Of Course, Natural Light Works Too

I was prepared for another gray day today, so I wasn't expecting the sun to be showing through this morning. While my recent focus may have been on shooting with a flash, the morning light was a chance to use the windows in our living room using the same principles.

Here's a shot of the corner of our living room with windows on two sides. The smaller window on the right is where more light was coming in through since it faces East.



The upside to natural light is that it's constant and makes it easier to meter. The downside is that indoors, it's often not as strong as a flash, so I had to open the aperture up as far as it would go as well as using ISO 200 to get a shutter speed that would be fast enough to keep the image sharp.

In this first shot, Jenny was facing the brightest window, with the larger window to her left. You can see it softens the light a little bit so that the shadows across her face aren't too hard and she's still well-lit from the front. This is similar to using a big umbrella camera right.



This second shot was taken with her back to the large window and light from the bright window coming from her left (obviously). Here, there are more shadows on the right side of her face (and hard shadows around her smile), while the left side has parts that are almost blown out. This is similar to bouncing a flash off a close wall.




Both shots were taken with my Olympus E-620 @ 50mm f2.0.