Photography and film are mostly about capturing light.

Light is the one single element without which modern video productions, commercials or corporate video wouldn’t even be conceivable. The entire history of film and photography revolves around developing cameras and other equipment that can capture light accurately. So what are the pros and cons of natural light v artificial light?

Naturally, in the age of digital cameras, we rarely think about such things and we use the equipment that is at our disposal to create the best visual material we possibly can. Until recently it was almost unimaginable to shoot video without the aid of lights and all of the accompanying paraphernalia.

One of the early attempts to shoot an interior scene using just the light from the candles was made by Stanley Kubrick, in his famous film ‘Barry Lyndon’. This attempt, although beautiful had very few followers, and the usage of natural light was mostly reserved for documentary filmmakers. Recently, another great filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu proved that artificial light can be avoided in cinema. Iñárritu’s ‘The Revenant’ won three Oscars, including the one for best cinematography. There is just one shot in the whole film in which an artificial source of light was used, and despite that the film’s cinematography is breathtaking. Emmanuel Lubezki, the film’s cinematographer said that:

‘The idea of using natural light came because we wanted the audience to feel, I hope, that this stuff is really happening. Natural light is very complex because it’s constantly changing, which of course is a problem for continuity, but it’s beautiful. And that constant transformation of nature is a theme of the movie.’

If you can shoot an entire film without using any other source of light other than the daylight, could this mean that we are entering an era in which commercial videos can also be created without all the expensive light equipment?

What artificial light offers to video productions

Most interior commercial videos are entirely shot in the studio. An interior requires a lot of artificial light and allows you to manipulate it in any way you want. You can shoot day scenes during the night and you can create a night during the day without any difficulty at all.

Furthermore, you can create any kind of light you need for the purposes of your shoot, and you can do it whenever you need it. It makes the organization of the entire filming process much easier, because the crew doesn’t have to worry about the factors they cannot control, thus they can dedicate their full attention to the more important aspects of the production.

However, in the last half a century the video productions have often used outdoor locations in their videos. All of this video material has been shot with the aid of the artificial light. The question arises what do they gain from dragging all the spotlights to the location? The answer is rather simple, the same thing that you gain in a studio – the absolute control of the light conditions on the set. If you can control every shadow in your shot, you know exactly what you are getting, by using just the natural light you can’t always be sure that the footage you’ve captured is suitable for commercial use. While spotlights can be used to enhance the visual attractiveness of the images you are creating it is relatively hard to achieve the same effect by using only the natural sources of light.

Despite all of the advantages the spotlights can offer there are quite a few difficulties they present to the crews that shoot on locations. The most obvious one is that you don’t always have the access to electricity, which is why most crews have to have an alternative access to power.

The biggest problem with using the artificial light is that it often gives an unnatural look to the footage you are producing. Poorly executed lighting of a scene can completely ruin it, while even if you do your job exceptionally well, a trained eye can still spot a difference between the artificial and natural light.

What do you gain from using the natural light?

As we already mentioned the biggest disadvantage of the daylight is that it changes very fast. It is only a couple of hours of difference between the early morning light and the light at noon, but those few short hours make all the difference in a shot. It is very hard to achieve shot continuity if the light is constantly changing and the results are often unusable for any sort of video because the differences between the shots are just too big.

For all of these reasons, shooting without any additional light is a much slower process that requires much more organization. Everything has to be on cue because being late can ruin the entire day of production, which can cause you to fall behind on your schedule and lose a lot of money for purely aesthetic reasons.

However, the footage produced by only using the daylight as the only source of light looks unprocessed and more natural. Like the ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘The Revenant’ examples show the final version of your footage can look pretty amazing if the whole process is done correctly.

Using only natural light sources for your video doesn’t mean that you can’t manipulate the light in any way you want, it just means that you must be creative in finding ways in which you can do it effectively. Reflectors are, for example, one of the best tools that you can use because they allow you to bounce the light to the precise place in the shot where you need it.

Perhaps, the most important part is having the right equipment that can capture astounding images in relatively poor lighting conditions. Lenses you use will determine the quality of your footage. The low contrast, prime lenses are the best choice you can make for day scenes, while night scenes are probably best covered with fast lenses like Zeiss Superspeed or Rokinon Cine Lenses.

As the technology develops it can be expected that shooting with natural light as the only light source for the scene will become less difficult. Most of the video productions use the artificial light because it offers much more flexibility and it allows filmmakers to have the complete control of their shots.