Here’s another shot of my favour­ite daugh­ter, taken at the end of last year. Her eye col­our, which star­ted off as very undefined, dark grey, is now beau­ti­fully con­ver­ging to an amaz­ing blue. I won­der who she got the genes from for that…

In terms of pho­to­graphy, I pho­to­graphed her sit­ting /​lay­ing in her favour­ite vibrat­ing boun­cer seat (looks some­thing like this) next to the win­dow, look­ing out­side. This is one of the most clas­sic loc­a­tions and is pretty much the per­fect place for por­trait­ure. Clas­sic, as it ini­tially provided pho­to­graph­ers with a strong enough light source for tak­ing pho­tos in the first place (way back in the day when the light sens­it­ive mater­i­als were hardly light sens­it­ive at all, by today’s stand­ards). But even before, it has been widely used in paint­ing for instance.

Pos­i­tion­ing your sub­ject next to a win­dow (dur­ing the day…) provides you with nice soft-​box like light­ing (no harsh shad­ows). Also, nat­ural light con­tains the full spec­trum of vis­ible light (as com­pared to vari­ous arti­fi­cial light sources that just con­tain a lim­ited and often times frag­men­ted spectrum) — which will get you beau­ti­ful, nat­ural col­ours if that’s what you want. Apart from that, if you pos­i­tion your sub­ject care­fully you might also get some nice catch lights in the eyes (that is the reflec­tions you see on the eye and the iris).

You might want to use a reflector though on the other side of the face that’s away from the win­dow so it doesn’t drown in dark­ness…

Here are some more por­traits I took near win­dows, 1, 2, 3.