Natural Light Portrait Photography
© 2014 Wazari Wazir | Raphael Portrait With Window Natural Light | 50 mm | f/2.8 | ISO 100 | 1/200
© 2014 Wazari Wazir | Raphael Portrait With Natural Light | 50 mm | f/2.8 | ISO 100 | 1/200
If you have been following my blog, you will know that I like using natural light when it comes to photographing my kids. Natural light is free, but it is not available all the time, unlike using flash photography or artificial light, you can use it all the time. So the real challenge when using natural light is that, you need to act quickly before it gets too dark.
The photograph of my son Raphael above wee taken in the doorway, I tell my son to stand in the doorway but he refuse to stand, instead he sits on his little plastic bicycle and move here and there. Actually the real challenge here is not about lighting, but to have a high level of patience. Personally for me, I will never give up until I got what I really want.
I’ve to make all kind of crazy things just to get my son attention, he is always moving around. So the first thing that you need to pay attention when photographing super active kids is to use a very fast shutter speed. Here I use shutter speed of 1/200. I like to have a clean image, so I use ISO 100, the grain there was added later during editing in the Adobe Lightroom. There were no “noise” visible at ISO 100 for this images.
For the beginners out there, if you notice, the lighting here is a little bit tricky. It can easily fools your camera metering because there were large area of dark side, if you use Auto setting, the probability of getting overexposed image is high, so the solution is to use to Spot Metering and Lock the Exposure or use Manual Mode like what I’m doing here. What I’m trying to say here is to get the exposure right especially the shutter speeds (make it around 1/100 and above) and then just focus on capturing the right moment.
