Window Light Revisited
Hi, I'm Steve May, a Cheshire Wedding Photographer, and this is the 5th post on my blog.
I am revisiting the topic of window light for this blog post, one of the most beautiful sources of light and one which can be used to create a light soft feel or a darker more moody feel, as in Rembrandt’s paintings perhaps.
This is a venue I visit quite often with my family as well as photographing weddings. The venue is in Cheshire. Whilst here socially I can’t help but watch other wedding photographers, and I’ve yet to see one use this particular location – which is very close to the main area for weddings. It’s a large greenhouse actually with a feel of some large French window, to me at least.
I took several photographs in the 10 minutes I was at this location and here are my 2 favourites, one a three quarter length shot, and the other a close up. My personal preference was for the three quarter length shot. See the 2 pictures below.
My initial desire was to retain as much detail in the picture as possible (I always shoot in Raw format) and I could then manipulate this as I so chose. I did push the exposure as far to the right of the histogram as possible intentionally (see the histogram in the screen capture below) as I knew I wanted a bright and airy final result after post production. This is more representative of how wedding couples choose it to be. I dialled in +1 stop of compensation to accommodate the bright background – 200th sec at f4.5 ISO 400.
When photographing with jpegs the camera chooses the colour, saturation, contrast and sharpness according to pre-set algorithms, this is not the case with Raw files and it needs to be finessed manually. Very little needed doing to be honest, I raised the exposure by a stop to give a bright airy feel and increased the colour temperature to make the picture warmer. I didn’t really want to retain any detail beyond the windows as I wanted to focus on Lou. Other than some selective sharpening, there was nothing done in Photoshop. I could have increased the saturation to put some more colour in, but that wasn’t the look I wanted – personal taste. See the final image below.
I am a Cheshire Wedding Photographer, for any further information please do not hesitate to get in touch with me via the details on the Contacts page.
Back to blog Published June 19 2013