Beautiful Light In Ugly Locations – Part 1
We have recieved lots of requests to film some more outdoor shoots, and are so excited to bring you this natural light tutorial now that Melbourne is out of lockdown and the weather is heating up!
Natural light is Peter’s favourite, and a lot of the time he finds stunning light in the ugliest locations – like car parks, as he is able to get a direction of light from all the different railings and concrete blocks.
Join him and Julia in this incredible 3-part tutorial with 7 different locations around a local carpark, proving that you really do not need a huge studio to creat gorgeous beauty portraits.
7 comments on “Beautiful Light In Ugly Locations – Part 1”
All of your tutorials I have seen are very good but this is the best so far: simple, yet, elegant as it provides no excuses for not shooting with the very basic of equipment. I will watch this many times and practice well until I can see like Peter does.
Thanks heaps, natural light is the best and it’s 100% not about the equipment 🙂
Excellent, Peter. I love doing what you’ve done here. A lot of people get hyper focused on location and little thought goes into the light, or they limit themselves to shooting at specific times of the day.
Just follow the light and everything else nearly falls into place.
Thanks for the content and I hope all is well.
Thanks so much Daniel, I completely agree people focus too much on locations
Hi Peter and Bec,
First, thanks for another great tutorial. I do have to wonder if it is even possible for Julia to make a bad picture, lol. It’s a good thing we don’t have to choose between Team Bec and Team Julia. I don’t think it’s be possible to make a choice.
I love how you were showing that natural light doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of reflective objects to shape and focus the light. A lot of photographers brag about having big soft boxes, yet the soft box you took advantage of off the parking deck ramp trumps any production model for size and costs $0. (I’m not a natural light shooter, but this has given me more confidence to start trying more and find the light I want, not accept the light and try to modify it.) I also enjoyed how you took advantage of the reflective capabilities of items like the stair case. That’s one that would have never crossed my mind to even consider.
One question I have is with the shutter noise from your camera. It sounded like you were shooting at a continuous low frame rate (or whatever Sony calls it) and getting two or thee frames per look. I don’t see you doing that in studio with the Hasselblad, so I was wondering if that is correct and if shooting multiple frames is part of your standard workflow when shooting outdoors in natural light and why.
Thanks again.
Eric
Hi Eric, many thanks for the awesome feedback, happy to hear you enjoyed this even and got some confidence to try natural light shooting.
With the Hasselblad the maximum frame rate is 2 frames a second, where as with the Sony I was shooting at 5 frames a sercond, it gives me that extra chance of catching an inbetweeen frame so I tend to use it if I think theres a chance a photo could be better a quarter of a second later. I don’t like doing it with flash because usually the flash heads can’t keep up. Hope that helps, cheers and thanks again
This is a tutorial I’ve needed to see for a long time, very glad I’ve joined up to Inspire. Time to change my camera setup and go out and try. Thank you