Utilising Available Space and Natural Light Indoors for Portraits

When bad weather sends your shoot indoors, you can still capture excellent images. Here’s how.

In this natural light photography class, Karl finds a way to work even in bad weather. He heads indoors, where he shows you a number of essential requirements for taking fantastic portraiture shots.

Shooting inside can often mean working in small spaces with limited light, which is why it’s important to remember three simple things. In this photography class, Karl explains each of these important elements and how to bring them together to take a good portrait.

Using the available light, he shows you how to work in any weather and how to make the most of less-than-ideal shooting conditions.

In this class:

  • Portrait photography: How to photograph indoors
  • Natural light photography tips
  • Natural light photography indoors
  • Posing your subject
  • How to photograph in small spaces

If you enjoy this class, be sure to check out Indoor Portrait Photography.

Questions? Please post them in the comments section below.

Comments

    1. Hi Romhan, I increased the ISO in order to maintain a fast enough shutter speed to freeze my subject incase of movement from my subject or from myself.

  3. Hi Karl! I am absolutely loving your course. Your teaching is at a high level, and I am so happy that I chose to take this up. Can I do an internship with you, LOL. Speaking of the course, can anyone explain exactly how you get a degree here, the courses involved etc. Are there any tests, or what courses have to be taken to achieve it?

    Thanks in advance!

    Frank

    1. Hi Frank, we don’t offer degrees in photography as we are not a university (although Universities do use our training to train their students!) There are many people offering ‘certificates’ but to be honest most of them are worthless, when it comes to employment in the photography industry it usually comes down to how good your portfolio is. We offer a certification plan on our lifetime membership which members can upgrade to. But we are more strict on the criteria for passing, our certification is based on a portfolio of work over a minimum period and is judged on the body of work submitted, you can find more details on this is your ‘home page’ in the upgrade section.

  5. Hi Karl,
    The lighting in this image it’s quite nice , it’s very soft because of the large window light and also the posing off the model is very natural which adds to all the elements that make it all these images look very elegant.
    I do enjoy looking at most of your shoots and do get a lot of knowledge and information out of them.
    Thanks FT

  6. I noticed on the photo at 2:55 you went from F1.4 , 1/160, 320 iso …. to F1.8 , 1/125, 500 iso at photo 3:13 and 3:34. Was curious what the reasons were for the adjustments when you are shooting in the same exact spot? The exposures on all 3 of those images look same to me?

    1. Hi Paul, the actual exposures would be about equivalent because the change in aperture is balanced out by the change in shutter speed or ISO accordingly. There was also shifts in the changing of the light from the outside so sometimes exposure changes are made for those reasons but most likely I wanted to get from 1.4 to 1.8 because I felt that the depth of field was too shallow for a hand held shot and may have resulted in a soft focus.

      1. Hi Karl…I had a similar question to above. Did you shoot this manual, or aperture priority/auto ISO?

        This location shoot seemed to necessitate quick shots (you said that you probably shouldn’t be photographing in the location and whispered your commentary). 🙂

        Like the previous OP, I noticed a lot of changes in your settings. Looks like you were trying to get aperture first and then shutter speed hi enough to hand hold the camera.

        Was just wondering if you made these decisions quickly “on the fly” in manual, or used a mode that could get you close, then adjusted from there…

        Hope that makes sense….brilliant work by the way

        1. Hi Matthew, thank you for your kind comments. For your information I only ever shoot in Manual. I think there may be one or two tutorials in the ‘Essentials or Advanced’ section where I demonstrate Shutter Priority and Aperture Priority to show what they do. For me personally I find it easier to work in manual, once you know the f-stop scale; f1.4, 2.8, 4, 5,6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, 45, 90 etc and then the shutter speeds and ISO are obvious 1/30th, 1/60th, 1/125th and the 100, 200 ,400, 800 etc then it’s very simple to know that if you change on then you need to affect at least one of the others. To simplify this for people just learning in the section I stick to just Apertures and Shutters https://visualeducation.com/class/understanding-exposure/ but for example I usually decide my working aperture that I want first (based on depth of field requirements) and then I just adjust the other two to suit until I’m at the right exposure. If I’m shooting fast action then I’d decide the shutter speed first and work the other two.

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