 Hey everybody, it's Craig back to here and in this video I'm going to share five tips with you to improve your natural light portraits. In this video I'm going to take you behind the scenes of a natural light portrait shoot and I'm going to share five tips with you that you can use to improve your natural light portraits. All right tip number one is time of day. I prefer to shoot two hours after sunrise or two hours before sunset. So somewhere in that range anywhere closer to noon you're going to have some really harsh sunlight, some harsh shadows. So a couple of hours after the sun rises or a couple of hours before it sets that's a really prime time for shooting natural light portraits. Now that's tip number one. Now tip number two is move your subjects into the shade. So the sun is behind a building opposite where we're shooting so we have a nice soft natural light so I don't have to worry about harsh shadows. And then tip number three is white balance. I suggest setting your white balance manually and then that way when you go to do your post-processing it's easy to adjust all of your images versus using automatic white balance. So I like to set my white balance anywhere between 5200 and 5600 Kelvin. It's really up to you. Maybe you could start setting it at 5500 Kelvin. See how that works out for you. So tip number four is to think about the background and think of something that's not too distracting but also has a pleasing color palette. So think of something that's opposite skin tones. So if you notice some of these images here have some blue in the background. I've added some of that blue in post-processing to give me a wider color palette that works with the subject skin tone. Now tip number five is focus. I like to put the background out of focus and that also helps make it less distracting. So I'm shooting with a 105 millimeter f14 the Nikon 105 f1.4. If you're shooting portraits like this I recommend prime lenses over zoom lenses just because you can have a shallower depth of field. So anywhere from 85 millimeter 100 millimeter 135 millimeter that range is my preferred range for portraits. Yours may differ slightly but f14 to f2 that's a good range to put that background out of focus and really put the focus on your subject. So a couple of things about this shoot. We chose this location one because we were in the shade but two we were trying to take advantage of the reflections of this building at this time of day. And this is the first time I shot here so I wasn't sure how it was going to work. Took a little bit of time to figure out the angles but then we got an angle that was working for us. Now we're using little tiny lights I got on amazon and we're trying to create a little background blur a little bokeh and you can see some of that in an image coming up and we're just kind of playing with the placement of that light and we're just really just trying to have fun with this shoot really just trying to work with the reflections from the window and we had a lot of wind to contend with also the temperature it dropped drastically and it was around probably about 10 Celsius or 50 Fahrenheit at the time of this shoot but I think we made the most of it. Anyway if you found this helpful give me a thumbs up for this video and if you have any outdoor portrait tips of your own please share them in the comments section below and if you're not already a subscriber hit that subscribe button and feel free to share this video on the web with your fellow photographers just click on share. Hey it's Craig back to here again and if you found these five tips helpful just give me a thumbs up for this video and if you have any tips of your own you can leave them in the comments section below. You can also share this video if you look below this video click on share and you can share it on photography groups and forums. Also one last thing if you're not already a subscriber to my channel just click on subscribe. All right thanks for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one.