Natural Light Portrait II

January 17, 2025 Portrait Photography, Wedding Photography

Using Natural Light for wedding portrait photography


Anyone who has perused my work will immediately notice the extensive use of Profoto lighting for my wedding photography and portrait photography. The Profoto pops a perfect amount of light into the picture. I heard a National Geographic photographer call it “painting with light.” My artificial light adds to a picture or just flat-out allows a picture to made at all maybe 90% of the time.


There’s another 10% where the Profoto wouldn’t add to the picture. It’s very rare. Almost always a picture benefits from painting jus.t a tough of light into the picture. This usually happens when the sun is low in the sky and there’s perhaps something slightly blocking it, or it’s been softened by happening just a few moments after it goes down. Hazy sky with a low sun works like a charm because the sky becomes an infinite scrim with directional light hitting the subjects. One of my Profoto tools can become a sunblock scrim in a pinch and I love being able to whip it out for portraits with a low hanging sun.


This is Erik and Karen at their Aspen Hall wedding in the fall a few years ago. For a long time Erik was our triathlon bike mechanic. He worked for a couple different bike shops and we followed him to wherever he went. Once upon a time he was a bike racer himself. A pair of his guests were Chris Horner (Tour de France) and Adam Craig (former mountain bike world champion) along with their wives. Karen does massage and owns Sole Purpose Massage here in Bend.


The day was coldish and rainy. These portraits happened to the south of the hall just off the path and near the tee-pees. The sun was kind of breaking out and kind of blocked with the hazy clouds and breaking through the trees every now and then. We were between portraits and they were just standing in the light like this. It was perfection all by itself. I absolutely love when people do their own impromptu pose for me in perfect light.


I had them freeze in position and shot this picture with the Nikkor 85mm f1.4 lens at f1.4. The lens flair mixed with the blurry background for me are the combination that put this picture over the top. The diffused back lighting only helped. After this picture I offered to just go home for the day, but of course stayed until the wedding ended. A print of this picture rests on one of the ledges I built for the room where I meet people. It’s always a favorite of couples.


Natural light works if a person who loves using artificial light all the time stays open to the idea of turning the lights off and just going commando with the light at hand.