Have you ever been somewhere, and want to take a photograph, and there just isn’t much natural light, or perhaps the light is only coming from a single source, such as a window? Are you tempted to use a flash? Well don’t even think about it, because doing so takes away from the story of what you are photographing. Usually this sort of scenario manifests itself inside historical buildings where there just isn’t much natural light, and in context, no artificial light. Think anything before electric lighting – houses, castles, outbuildings, etc. Photography in historical buildings can be burdened by a lack of light – but that’s how they were when inhabited.

I photograph mostly using natural light. I don’t like using a flash, because ultimately there are certain qualities of natural light that enhance the colours and aesthetics of an object or scene. I find flash light too harsh, even when used with diffusers. But that’s just me. Below is an image from the attic space of a building at the Voss Folkemuseum in Norway. The room contained some beds, and storage chests, so obviously it was used as a bedroom. The light streaming through the window is enough to bathe the room with enough light to show its use (typically windows would only have been installed where the light would be most concentrated, in this case south-facing). Notice the spinning wheel next to the window where the light is most concentrated?

A lack of light often tells a story. It shows you what the space really was like for those who inhabited it long ago. Before the advent of electricity, most buildings relied on natural light during the day, and perhaps candle-light at night. Windows were small because glass was inherently expensive, and the more glass one had, the more heat that was lost in winter. If you were documenting a scene in a more archival manner, you might naturally flood the scene with artificial light of a sort, but historical photography should not be harshly lit.

Many historic buildings were built at a time of very little beyond natural light and candles. The light today is that very same light, and to bath it with artificial light would be unnatural. These nooks and crannies were never meant to be bathed in complete light. Consider the images below, taken at different folke-museums in Norway. The images are of cooking fires inside historic buildings, which had no openings except in the roof. The one from the Norsk Folkemuseum is Saga-Stau, a replica of an open-hearth house from about 3000 years ago.

On a bright sunny day, dark spaces are bathed in whatever available light is able to seep through every opening. In a dark space this light can often appear harsh, blinding window openings to the point where there is little cognition of the scene beyond the window. Yet it also tends to produce shards of light puncturing into a space. On clouded days, the light can be more muted. In the image below of the living space, the light coming through the window is harsh enough to produce highlight clipping of both the window frame and part of the table. However the light adds a sense of Norwegian Hygge to the entire scene. To light this scene with a flash would simply reduce the scene to a series of artifacts, rather than a slice of history.