Natural light can be your best friend as a portrait photographer, particularly if you have less experience working with artificial lights.

Before you jump into working with natural light, it helps to understand how you can best capture or manipulate it to your advantage.

The better you are at working with light, the better photographer you will be. Also, as you become better at working with natural light, you may find that you're streamlining your workflow and saving time making edits.

Seek Out Cloudy Days

It might sound counter-intuitive, but cloudy days are best when working with natural light. It keeps things simpler because there's no harsh light to battle. However, you'll only have to work with what you get, with no control over direction, strength, or the sudden appearance of blue sky and bright sun.

Unless you're looking to incorporate the harsh shadows created by bright sunlight, work on cloudy days. Clouds act as a light diffuser on the sun, filtering out the harshest rays. We recommend using a weather app to determine the best days on which to shoot. You might also check live radar weather to keep an eye on rain or clouds breaking.

Intermittent Sunlight

On days when there will be some bright sun, and you must do a shoot, work with any available shade. Shooting on partly cloudy/partly sunny days can mean shooting quickly and adapting. Exposure can suddenly differ dramatically as the sun appears and disappears.

Be prepared to shoot as clouds move across the sun, and light is the most diffused.

If it turns out that there is more sun than cloud coverage, you can try moving your subject into a shaded area. For example, you could use a covered area (such as a covered terrace), tree shade, or shade cast by a building or other object.

Working in the Shade

Working in a shaded area with bright light nearby will pose some exposure challenges. With some practice, but you can learn to compensate and still produce beautiful imagery.

When you move your subject to shade, keep in mind what the shade or shadow can cast color effects. Without artificial light to compensate, you might not like the end results. For example, light streaming through the leaves of a tree from above could produce a slightly green color cast. If you've moved your subject into the shade of an unpainted concrete structure, the color cast could be dark grey. Be mindful that color cast could affect things like the subject's skin tone and appearance.

If you're going to work in the shade, ideally work in shadows cast by neutral colors, like light grey or white.

Shooting in Harsh Sunlight

Inevitably, there will be days when you don't have any option other than to shoot on a bright, sunny day. Don't panic. There are a few things you can do to save your pictures!

Since you won't have clouds acting as a diffuser, you will need to monitor the light's direction and what it's doing on the ground - both to and around the subject.

There will be shadows cast, and they will likely appear quite stark.

The essential advice for shooting on sunny days is to avoid the strongest light around noon. Typically, it's between noon and 2 p.m. when the sun is directly overhead. You won't just have harsh shadows. You'll risk having your subject appear washed out by the strong light.

You will need to adjust the exposure on your subject to compensate for the bright light. You can use a scrim. A scrim is a light modifier placed between the subject and the light source to reduce its intensity. It can also reduce the light's harshness, acting as a diffuser. Size matters when working with a scrim. The larger it is, the more coverage it will offer.

Shooting Raw

If you aren't already shooting raw, you should be. This is especially true if your camera can capture enough information in raw files - with its dynamic range - so that you can make edits later.

You can make a lot of fixes in post-production if you're working with software as powerful as Lightroom. You can adjust highlights, shadows, white balance, etc.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that the ideal in photography is to capture the best images from the start. The more perfect the picture, the more streamlined your workflow, and the less time you will spend making edits. That's pretty much every photographer's dream!

Shooting in the field, especially if you're working with natural light, can often mean shooting in less than ideal conditions.

Remember our advice:

Do the best you can when shooting outside in natural light, and adjust accordingly.
Be prepared for the weather in advance.
Bring a scrim just in case you need it.
Shoot near shade, in case you need it.
Shoot raw.
Practice!