The beauty of window light
Do you sometimes envy famous photographers for their great lighting equipment? Imagine all the great things you would be able to produce when working with gigantic softboxes or a brand new Broncolor 330 Para Umbrella.
Image courtesy of Eric Raptosh
What if I told you that you can probably find a light source that is just as big, or sometimes even bigger and that gives ample soft wrapping light. The only thing you have to do is look around your city, neighborhood or home (if you're living large) and go find a nice big window. Yes, that's right, the glass shapes that you can find in almost every wall :-).
Relatively ugly looking on the outside, but nice soft light on the inside.
Last Sunday, I set out to capture a few shots in this building (a parking lot actually, quite deserted at that time). The lighting setup was quite straightforward here. I used the large window as my main light, angled from the side on my model. Occasionally I used a reflector to even out the shadows on her face, but in general I liked the mood the shadows created. I put my camera in Manual mode and underexposed the image 1 or 2 stops to get the more dramatic look I was after. All in all we spend like 45 minutes here and the experiment was a wrap. Hope you like them!
