Natural light is soft, beautiful and it is free. I spend majority of my professional life dedicated to shoot natural light… that was before I understand flash photography.

As much as I love the soft quality of the natural light, in Singapore, it is very challenging to be depended upon for indoor session. It is always rainy or cloudy. Plus with the movement of the baby, it makes pin sharp images become stressful at times.

With even purpose built natural light studio like one I have, I have to control the direction of the natural light using different flag and reflector to get it right. The worst is when you are ready, the cloud just move and cover the sun… great!!! working with natural light limit my shooting time… so for client’s benefit, I started to control the light using flash with help from my great Mentor who show me beyond how to set light, but how to “feel” with light.

I started to understand how to change the light to enhance my vision and i feel this is a new beginning for me… it was not easy at first…

I try to create soft and flat images for the little baby as requested by the parent, here is one with natural light and one with flash, personally, I like the flash version better and I think the baby agree with me too… 🙂

I use ISO 100 instead of 800 and shoot at smaller aperture at the same shutter speed, so the result is sharper and the image is a lot more crisp and it print a lot better. With all of my work are printed, flash is the way to go for me and I can control it the way I wanted. The first is with natural light and the second is with flash.

Interestingly, I read about the comparison that a great OZ photographer, Sue Bryce on the testing as well… here is the small video on youtube by Creative Live… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o2wlNkr108

Regards,

Hart Tan
www.tomato.sg
www.facebook.com/tomato.sg