No sun? Nothing! False natural light in the studio.
Bringing the outdoors into the house
The weather is not always suitable for photo shoots. It can make it really hard to schedule outdoor sessions and sometimes causes us to cancel things at the last minute. If we were hoping for bright winter sunshine, we could be sorely disappointed. Instead of delaying shoots that need the feeling of sunshine, we can find ways to mimic the natural light inside a studio. Obviously, there are some things that need to be done in place. However, for certain types of images, such as product photos, we can eliminate most of the uncertainty and continue indoors, where the weather won’t spoil things.
Make artificial light look natural
So, how do we make artificial light look like natural sunlight? If we think of taking photos outdoors on a sunny day like a massive studio, the sun is a small bright spot in a large space. Apparently, the sun is really huge and many times the size of our planet. However, we perceive it as a rather small area of concentrated light in the sky. Also, we know that on a sunny day we have shadows with hard edges. When the darkness is clear and distinct, we have “hard” light. So we definitely won’t use any “soft” boxes to modify our lights. We can figure out that what we need is essentially a single source of light that is not diffused (a very small amount at most if we think about the sun going through our atmosphere). ). That means we need to use a single ceiling light bulb to light our scene if we want it to look more like sunlight.
If we soften the light with dimmers, it will look more like the light we get on an overcast day. The clouds then diffuse the light, giving us a large, soft light source instead of a strong point. However, can’t we just use other modifiers? There are several modifiers that we use for hard light, such as beautiful dishes or snores. The problem with using snoot is that it focuses the light on a small spot, so we don’t get the light spread like on a sunny day. Unless that spot is large enough to cover our entire scene, we’ll end up with some weird shadows that make it look less like daylight.
The reason we tend to avoid other modifiers is that they can change the shape of the reflection on any reflective surface. See how highlights on glossy surfaces look in bright sunlight. That’s what we wanted to achieve in the studio for our lighting to be believable. So by all means, experiment, but remember the outcome you are trying to achieve. Keep the “sun” round whatever you do!
Create your own beach
Ok, so we have the lighting in the right direction. Think about setting up a scene like being outdoors. A relatively easy scene to do is the beach scene. To do that, we only really need two things: sand and a blue background for the sky/water. For a tabletop scene like the ones pictured here, we could use a large blue sheet of paper or card to create an infinity curve. Attach the paper at the top to keep it in place and fill the bottom of the card with sand to make your “beach”. I use play sand and not construction sand for this.
To prevent it from looking like sand on a small piece of card, we will need to keep the depth of field relatively shallow. We definitely don’t want to see any texture on paper or cards! So we need to have enough distance between the main part of the sand where your subject will be and the tag behind it for us to blur the background in blue. The sand is in the background so it’s a bit out of focus to create a sense of depth.
Adding Clouds in Photoshop
You can then add some translucent clouds over parts of the blue in Photoshop to make it look more like the sky. The easiest way to do this is to get some cloud brushes. Paint a few white clouds on one or two separate layers. Then blur them. Gaussian blur usually works well for this. You can then change the opacity of the clouds until they look real. If you want to add a little more depth to your sky, then you can use multiple layers of clouds with varying degrees of opacity. Just add a little opacity to things that are supposed to be further away and possibly reduce their opacity as well. You can also darken part of the blue to hint at the ocean.
Studio Summer Scene
Now that we have the beach scene, we can add a theme. If you’re looking for ideas for what to shoot, I’d start with items that you’ll see at the beach. So try things like sunscreen bottles, buckets and shovels, flip-flops, toys, picnic baskets, etc. The size of your shooting space and the amount of sand you have will determine how large the items will be. .
In the photo of the sunglasses, you will notice that there is a lens flare in the corner. This can happen naturally when strong light passes through your lens. Modern lenses often have anti-glare coatings that can make it difficult to get nice flare when you want it to. So you can always add lens flare in Photoshop, that’s what I did here. You don’t necessarily have to use the Photoshop lens flare tool to do this. It’s often easier to get a lens flare image on a black background and use monitor or brighten modes to get rid of the black. Then you can easily see to position and resize the flame as you like.
Light Modification
If you decide you want to look for something other than fresh and bright sunshine, there are several possibilities. In the Coke can image, I used a Gobo with a projector mounted on my lamp. The images below show what this looks like. Gobos are a fun way to bring shapes and shadows into an image. This makes it look a bit like the can sitting on a bench under a tree on a sunny day. We mostly only see speckled shade outdoors under trees, so our brains can be fooled into thinking this must be an outdoor image.
I’ve also added a v-shaped white card on the left side of the box to bounce some light back and soften the shadow to the touch. Sunlight shines around us and reflects everything back to some extent. So having something that bounces off a little fill light can help create realism.
In this next set of shots, I went back to using a bare-bulb flash. Then I added the diffuser core from the reflector (take off the jacket Reflector 5 in 1 and you have a diffuser) to simulate clouds, soften the light. The different images show the result of moving the reflector closer to the subject for a softer effect.
So there are ways to make something look like it was shot outdoors, while in fact you’re in your warm and comfortable studio. Styling can be an important part of this, but lighting is the most important place to start. For example, if you don’t have a flash in your studio, you can try using a bare bulb over a reading light. Have fun experimenting and see who you can fool with your simulated sun.
All images © Joe Lenton
