Most new photographers would never know or understand when the best time to shoot portraits is. But if you want an effortless time and even diffused natural light, then you’ll have to plan accordingly. Most important, though, you’ll need a subject that’s got the time to shoot too. Better yet, you don’t need a fancy camera or lenses for this method. As long as you just know and understand the timing, you’ll see that this is universally the best time to shoot portraits. So what is it? We’ll tell you after the jump.

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The Best Time to Shoot Portraits and Why

The best time to shoot portraits is during an overcast day when the sun is diffused behind the clouds. Some photographers and producers call this the softbox look in the creative industry. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that it will always happen during the golden hour. The Golden Hour is very nice, but if you don’t know how to use the light, it’s also useless. Instead, it’s much easier to just get naturally diffused lighting in all situations and from every angle.

So here are some specific reasons why the best time to shoot portraits is during a cloudy day:

You can shoot at a wider aperture and a lower ISO. This will give you sharper images and often a lot of data to work with in post-production. As you raise the ISO of a camera up, it tends to lose both color rendition and dynamic range.

You can use your camera’s spot metering methods to spot meter for a subject’s face.

No matter the angle, and as long as you’re exposing accordingly, no angle can look bad.

You’re not going to have deep, dark shadows under their eyes or under their chin. No one wants those. I purposely grow a beard to hide my chin, for example. Or, chins, rather! Ha!

Colors tend to pop more with soft, diffused lighting.

If you’re using auto white balance, it’s going to add warmth to the image to make the skin tones look more radiant.

You can do all this using just natural light. If you choose to mix in a flash, it will just make everything pop even more.

How to Do it

Here are a few ways and tips on utilizing a cloudy day. Once you try it, it will really hammer in why it’s the best time to shoot portraits:

Possibly consider bringing a reflector. It will bounce light back into someone’s face and under their chin.

Don’t want to bring a reflector? Change the pose up or shoot very tight.

Shooting a photo with a subject by a red brick wall will make your subject appear more red.

Use your camera’s natural HDR mode. It will raise the shadows and nerf the highlights. But it will do it to the point where a portrait will still look natural.

Grab a lens with a shallow depth of field and a fast aperture. A standard nifty 50 lens is just fine. At that previous link, you’ll find our reviews of lots of them.

Pose your subject. Even though there is all of this diffused lighting, you’ll still have to move them around a bit. Come up with a concept of some sort.

At the end of the day, just remember that you shouldn’t stress any of this. Look at the image, assess what’s going well and what’s not. Figure out a solution to what’s plaguing your photos. And always remember to be experimental.