Natural Light

I'm sure you are looking at this post - or more specifically, the images in this post - and you must be thinking that I am soooooo vain...!! Who pastes pictures of themselves all over their blog??!! Jeesh!! Well, before you X out of this window in disdain, let me explain myself.

I recently have become totally fascinated with natural light portrait photography. Not that I want to be a portrait photographer... but I do end up with people in many of my photos, and it's fun to change it up once in a while. Black and white is fairly standard and sepia doesn't flatter every picture... so I'd like to try something different. The look I find especially intriguing is the one where the photo almost looks overexposed, and the colors are washed out. The picture ends up looking a bit soft and dreamy, a bit old and worn. A friend of mine is a professional photographer and I have flat out asked what settings she shoots with to get these kinds of results. She has completely ignored my query. What's up with that?? Anyhow, since I couldn't get a straight answer, I was left with no choice but to experiment... on myself!!

My testing took place indoors, against a neutral colored wall, next to a window, on an overcast day. Quite frankly, I thought the light was stellar, and I think it would be difficult to replicate with a flash. By turning and either facing right into the light or slightly away from the light, I could adjust the angle of the shadows or even completely eliminate the shadows on my face. A smaller lens aperture obviously lent to a larger focal area and greater depth of field, but my 31mm wide open (f1.8) created some neat effects too, like only getting one of my eyes in focus out of my whole face. I tried many different shutter speeds, many different f-stops, all at ISO100... I reduced the saturation and increased the contrast... Sometimes, half of my features would be blown out and my hair looked like a solid black mass. Sometimes, the photo was sadly very normal. Booo.

In the end, I've decided that post processing is the only way to achieve what I am after. I can't figure out for the life of me how to get the results in-camera. And even using Photoshop CS3, I'm not 100% satisfied with what I've got. That being said, I'm not exactly Adobe literate so I could be completely missing something. Feel free to comment with your suggestions!!

At any rate, I followed up my disappointing test session with some further Google work. I think perhaps these guys have what I am looking for: http://www.autofx.com/products/mttc/detail.html. Auto FX Mystical Tint, Tone and Color 2.0 seems to have the solution to my particular problem, plus Auto FX offers a whole whack of other cool digital enhancement tools - the possibilities look endless! I am going to download a demo and give it a whirl. For my next experiment, I promise I will find a different test subject!

Cheers.