The single most important thing I feel I have learned since deciding to take my photos to the next level is lighting. Understanding light has been (and still is) a lesson I am constantly trying to master. I’m not claiming to be anywhere close to an expert on it but I have definitely come far in the past 3 months. Since I use only natural light when shooting I always look for where my light source (the sun) is coming from.

Because in San Francisco we live through foggy summers I’ve only had to learn shooting with one type of lighting – diffused light through fog and low clouds. It makes it easier to learn everything else when your light is the same every day. However we are now entering into our Indian Summer (yay). I’ve always looked so enviously at many photos of beach shots at sunset with warm glowing light. So gorgeously beautiful. I wanted to take that kind of shot too! But it’s not that easy to find golden light in our city as the fog rolls in around 3 or 4 in the afternoon even on a sunny day. The sun stays high in the sky on those days and then disappears into the fog once it gets close to the evening hour.

Until now.

That golden light I’ve looked for in this foggy city of ours has suddenly started showing up in the evenings.

And I’m even more happy to discover it has started showing up through our living room windows!

This is one style of lighting I’d been wanting to practice on for so long. And man it is harder to shoot in and get right than I thought

Just a slight shift a centimeter one way or another changes the shot completely. And since I only shoot in manual, I’m constantly fumbling around trying to get my settings right. On this particular day, my son was being unusually cooperative. And I hadn’t even had to bribe him!

So I got to experiment a little with my golden boy in the beautiful warm light All the time moving an inch this way and that to see how much my shot changed each time.

Model #2 comes home from the market with daddy in the middle of it all and wants in. With her big slab of focaccia. Seriously, this child finds happiness in the ODDEST things in the world. I love her.

The thing about this gold light is it changes by the minute. So I’m snapping away like a crazy woman.

I think Grizz has a video of me frantically snapping away as my light changed and slowly faded. I totally thought he was taking a video of our kids sharing the giant bread

Nope, he was laughing at me the whole time. Apparently I was so focused on getting the shot right I had forgotten my other techniques like posture (there is a correct way to hold the camera) and tilt. But hey, not only was my light fading fast, my kids were being so sweet sharing that huge hunk of carb. Like we dont’ feed them well or something

And no I’m not sharing that video. I’m pretty sure I was all sweaty and crazed looking. Hey it was a sweltering 75 degrees with that sun beating down into our living room (yes Anna, i said sweltering 75 degrees!). But I will leave you with a parting shot of my Grizz cleaning our windows. Now that I have pretty evening light I needed some pretty clean windows!

I expect I’ll be posting more shots of our evening lit living room since I plan to play around more with that rare golden light