STUDIO OR OUTDOOR PHOTOGRAPHY?

Controlled Studio Photography or Bracing The Elements for Outdoors – What’s best?

You’ve made the choice you would like some professional photographs taken of the family and the photographer has given you a choice. Sit in the warm and controlled environment of a studio, or embrace the elements and take your chances in the great outdoors. What do you do? This short blog will give you the pros and cons of each path and help guide you to a decision that will provide an enjoyable experience and unforgettable memories.

What’s Your Style?

You will have a gut feeling around a preference. If you are at one with the outdoors and spend most of your time in hiking boots, the natural inclination may be for a more natural outdoors setting.

However if have a more formal disposition, or children that would make a mad dash for escape in an open space, you may have a disposition towards a controlled studio setting. Consider however that you can have a formal portrait in an outdoor setting and an informal portrait in a studio, so the lines can blur between the two.

What does each option offer?

For fans of the great outdoors, you do not need me to tell you about the unpredictability of the weather in Scotland. This can be a blessing and a curse, with glorious early morning and evening light when the sun is out and wind and rain for large parts of the year.

If you embrace the weather come what may, you can create images that are unique and unrepeatable under any circumstances.

The setting is only limited by your imagination. A walk in the hills, a cityscape, sitting casually on your motorbike or strolling along a sandy beach. The casual nature of the outdoor setting tends to put the subject at ease and lends itself to the more fly on the wall style of photography, where events unfold and are captured with only limited direction from the photographer.

It can also be a great option for families where the chaos that children bring to any occasion, becomes part of the experience and if captured with skill can look stunning.

The studio setting in contrast, affords a great many options, with no consideration given to the weather. Choice of clothing, choice of posing, choice of background, choice of lighting styles…hoice, choice choice. This is a great option for larger groups, if elderly relatives are present and if young children are included, especially babies.

Whilst the studio appears to give unlimited options, it is constrained by the space you are in. So no running towards the camera and whilst it is possible to capture movement in the studio, there is no substitute for the outdoors if dynamic, free flowing and casual photography is desired.

Where does the photographers’ skills lie?

You need also to consider the experience of a photographer when it comes to indoor and outdoor settings, as they are different disciplines requiring different equipment and skill sets. Outdoor photography requires creativity in spades and in some cases creativity can trump technical excellence as the image is so captivating.

The studio is a more technical environment where every facet of the posing, lighting and background is under the photographers control. The quality of the light can be soft or hard, the direction of the light can change how shadows fall and the combination of lights used can be balanced in different ways to create particular effects.

This is not your concern as the subject. If the photographer fully understands what you are wanting to achieve, they will use the equipment with skill and artistry to achieve that outcome.

The choice is yours

My recommendation is to find a look that you want to achieve and talk to the photographer about how they could work with you to make it happen. Indoors or outdoors, any session with a professional photographer is likely to blow you away and once you see those images, you will not double guess your choice of studio or outdoors.