Window Light

Last week I was asked to photograph an 8 month old! My usual approach to portraits is in outdoor on location type shoots. For infants, though, I make the exception and set up indoors. This little man's mother and I discussed the look we were going for in advance. She has two older children, and most of the photos hung on her walls are either in black and white or sepia tones. From the start we were not interested in color photos at all. This gave me a lot of freedom to ignore colors in the room and instead to concentrate on light and texture.

Most of the light here is natural light filtering through the windows. I did use a reflector for some of the photos, and also a flash unit on all of them to kick a little extra light into the shadows, but was able to control the artificial light well enough that it did not rob any of the ambience from the window light.

In the end though I can only take a tiny bit of credit for these images. Much of the success of an infant's photoshoot depends on the infant himself. Brooks behaved very well throughout the shoot and put on quite a show for us. His little face also has that classic shaping that lends itself very well to a classic style of photo processing.