Advantages and disadvantages of natural and artificial lighting

Natural Lighting:

1. Advantages: The great thing about natural light is that it is free, abundant and easy to find. You can find natural light and bright shots without investing a lot of money in lighting equipment.

2. Cons: Although natural light is abundant and easy to integrate into photography, the difficulty is that it is highly variable. Depending on the location, season, weather and time of day, natural light produces different colors and contrasts in an image.

Artificial Light:

1. Advantage: Since artificial light is independent of natural light, it is a continuous source of light available at any time of day.

2. Disadvantages: Artificial light is expensive and can be largely a waste of resources; even though artificial light provides more control over photography, it requires more equipment and time to set up.

Selection of light sources

Depending on the type of photo being considered, more than one artificial light source may be needed to balance the shot. Accessories like batteries, cables and connectors will be needed, as well as a separate studio or place to mount the equipment. In short, artificial lighting can add many other time-consuming and costly components.

When there is no time to create a guided photo shoot, natural light can easily be used in reportage, street photography or run-and-gun techniques; on the other hand when there is both a budget and enough resources to create a photo shoot, artificial light is the preferred choice for commercial, product and fashion photography.