Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV brought to you by Adorama.
Its the camera store for every photographer
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Make sure you check them out at Adorama
dot com. Well Odette is here with me
today and we are tackling a question
that has been posted to me on Facebook and
that is; is it possible to shoot
portraits in natural light with no light
modifiers at all, no flashes or
reflectors, no umbrella, nothing, just
natural light and absolutely you can do
that and so we're going to zip around
Pretoria South Africa and we're going to
find the light, soft light and hard light
and open shade and directional light. All
of that kind of stuff and I'm going to show
you how you can shoot portraits without
any light modifiers just using your
camera a beautiful model and that's all
there is to it, so without further ado
we're going to do it right now.
Alright we're going to start with the
easiest lighting setup and that is soft
light. This is just shade. We've got this
overhang here and so we don't have any
direct sunlight. Light is just bouncing all
around giving us this really amazing soft
light and back here we have this really
awesome background so we have this
fiberglass with some specular highlights
so I can use this as something that
compliments the blue in horizon in the
dress and the awesome other thing is
I don't want this to be in focus, so we got
a little bit of distance we got about
five feet of distance between Odette and
the background I'm shooting an aperture
value of f1.4 wide open so we get really
shallow depth of field.
The key to this setup is this light that
you just saw coming in to the left side
of Odette's face, so that gives us that
contrast and it's sort of a trick where
you find a little pocket of light coming
in to shade and this is similar to open
shade we're going to get to open shade a
little bit later, but this is a really
nice thing to do. Find a pocket of shade
with some strong directional light
coming in. That's going to help sculpt
your subject, that's going to look a lot
better than just flat shade but we need
to do more, in-fact lets go try to find some
open shade and we'll do that next.
Well here is an environment that
I thought would work because we have this
really awesome highly reflective
background. It's got some cool
specular highlights.
I thought maybe shoot black and white
however because of the angle of the Sun
notice we have these really nasty
shadows underneath Odette's eyes
and when we shoot this, it's just nothing
but natiness and so although the
background is cool, this light doesn't work.
So you have to really pay attention to
the shadows on your subjects face to
make sure that you're not going to get
any 'nosferatu', crazy, black and white
vampire, crazy.
We don't want that. We want nice open
exposure where the eyes pop and the
features come out so this doesn't work.
Now we're in an environment that's
called open shade so Odette is here under the
shade of these trees here. We have
really nice soft light but the
difference is if we pan the camera
around you can see that we have this
parking lot right here where we have the
strong sunlight coming right in, it's
bouncing off this concrete, it's coming
right past us this way and into her eyes,
that's giving us these brilliant
specular highlights, it makes your eyes
sparkle and so we have the ability to
shoot in soft light with a really strong
directional light, similar to what we did
before but we have a much much larger source
of bright light. That's the definition of
open shade. A shady area right next to open
bright sunlight, it works every single
time we shot this and I think you'll
agree that these results are spectacular.
Alright to make this successful we did
a couple of things, the background what
we did we wanted to make sure that we
had some nice green to compliment her
blue eyes and I made sure that I
positioned myself and my camera. We didn't
have branches growing out of the back of
her head, we didn't want that and then
the last thing we did we asked Odette to
sit up on this wall because when she was
standing in front of it we had to sort
of this nasty wall we didn't like that
and so her sitting up on this allows her
to get closer to the green it eliminates
the nastiness of this wall,
and it also solves some problems of the
cars parked on the other side of this
wall and so that cleaned up the
background considerably, just by having
her sit up here and I think it worked out just fine.
Well sometimes you can't
find the light
because things change and so we just had
some wind come in and the clouds rolled
in, the weather is changing rapidly
I wanted some really contrasting bright
light to shoot some black-and-white
images instead of finding the light
what we're doing is we're finding our
place. Now notice around behind us here
we have some really cool architectural
features, really strong leading lines and
so what we did is we got Odette, we put
her in this space. I shot around at
different angles, using a wider angle
lens this is a 35 mm lens and we
shot in black and white.
I think it really worked and here's what we got.
Well thank you so much Odetted for
being in this video today. I think we've
got some really great stuff. We were able
to find the light. We got some really
nice soft directional light in that
first set up. We got some amazing open
shade that worked so well for your eyes.
We've got great specular highlights and
then when the weather turns sour and the
clouds came in we were able to find this
space and get something that really pulled
us in with those leading lines and the
black-and-white I think works really
well, as well but unfortunately the
weather has beaten us, it's really storming
crazy, rainy, nasty outside so we're
inside enjoying our nice warm coffee,
looking at the results of our shoot
I think it went really, really well and
think that's all you have to do when
you're shooting portraits with no light
modifiers. Get out there. Find the light,
find your space, get a fantastic model
and you'll be highly successful now
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