Nadine natural light

A lot of the time when we’re shooting with strobes we would almost forget how beautiful the natural light can be.
Natural light is without a doubt one of the most beautiful light sources we have to work with. Now some people will claim you only can shoot with early morning light, or evening light…. well this of course (mostly) true for for example landscapes, cityscapes etc. However with fashion we often shoot with open reflectors, reflectors with grids etc. so why would it not be possible to shoot in the sun during the day?

What you do have to remember is to take good notice of your shadows, when shooting without any form of modification to the light (translucent screens, reflectors etc.) it’s important to first find the right angle you want to shoot under and then position your model the way that the light actually works with your model. If there is a high sun it’s very easy to get the so called “raccoon eyes” but this is for example easily solved by just tilting the head of the model up so the sun is hitting the face under the “correct” angle.

The nice thing about working in a location like this is that you can work with the repeating patterns in the buildings and when combined with a shallow DOF, in this case F3.5 on a 150mm Mamiya lens on a Phase One DF camera with a Leaf Credo 60 you can really get some nice depth in your image and pop your model out. Getting the focus correct is a bit tricky, especially with a moving model like Nadine, but that’s why we always shoot a bit more than needed 😀

For the next shot we moved a few meters and I positioned Nadine very close to the wall and by using a slight angle to the wall with the camera you can really draw the attention to your model thanks to the focus “fall off”.

So the next time you really think you need strobes….. also take some shots with just the natural light, and the harsher the light the more challenging, but the more spectacular the images CAN become.