Become Better Photographer: Creating Beautiful Window Light with Daniel Norton

Today we are going to talk about using window light, or actually creating window light, with photographer Daniel Norton and AdoramaTV. In Daniel’s studio in New York there huge beautiful windows with plenty of sun light coming through. However, according to Daniel:

It’s kind of nice, whatever, but when you want actually use the windows in the shot. Unless you’re there exactly at the right time of day. The lights never where you want to be. So what I often do is, I fake it!

To fake the windows light Daniel installed Profoto B1X outside the window and  set it up at an angle, similar to the angle of the Sun, going across the outside of the building.

This is going to give an even, consistent light, which has a couple of advantages:

• Every exposure is gonna be the same.
• It’s gonna give what you expect, because it’s flash.
• It is possible to shoot with the faster shutter speed

Daniel is shooting with his Hasselblad here X1D, 90 mm lens. 1 Profoto light outside.

Before we use the flash, let’s see how it looks with just natural light.

That looks pretty good, right. not bad. Nice even light, the windows a little bit blown out behind her, but that looks pretty good.

Now let’s turn the flash on.

There now, we can see, we have nice dramatic controlled light across her face even. The front windows a bit lower from the flash, but behind her the windows now have detail, and we can control the brightness of the windows simply by adjusting a shutter speed up and down, depending on how the lights changing outside.

Let’s try to shoot with 1/125 shutter speed  to show the difference.

Now we see again even light across her face, the backgrounds got a little bit brighter, everything looks really nice.

As you can see, with this technique of an extra light shooting from the outside of the window it doesn’t matter what happens outside. There could be thunderstorms, it could it could become night, whatever. Now we can shoot some good pictures, consistently.

Watch the full episode with David Bergman and Adorama TV: