5 Steps to Amazing Photos Using Natural Light Indoors

Many of you know that I live in Ger­many. Now, Ger­many is known for a lot of things…Oktoberfest, Bier­gartens, Schnitzel, The Black For­est, but weather…not so much. It rains a lot, and in the win­ter, the days are short, painful­ly short. In Decem­ber, it begins to get dark by about 4:00, and the sun does­n’t come up until around 9:00. That, com­bined with the rain, does­n’t make for a lot of hours of good light, but that does­n’t wor­ry me, and it should­n’t both­er you. If you fol­low these 5 steps to amaz­ing pho­tos using nat­ur­al light indoors and you won’t have any­thing to wor­ry about!

In my pre­vi­ous blog, I talked about how learn­ing to find the light and mak­ing that light work for you is an impor­tant step in your pho­to­graph­ic jour­ney. That can be dif­fi­cult if you live some­where that the weath­er does­n’t coop­er­ate with you. Now, as I said, I lived in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. You know the song “It Nev­er Rains In South­ern Cal­i­for­nia”? Well, it does­n’t!! And when I moved to Ger­many, I had my work cut out for me as far attempt­ing to get amaz­ing pho­tos using nat­ur­al light inside. 

After a few days of shock at the lack of sun and a blue sky, I did what I sug­gest­ed that you do. I got out my note­book and watched the light for a week. I learned where the best light in my house was. I learned at what time, even on the greyest of days, I could count on that light to come through the win­dow, and then, I start­ed to use that light. 

5 Steps to Get Amazing Photos Using Natural Light Indoors…

Here some ways for you to get amaz­ing pho­tos using nat­ur­al light indoors…

1. Many of you already know you want to turn off the lights when pho­tograph­ing inside. If you have com­pet­ing light sources, this will affect your white bal­ance. Use the light from the win­dow to light up your subject. 

2. Face your sub­ject towards the light. After that, have your sub­ject angle off of the light source and use that nat­ur­al light to cre­ate flat­ter­ing shad­ows and catch­lights in their eyes. Catch­lights are those lit­tle squares of light that you catch in your sub­jec­t’s eyes giv­ing them life.

3. Move your sub­ject around the house, and don’t for­get the bath­rooms. Yes, the bath­rooms. Bath­rooms have fan­tas­tic nat­ur­al light.

4. Crank up the ISO if need­ed. You read that cor­rect­ly. Most cam­eras nowa­days can han­dle a high ISO. And it’s okay to have a bit of grain in your pho­to. If your pho­to is exposed cor­rect­ly, and your ISO is high, you will have a pic­ture with much less noise. 

5. Last­ly, have fun cre­at­ing amaz­ing pho­tos using indoor light. Close cur­tains to dif­fuse the light. For instance, close blinds to cre­ate dap­pled light. Exper­i­ment with how close and how far your sub­ject is to the win­dow. Even hang a blan­ket over the win­dow and see what kind of shad­ows you can achieve. 

There are so many ways to achieve amaz­ing pho­tos using indoor light. Now, grab your cam­era and try out a few of these tips, and don’t for­get to pop into my Face­book Group to share a few!

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Learn how to use man­u­al mode and take con­trol of your cam­era so that you can cre­ate the amaz­ing images that you’ve always imag­ined with the Begin­ners Pho­tog­ra­phy Essen­tials Pro­gram!