Natural light photography refers to the use of the sun as your main light source. Most photographs taken in the “real world” use natural light.
Professional and amateur photographers or people playing around with their smartphone cameras use the sun as a light source. After all, natural light is free, abundant, and quite easy to find.
Using natural light for portrait photography can be tricky but understanding how light works can help you create amazing results.
Natural lighting can produce different colors and contrast in your images depending on location, season, weather, and time of the day.
Sunlight changes color over the course of the day. The soft light of dawn and dusk is dominated by oranges and yellows. Midday sun contains more blue light.
Thus, the look you are going for will determine the time and location of your photoshoot.
Once you understand light and how it works, you might be able to control it to your advantage.
For instance, too much light on a sunny day may produce an undesired color temperature and harsh shadows. In this case, you can use a diffuser between your subject and the sun to soften the light.
Reflectors can be used to bounce sunlight toward the subject and lit the subject from the front rather than from the back. This is what allows photographers to produced detailed, high-contrast photos of their subjects.
I don’t consider myself to be a pure natural light photographer because I do use artificial lighting or a combination of both.
In fact, when shooting indoors, I may use natural light from a window as my main light source and use a flash or a strobe as my fill light.
At the end of the day, having great photographs is more important than having the purest technique.
