Probably 90% of the portraits I’ve made over the years have been photographed using daylight – what is often described as natural or available light.
It’s always been my preferred way of working.
Part of that is simply because I love the quality of it. Daylight can have a softness and a way of wrapping around a person that I’ve always found difficult to resist. When it isn’t available, my next choice has often been continuous light — particularly Fresnels — with flash tending to come out when I need it rather than being my starting point.
But there was another, rather less romantic reason I started working with less and less equipment.
I got fed up carrying the bloody stuff.
I remember years ago hauling photographic equipment around London, struggling to find a cab and then trying to get through crowds of tourists and commuters carrying far too much gear.
There were days when the sheer weight of it nearly had me in tears.
So I started taking less.
Then a little less.
And a little less again.
Eventually I reached the point where a portrait shoot could be just me and a camera, or sometimes an assistant and a reflector.
That was pretty much it.
Clients occasionally looked at me when I arrived and asked:
“Where’s your gear?”
My assistants, on the other hand, loved it. There was suddenly almost nothing to carry apart from my camera bag, a reflector and occasionally a tripod.
What initially started as a practical decision changed the way I photographed.
Without all the equipment, I stopped arriving at a location thinking about where I was going to put the lights.
I looked at the room first.
Where were the windows? Which direction was the daylight travelling? What was it bouncing from? Where did it become soft? Where did it fall away? What happened if I moved the person three feet in one direction?
Instead of constructing the light, I learned to find it.
And I discovered that I preferred the photographs.
An editor once told me that one of the reasons she regularly booked me was because she could put me in a dark shoebox and I’d still come back with the photograph.
I always liked that.
For much of my career as a portrait photographer, I would arrive at a location without really knowing what I was going to find. There might be a beautiful room with wonderful windows. There might be an office, a hotel room or someone’s home. Sometimes there wasn’t much of a location at all.
But you still had to come back with the photograph.
Working with daylight doesn’t mean waiting for perfect light.
And it certainly doesn’t mean every photograph has to look like a ‘natural-light portrait’.
Daylight isn’t a style. It’s simply a light source.
It can be soft and delicate, hard and graphic, bright and commercial, or dark and atmospheric.
I’ve always started by looking at what I’ve got and asking:
What can I do with this?
These portraits of Lee Ingleby and MyAnna Buring were all made in the same living room using available daylight.
There was no elaborate lighting setup.
By changing where I placed each of them, their relationship to the windows, the background and the direction in which I photographed, the same room gave me completely different photographs.
Lee’s portrait is dark and atmospheric. MyAnna’s environmental portrait is much brighter and more open. Move again and the close portrait becomes clean and polished enough that it could easily be mistaken for studio lighting.
The room hadn’t changed.
What changed was the way I used it.
The close portrait of MyAnna was later used on the cover of Freelance Photographer magazine, in an issue that also featured a profile of my work as a celebrity portrait photographer.
I like that example because the photograph didn’t require a photographic studio to look professional.
It required understanding the light that was already in the room.
I photographed Charlotte Riley in a hotel room in Soho, London.
The room had an enormous window, strong backlight, red walls, patterned curtains, brightly coloured furniture and rather a lot going on.
You can look at all of that and start thinking about the problems you need to solve.
Or you can ask what the room might give you.
By looking at where the daylight was falling, what was being reflected back into the room and where Charlotte could sit within that light, the room itself became part of the portrait.
And then, without leaving the room, I could make this.
Same person. Same room. Same available daylight.
Completely different photograph.
That’s one of the things I find most interesting about working with daylight. A location doesn’t dictate what the finished photograph has to look like.
Of course, you can find wonderful light and still make a terrible portrait.
There’s a person standing in front of the camera.
For me, portrait photography has never been about imposing a collection of poses on somebody. I talk to people. I watch them. Sometimes I direct them and sometimes I deliberately stop directing them.
Expression, posture and gesture can change in a fraction of a second.
Sometimes the photograph happens between the photographs you thought you were making.
I made this portrait of Rupert Young at his home using available daylight.
For me, it’s as much about his expression and gesture as it is about the light.
Learning when to direct someone, when to keep the conversation going and when simply to watch is every bit as important as knowing where to put them.
This photograph of Orlando Bloom wasn’t made during an editorial assignment or planned portrait session.
He was visiting one afternoon and had a new tattoo on his stomach that he wanted me to photograph.
So I photographed him.
There was no lighting setup. I simply used the daylight available in my living room.
What began as a photograph of a new tattoo became a portrait.
I think that photograph sums up quite a lot of what I’ve learned about portraiture over the years.
You don’t always need to make things more complicated.
Sometimes you already have everything you need: a person, a space and some light.
Over the years I’ve been asked by other professional photographers to show them how I work with daylight.
Many years ago, a well-known photographer asked me to take his portrait. He later admitted that he hadn’t really wanted the portrait at all. He wanted to watch how I found and used the light.
I think that’s interesting because finding the light had become so instinctive to me that I hadn’t necessarily thought of it as a particular technique.
You walk into a room.
You look.
You move around.
You watch what happens to the light.
And eventually you begin to see where the photograph might be.
It’s not about memorising a set of lighting diagrams or learning that a person should always stand a certain distance from a window. Those things might help you reproduce a photograph, but they don’t necessarily help when you’re standing somewhere you’ve never seen before.
The useful skill is being able to walk into that unfamiliar space and think:
I can make a portrait here.
I’ve recently brought this way of working together into a one-to-one Daylight Portrait Photography Workshop in London, exploring how to make professional portraits using daylight, natural and available light.
The workshop isn’t about recreating my photographs. It’s about learning how to look at light, space and the person in front of you so that you can make your own decisions wherever you happen to be photographing.
It’s suitable both for photographers developing their portrait practice and for experienced or established photographers who want to explore a more responsive way of working with available light.
The workshop can take place at my studio in Hackney, East London, at my home in Essex, or, where practical, at your own home or studio.