Photography is all about light – the clue is in the name in fact – and as you take more and more photographs you realise more and more how important light is, and how good light is a major factor in getting good photographs. It’s hard to quantify good light, but if any one type of light can be relied upon over all others to be likely to be “good” it is window light. Even when it’s not coming from a window.
The photograph above is of Cáit, whose wedding I photographed at the start of February, and it hopefully illustrates the potential of window light quite well. Although it isn’t technically lit by window light – it was lit by its lesser known, but no less effective, first cousin: front door light.
Cait had made her way downstairs a short time earlier, and after some candid shots as she had her veil attached, I took some bridal portraits as well as some photographs of her with her bridesmaids and parents. All standard fare for wedding shots, but all beautifully lit by the soft, plentiful light streaming through the open front door behind my back.
Seeing how good the light was in the hall, I took as many as I could there, including this bridal portrait, with the pose prompted by Cait’s hair dresser, who was extremely helpful in this respect on a few occasions that morning.
The reason window light is so effective is that it is coming from a very large source, and so is very soft. Often there will be an element of diffusion already if it is cloudy outside, and sometimes a second level of diffusion by way of a net curtain or something similar. In this instance, because the light was streaming through an open door, it didn’t have this extra layer of diffusion, but the sky outside was overcast, but without the day being dull. This meant that there was plenty of light, none of it coming directly from the sun, and as it bounced its way around the front porch and into the hall it lit Cait beautifully.
The benefit of starting with light of this quality is that the image is ready for an album practically straight out of the camera. I performed the absolute minimum of post processing to this photograph and it is one probably my favourite of the bridal portraits I took that day.
It is a stunning portrait. I must leave the front door open more often.