How do you find good quality natural light while walking out and about? It’s not always easy, but if you know where to look and what to look for, you can almost always find the perfect light for a portrait.
At least that's what London-based photographer and YouTuber Sean Tucker believes, and he's created a helpful tutorial for his series ‘Good Light’ that explains what it is you should look for in natural light to make the most of a scene for an impromptu portrait session.
In the six-minute video, Tucker and his friend Sarah hit the streets of London in search for a backdrop for their photo shoot. As tends to be the case with so many street shoots, the pair end up in an alley, where Tucker sets up shop to explain the benefits of this particular scene and why it provides good natural light for the portrait he’s trying to capture.
Tucker hows how the buildings on either side of the alley not only provide good leading lines, but also serve as black flags of sort, helping give depth to the subject by making the natural light more directional. After a few shots, he noticed a problem though: panda eyes. To fix this, Tucker uses a simple white grocery bag his subject had on hand as a reflector. A bit primitive, but as his final image shows, it did the trick.
Photo by Sean Tucker
To wrap up the video, Tucker shows how he went about editing the image in Lightroom CC on his iPad—itself a helpful tutorial for those of us who frequently edit images on-the-go for sharing on social media and beyond.
Watch the full video for yourself up top, and then head on over to Tucker's YouTube Channel to see more from his popular "Good Light" series. You can also find him on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, or read his DPReview Photo Story of the Week.
2018-4-18 17:58