Understanding lighting and the intended effect will help inform your decisions for creating budgets, schedules, and even Shoot Briefs and Shotlists. The topic of light is quite vast so we will just stick to the basics for planning your photography and video shoots.

There is something perfectly imperfect about using what light is available when it’s time to capture your shots, and there is something very practical and efficient about controlling the light too. Let’s take a deeper look.

Shooting Outdoors

Shooting in the midday sun can often yield really harsh effects. This can be unflattering for skin in portraits or can be used artistically with more attention to shape, shadows, and highlights. You can still manipulate any strong direct source of light you are working with by using fill and negative fill, diffusion, or adding high-sync speed lights and strobe lights.

Also known as Golden or Magic Hour, this is that precious window of time where the sun shifts rapidly, creating more variety or variables to play with. The quality of the light from the sun just before and after sunrise or sunset offers so much more color depth, backlighting opportunities, and flattering effects on the skin.

Nowadays, too, with the amount of information that you have when shooting RAW, using masks in post-production, in the editing process, allows more control over particular parts of an image, i.e., aiding in high-contrast or low-contrast scenarios. I prefer getting things as close to my vision as possible in camera and then painting as I like in Lightroom or Photoshop instead of relying entirely on these tools.

The pros of working with natural light

You have an abundance of available light (the sun!) without the cost of using only strobes or continuous lights. It frees you up to be able to use any outdoor scene as your backdrop, telling an entirely different story. It’s also a much more intuitive way of shooting – seeing the light, then capturing.

The cons of working with natural light

Weather can be unpredictable. Even the sunniest of summers can have days of downpours, humidity, mosquitos, or extreme heat. In winter, you might have really short windows of time or simply lack the quality of light you need due to fog, cloud coverage, haze, etc. This can create delays to your timelines or deadlines not to mention a challenge with hair and makeup!

Shooting Indoors

Indoor light can be anything from the lights you have in your house to the light coming in through the windows, to lights used to set the scene. Photography strobes and modeling lights, continuous (cinema) lights, and practical lights from lamps and light fixtures are the types of artificial light sources.

For simple shoots, opt for indoors by window light for a large natural light source, and where desired, work on controlling the light using bounces, negative fill, and diffusion. If this option isn’t possible due to weather or the logistics of your location, you can upgrade to using strobes or continuous lights, or simply allow the variables of the changing outdoor daylight to help tell your story. Be sure to have a tripod handy!

The pros of working with Indoor light

Shooting in a studio setting affords you nearly complete control and consistent imagery. This is why Fashion and Beauty, as well as Portrait Photographers who need a more commercial look, will typically shoot inside or bring controlled lighting to an on-location set.

With some understanding of color temperature and masking, you can create unique results from mixed lighting.

The cons of working with indoor light

If you are new to the fundamentals of studio lighting and equipment, it can actually feel limiting if you don’t have the support of a crew and plenty of time and space.

Working with a variety of artificial lights can lead to mixed color temperatures as well as strobing effects with certain shutter speeds, creating less-than-desirable results, and more time than usual in post-processing.

Timing your Session

Shooting far outside of Golden Hour can lead to blown-out highlights or darker shadows and overall more contrasty photos if there are no clouds present—a look I’ve actually come to embrace lately! On the flip side, if the days are short and there is rain pending or the sun is covered in haze or clouds, this can offer a nice softening effect that, if you wait too long, won’t offer enough light around Golden Hour.

Timing your natural light shoot will be dependent on the sun’s path or the trajectory of where the sun will be in relation to the location of the shoot, the time of year, the time of day, and the weather on that particular day. This is why I use an app like Sun Tracker AR to scout and plan.

However, even with all the planning you can do, sometimes the best photos happen when you feel the moment and go with the magic you see as it is happening!

Interested in learning more about lighting your shoot? Get started planning your session here.

---