Mastering Natural Light for iPhone Photography
The morning of Emma’s audition, she realized she needed to update her headshot. A few years ago, I’d have used a DSLR, but this is 2018: we can use the iPhone X!
In five minutes we put together a simple photo studio using everyday items.
All you need is:
- A Window
- Parchment Paper
- White bath towel
- Painter’s Tape
While I shot this on an iPhone X, I didn’t use the “Portrait Lighting” feature. Instead, I set up real-life Portrait Lighting! You can get great portrait results with any camera when you understand a few lighting principles.
In this post we’ll start with an unflattering photo and walk through improving it, step-by-step. No photography experience or DSLR required.
Diffusion
Here, Emma isn’t wearing any makeup, and I shot her in direct sunlight.
You can see every pore of her skin, and the shadows have a sharp transition between dark and light. This is called Hard Light. It’s bad, unless you’re going for a “grizzled old cowboy” look.
You get hard light when there’s nothing between your subject and light source. For example: a bare bulb without any lampshade, the LED on the back of your iPhone, and the sun on a clear day.
You get Soft Light by diffusing the light source. Watch what happens when I tape some parchment paper over that window.
If you just put some tissue over a flashlight, it won’t really help. There’s a deeper way of thinking about hard vs soft light: the size of the light source, relative to your subject.
The LED on the back of your iPhone creates hard light because it’s small. Have you noticed that when you take a selfie with a bright screen, you look better? That’s because the entire screen acts as a light, instead of that tiny LED.
While the sun is huge, it’s 92-million miles away, so as a light source it’s a tiny dot in the sky. When the sun shines through that paper hanging on the window, the entire paper becomes the light source, instead of that tiny dot in the sky.
The next time you see a beautiful portrait, zoom in on the eyes. You’ll always see the reflection of a big light source.
An easy rule to remember: bigger light source = softer light.
Diffusion Reduces Brightness
Diffusion has another nice side-effect. Notice the darker shadows in the first photo? Sunlight is so bright that we need to reduce the exposure or the left side of her face will be overexposed. It’s like that classic problem of trying to take a photo through a window while keeping the inside and outside exposed.
Lucky for us, when light passes through our diffusion it loses strength. With a smaller difference between Emma’s exposure and the ambient light in the room, we can manually adjust exposure until everything is a good range.
Aside: What About RAW?
In a previous post, Sebastiaan explained how shooting RAW gives incredible latitude when editing. Unfortunately, it can’t perform miracles. It can’t turn hard light to soft light, and if we try to bring up those shadows…
RAW is awesome, but don’t rely on RAW saving the day. If you make sure you get the best photo to begin with, then RAW will only make it better.
Add a Fill Light
So we’re happy with diffusion, but the shadows on Emma’s face are still too dark. It makes for a cool film noir look, but it’s a little too much for our headshot portrait.
The easiest solution is to add another light just focused on reducing the shadows on her face. It’s known as a fill light, because it’s filling in shadows.
This doesn’t have to be a physical, plug-in light. The easy trick is to reflect sunlight back into Emma’s face. We drape a towel over a floor lamp, place it just out of frame to our right, and…
You see more definition, and her face pops out from the background.
Pop Quiz: is the light bouncing off the towel hard or soft? The entire towel acts as the light, and that towel is big next to Emma’s face, so it’s a soft light.
Reduce the Light Ratio
This photo looks great, but it’s still too dramatic. We’re trying to make headshot, not an art project, so let’s tone it down.
Our key light (the diffused sunlight) is much brighter than our fill light. What if we make each light the same strength? We cover more of the window with paper, and move our towel closer to Emma’s face…
We just adjusted the lighting ratio. In our final photo, the key and fill light are around 1:1 in strength. Voilà: true portrait lighting.
Editing
I wanted to edit this quickly, so I shot with depth enabled. I brought it into Darkroom, and dragged the “foreground” and “background” sliders. Now I can choose what edits to apply only to the background.
I want her to pop against the background, and draw away from that wall texture. So I brought down the brightness of the background, and increased the blur. I spent a minute on blemish removal, and we have the final photo.
Wait, is Professional Gear a Scam?
If you can do all this stuff with household items, it sounds crazy to spend hundreds of dollars on professional gear. Why spend $40 on a diffusor when you can use 40 cents of parchment paper?
For starters, good reflectors are usually “5-in-1” thingies. They have a removable jacket, and inside is a diffuser. They also come with a flexible wire frame, so they’re easy to collapse and stuff into a bag. The material will transfer light better. You’re paying for convenience. Lighting setups are often also modular, so you can easily set up a big studio with rails, backdrops and lighting sources with less fuss than a roll of paper and tape.
Technical reasons aside, you look more professional! That helps with portraits. When your subject trusts you, they’re more likely to relax and act candid.
Just remember, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to take great photos. It’s 99% technique and know-how.
Show Us Your Best Portraits
Learned something? Are you going to try this out for yourself? We’re always looking out for cool photos for our Instagram account. If you use this diffuser hack, be sure to tag your photo #ShotWithHalide, and we might feature you on our Instagram account!
