WHICH IS BEST FOR HEADSHOTS – NATURAL LIGHT OR STUDIO LIGHT?

I often hear people say that natural light is the best for headshots. Natural light can look really great, but so can artificial studio light. You just need to know what you’re doing.

And, to state the obvious – if you book a session in the winter in the UK and it gets to 3pm in the afternoon, there’s really not going to be a lot of natural light left to work with! Knowing how to work with whatever light you have available is one of the main skills a professional photographer needs.

Here are some pictures, all shot in my Cardiff studio – see if you can guess which ones were taken with natural light and which with artificial studio lights. Hover over the images to see a short description of the lighting.

As you can see, I often mix natural window light and LEDs or flourescent lights to get the results I want. Sometimes I’m aiming to make it look very natural and “unlit” and sometimes it’s a bit more dramatic.

The main take-away from this is that it doesn’t really matter what lighting equipment you use, it only matters how you use what’s available. I’m fortunate to have lots of different lights, and lots of ways to use and modify the light – reflectors, diffusion, fresnels. spotlights, flags etc. But I also have windows, and depending on what light is coming through those windows I might use it, or I might not.

I might use 6 different artificial lights on one picture, or I might just put you in front of the window. Every session is different.