Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby on how to control harsh natural light

In his series in Digital Camera magazine and Digital Camera World, the legendary Scott Kelby reveals some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of some of his favourite images.

This month Scott explains how to control harsh natural light to create stunning portraits.

Words and images by Scott Kelby. You can follow Scott and his work on his blog or on his live photography talk show The Grid. You can also find Scott and his KelbyOne team on their Facebook page and on Twitter as @KelbyOne.

Except for a short period about twice a day, the sun is a pretty harsh light source. Nevertheless, natural lighting can be soft and beautiful, especially when you give Mother Nature a hand with an inexpensive trick.

For this photo shoot, I visited an abandoned old Florida mansion in the middle of nowhere. The mansion is currently being restored using money raised by renting it out for the day for location shoots. As soon as I heard it was available, I set up the shoot, with my wife Kalebra doing the art direction.

My wife handled everything from picking the make-up, outfits and hair, to directing and posing. This left me and three assistants to focus on nothing but the lighting and shooting, which really made my job easy.

The main challenge with this shoot was to prevent the harsh light from the window from blowing out the highlights on the model’s face and dress. The solution was as cheap as it was simple…

SEE MORE: Scott Kelby on how to balance ambient light with flash

Controlling atmosphere: day-to-day items can make or break a shoot

1 Shooting from afar
I love the compression a long lens brings to an image. You can see how far back I am from the subject in this over-the-shoulder view of my shooting position. I’m using a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens here, which is my go-to lens for portraits. I usually shoot in the 150-200mm range of the lens, but to get the wide look I wanted, including the awesome location, I had to shoot at 70mm.

After a few test shots, I was already battling with the highlights. The model’s face was too bright. So while the model and my wife worked on the posing, clothing, and gestures,  I was trying to tame that harsh sunlight.

I was shooting at f/2.8, so at least I could soften the background behind her a little bit. I knew I would have to zoom in much tighter to get the background more out of focus, which I did on the some of the shots, but not the ones we’re looking at here.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes – Scott Kelby’s killer one-light portrait set-up

2 Taming the harsh sunlight 

The solution was to turn that big harsh window light into a softbox by putting up a frosted shower curtain liner over the window. These are very inexpensive — they cost around £10 from John Lewis in the UK, or about $6 in the US. If you look at a shower curtain liner, it pretty much looks just like the front diffusion panel of a softbox. My hot tip for anyone interested in portraiture is to keep one of these in your camera bag for situations just like this.

SEE MORE: The best studio lighting for photography – 8 top options tested and rated

My assistant Brad Moore used gaffer tape to cover the bottom part of the window with the liner. Gaffer tape was invented in Hollywood for use on film sets because when you remove it, it doesn’t take the paint with it or damage any surfaces, and it doesn’t leave a messy residue. It’s really pretty magic for stuff like this. You can find gaffer tape in any large camera store.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes – Scott Kelby explains how to shoot on location with two lights

3 A close-up of my shooting rig
I was using a Canon EOS 1D X, but I could have used my 5D Mark III. The results would have been similar because I was shooting on a tripod using a very low ISO. I’ve pretty much switched over to tripods from Three Legged Thing, but here I was using a Gitzo Mountaineer instead.

My laptop was supported with a mounting bar from Manfrotto. The laptop table is by Tether Tools. I was tethered directly into Lightroom on an Apple MacBook Pro.

SEE MORE: Off-camera flash – how to stop fearing your flashgun and take control of lighting

4 Essential accessories
Once we had the main shot, we went for a different look in the same location. I moved a few feet over to the left, away from the corner. You can see two important accessories in this shot.

To the right is a powerful speaker system for playing Pandora internet radio via my phone. I feel that music on the set is very important. It helps to set the mood, and the models love it.

We played some classical to get us in the mood, then we switched to something the model liked best. That’s our rule: the model chooses the music. If they’re hearing music they love, it comes out in the image.

Above this, you can see the floor fan. We didn’t want to blow the model’s hair around, but we wanted to move it a little to add volume. Later on we wanted the drapes blowing, so we cranked up the fan, and had two assistants outside the window, fanning the drapes with two large diffusers to make them move.

SEE MORE: Flash portraits: creative off-camera lighting techniques you have to try

5 Going for the wider view
I wanted an epic feel for this image, so I switched to a 16-35mm wide-angle, and positioned my camera low down to get a low, wide perspective. The fan was just out of the shot. We moved the couch towards the camera to add depth to the image.

Using this lens enabled me to get lots of the lovely floor and ceiling into the shot, even with the subject much closer to my shooting position.

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