blurry shots.

Actually it is not advisable to handheld your camera with a shutter speed of less than 1/60, the possibility of getting a  blurry picture is quite hight but different people hold a camera differently, maybe some of you can handhold your camera rock steady even if you take a shot with 1 second of exposure. My point here is that you need to experiment, try new things, if before this you are using flash most of the times, why don’t you try or give yourself an assignment titled “Natural Light Photography“.

You don’t have to go far, you can start inside your house, at the bedroom, at the kitchen, you can shoot some food photography in your house using window light and if you have kids or baby, the better, try to take a photograph of them using window light because the light that came from window light or door light is quite soft, diffused which will get softer look to the subject.

You can increase or decrease the intensity of the light hitting your subject by moving closer or farther your subject from the light source, which is window or your door, it may take a while before you can master the available light or natural light photography but just give it a try.

Some people have ask me whether I’ve I have a studio in my house, actually I’m not, I don’t have any. You can view some of my son pictures which is taken with natural light from on FLICKR set.

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