Picking the correct natural light for portraits.

"Oh it's sunny ! let's go take pictures !"

...or let's not ?

What is actually good natural light? This short post should help you with some basics on light for photography.

Let's start from a well know studio habitant: the soft box. While shooting portraits with artificial light, the big issue is the directionality of light: because it comes from a narrow source and in straight line, it creates shadows. Now shadows can look cool and be created on purpose, but many time you wan't to avoid the black areas under the eyes and next to the nose, on the neck or even on your background. In order to diffuse the light, we use soft boxes. It forces the light to bounce inside the box and come out from a very large surface. Instead of a 2 square inches light source, you have a 1 square meter light source that doesn't even shoot light straight. The next two pictures speak for themselves:

Courtesy of weichongraphy.wordpress.com

Now one of the best ways to have a natural soft box is to use a window:

- with a light transparent white curtain if the sun directly hits the window (otherwise it is very directional and hard to expose between light and dark zones in the room).

- without curtains if the window is hit by non direct light or if it's rather cloudy. It will give some direction to the light and it will yet be quite even and smooth. See for yourselves:

Thanks to Ema, Mamiya RZ67 pro II F2.8

Now shooting outdoors. I find that a bright sunny day is actually a pain, unless you want to create that burning sun, strong shadow effect that suggest heat. I live in Ireland, and fortunately, the sun is only a myth here. Instead I have plenty of cloudy skies with very even light.

Boring? Yes it can be if you don't use depth of field & expose correctly. But if you pull those right, you can have very nice, soft images, as follows:

 Mamiya 645 1000s, 80mm (246$ online...)

 Nikon D80, 85mm @F1.8 

Last two are with the Mamiya 645 1000s too.

So don't be afraid of cloudy days. I find that the overal best case scenario is sun with some clouds. In other words, any average day :)

If you shoot in a very harsh sun light, don't hesitate shooting against the sun : you subject's face will be evenly lit, and if you spot meter (measure exposure) on his / her face, you'll have a nice back light effect like this:

Mamiya 645 1000S: I made sure Albin's face was not directly hit by the sun to avoid bad shadow. Ladies: the girl behind is his GF, don't even ask.

If they face the sun, they'll close their eyes, have ugly shadows on the face, yuk ! In that case, you might want to use your flash for some fill light.

Last but not least, you can do one cool thing with very strong sun light, this:

Nikon D80, 50mm F1.8 (100$ lens...)

On this picture, Deborah is in a park in Dublin 4, saturday afternoon, 2pm bright sun. So how come only her face is lit and the rest came black? Well that has to do with something call dynamic range, that I would describe as a camera's ability to restitute details in extreme bright or dark zones.

HDR for example is artificially made extreme dynamic range: you take a shot exposed on dark objects of the image, one shot exposed on bright objects, and you mix the two so everything is bright and details.

Well most digital cameras have a very poor dynamic range (film does much better). So if you measure the correct exposure on the brightest part, in that case her face, the rest will be far to dark to show at that exposure level. 

Now go and shoot stuff.

Editing color digital into black and white

Long time without a little "how to" post !

I was going thru Flickr today (please, don't upload your entire memory cards on flickr, be selective, you're only has good as your worse pictures), and saw tons of really funny looking digital B&Ws.

Some are obviously meant to be looking in some way, some are very poor attempt to get whatever effect (film? shoot film then). They often are the fruit of very bad underexposure do to people not using the curves on the camera, or often in line with bad strobist work.

First of all, a little irrelevant but worth mentioning: for the price of a SB 900 flash, you can get 2 Elinchrom flash units + pods + umbrellas, 400W each...just saying, if you want to get into strobist stuff, do it well. In that field equipment matters and you need power.

So I'll now assume you want to edit a correctly exposed color shot. Most people desaturate, and that's it. Could work, it's one type of B&W but it's likely not going to work the way you want, since it'd pure luck if it did.

Why that?

Well the reason B&W film works so well is that it never knows what a color is. It gets amounts of light, period. No translation from red to gray. When you make a color shot B&W, with Photoshop, you have to take into account that red and blue, at the same light intensity, don't feel the same. Also it happens that blue is the sky, red is the main component of the skin...so messing up your B&W conversion could be like exposing poorly. With film, you use filters on the lens to cheat that. With digital, good news, you can shoot then think.

Examples in line:

This is the raw file saved as a JPG, no editing.

This is the "portrait" BW setting in photoshop: see how it takes colors into account. The blond hair look nearly darker than the back ground, though it's not at all how you feel when looking at the original file. Maybe this portrait deserves a different treatment? Let's try...

This is the "scenic landscape" settings. Notice that whatever the software and whatever it's called, you can reproduced those setting as they look on the screen shot. In that case blue intensity is much lower, hence the blueish background looks darker than the hair. I find that the model now stands out, shines, the picture has a stronger feel. Let's see if we can push that even further...

 Now I used the Infra red setting, meant to look like it's an actual infrared shot. We got a stronger "Harcourt studio" effect. That's the one I opted for, though I just lowered the gap between green a blue a little to avoid it looking too much like Infra red.

The fact is, you'll never have one preset working for one type of picture: if the background was a red brick wall, it'd be totally different. My point is : try, but go beyond desaturation !

Finally, you might need to play with 2 things: contrast and mid tone contrast. Mid tone contrasts will tend to increase the feeling of depth, 3D in a way.
You know what contrast does.

Good luck with your B&W, this is in no way top level professional stuff, but I believe in receiving a hint then practicing ! This is art, we don't need a manual :)

Feel free to drop a comment if you have questions !

Shot with a Nikon D80, 35mm f2 Nikkor lens, 2 Elinchrom D lite 2 @ 4 flash units.