Natural Light Portrait | Light And Shadows
© 2014 Wazari Wazir | Portrait of My Daughter | Natural Light Photography | Arianna
You don’t really need an expensive studio lighting to get a great portrait. Yes studio lighting has its place but if you are casual photographer, just wanted to take a photograph of your own family, then I think you better learn on how to make full use of natural light. People often asked me, whether I’ve a studio inside my house, while kind of lighting equipment that I use to get a great portrait, whether I’ve used any diffuser or not. The truth is, I don’t have any of it, most of the photographs of my children here on my blog were taken with purely natural light.
What you rely need to know is to understand a little bit about lighting, once you understand it, you will know when a great lighting hit the face of your subject. The photograph of my little daughter were taken using a door light, I mean, she was standing in the doorway, the lighting was quite harsh since it was taken somewhere around 2pm but I get the nice soft light because she was standing under the shade of the porch, where we park our car.
I switch off the light inside my house to make it dark, I don’t want a brighter background, I just wanted to make my daughter face stand out and a brighter background won’t help. It is best to use Spot Meter for this kind of situation but if you use Centre Weight or Matrix Metering, it is best to make it a little bit underexposed so the background will be kept in the dark.Don’t worry about the shadows on your subject face, because for me personally, it is sometimes the shadows that makes the picture and the shadows also play an important role to make your subject stand out, giving it shapes and dimension, rather than flat looking portrait with even lighting.
About the editing, in Photoshop I added a little bit of “Noise” under Filter menu, to have a little bit of “Grain” in the picture, then I blend it with Soft Light blending option and reduce the opacity. I just wanted a subtle of grain in the photograph.
