A guide to photographing with natural light

Light is a photograph's key ingredient—it's literally the only reason an image can exist. Upon clicking the shutter, light enters the camera, transferring the image it hits onto the film or transforming into electric signals that then turn into the pixels in a digital photograph. Without light, there is no photograph.

The most basic and important form of light is natural light, generally referring to any light created by sunlight.

In other instances, ambient light (meaning the available light in an environment) can be considered as natural because it isn’t directly influenced by the photographer’s lighting equipment. This usually indicates natural lighting from outside that lights up a room through a window.

Natural light is abundant (so you get to practice consistently, free of charge) and, by paying attention to certain factors such as how the sun behaves throughout the day and in different weather conditions, you will learn to see light better, maximize its potential, and apply the basic techniques in any genre of photography.

What are the Characteristics of Natural Light?

Before learning the different types of natural light, let’s look at the four main characteristics that are used to categorize them—color, intensity, direction, and quality.

Color Temperature

Color temperature refers to the various shades of color that are produced by different light sources. It is measured on the Kelvin scale, from the cooler, blue-tinged end of the spectrum to the warmer, reddish-colored end . Color temperature changes throughout the day, depending on the time and the amount of clouds in the sky. At dawn, the sky appears light blue. At sunset, the sky appears orange (this is what photographers refer to as the golden hour or magic light); and at dusk, the sky appears violet-blue.

Intensity

The intensity of light is a measure of its harshness or brightness and determines how much light is present in a scene. Intensity is sometimes referred to as “quantity of light.”

You can estimate how intense light is based on the balance between shadows (the darker areas of your image) and highlights (the lighter areas of your image). This distinction between highlights and shadows is known as contrast. Light is usually most intense at noon when the sun is directly overhead. Contrast at noon, therefore, is high and tends to make shadows more pronounced. On the other hand, light and contrast are less intense early in the morning or evening.

Direction

As previously mentioned, depending on the time of day, the direction of light changes due to the sun’s movement.

Given that the the sun is below the horizon at dawn and twilight, almost horizontal at sunrise, and is highest and nearly vertical midday, photographing at these different times of day produces largely different images. The cycle reverses towards the night with the sun medium to low in the afternoon, almost horizontal at sunset, and below the horizon at twilight and dusk.

Quality

Quality encompasses the other characteristics and can either be classified as hard/direct or soft/diffused.

The smaller the light source is compared to a subject, the harder the quality, and as the light spreads and becomes bigger, the quality also becomes softer.