Most indoor sessions happen in rooms nobody designed for photography: a rented flat, a hotel room, a grandmother's kitchen. There is no space for stands, no time to build anything, and the client is standing there waiting.

The good news is that the room already contains a light source that most studios spend money imitating. A window is large, soft, directional and free. What it needs from you is not equipment. It needs three decisions, made in about ninety seconds.

Walk the room before you pose anyone

Do not start where the client happens to be standing. Walk in, ignore the furniture, and look only for light.

  • Find the biggest window. Size relative to your subject is what makes light soft, so a large window at close range is the softest source in the building.
  • Look at what the light lands on. A white wall opposite the window is a free reflector. A dark bookcase in the same spot is a free flag. Both are decisions someone else already made for you.
  • Check what is behind your subject, not just in front. Half the work of a good indoor frame is finding two square metres of uncluttered background.
  • Then move the furniture. A chair dragged two metres towards the window changes more than any setting on your camera.

Distance is the only dimmer you have

Light falls off fast indoors, which is a problem when you fight it and a tool when you use it.

Move a subject from one metre to two metres from the window and roughly three quarters of the light is gone, because intensity drops with the square of the distance. That is why the room feels dark two steps back from the glass.

Both positions are useful, for opposite reasons:

  • Close to the window gives you the softest light and the steepest falloff. The far side of a face goes dark quickly, and the background behind the subject goes darker still. This is your dramatic, shaped, editorial position.
  • Two or three metres back gives you flatter, more even light across a group and a background that is closer in brightness to the faces. This is the position for families, for anything with more than two people, and for a client who wants to look uncomplicatedly good.

If you only remember one thing: to make light softer, move the subject closer to the window, not the camera closer to the subject.

The angle decides the mood, and you set it with your feet

With one window and one person, everything comes from where each of you stands.

  • Subject facing the window, you between them and it. Flat, clean, forgiving. No shadow to speak of. Good for headshots, skin, and anyone anxious about their face.
  • Window at forty five degrees to the subject. The default portrait position. It gives a nose shadow that stays on the shaded side of the face and a visible cheekbone. If you learn one setup, learn this one.
  • Window directly to the side. Half the face lit, half in shadow. Strong and moody, and unflattering to almost everyone who did not ask for it.
  • Window behind the subject. Backlight, a bright rim on the hair, a soft haze. Expose for the face and let the window blow out; a window that goes pure white in the frame is not a mistake, it is the point.

Turn the person, not the room. Fifteen degrees of rotation changes the shadow on a face more than any menu item on the camera.

Switch off the ceiling lights

This is the most common fixable error in indoor work, and it costs nothing.

Daylight from a window runs around 5500 to 6500 kelvin. Household bulbs run around 2700 to 3000. When both hit the same face, no single white balance can fix it: correct the daylight and the lamp side turns orange, correct the lamp and the window side turns blue. Skin ends up two colours in the same frame.

Turn every artificial light off, set white balance for daylight, and let the room get darker. Darker and one colour beats brighter and two.

The exception is when the lamp is clearly part of the picture: a bedside light in shot, a warm kitchen in the evening. Then it is a motivated source and it belongs there. That is a decision, not an accident.

Read the weather, not the clock

Golden hour is the least useful advice indoors, because most sessions are booked at eleven in the morning.

  • Overcast is the best window light there is. The whole sky becomes the source, so the light stays soft anywhere in the room. A grey day is a gift, not a compromise.
  • Direct sun through glass is small, hard and contrasty. Do not fight it: either hang a white sheer curtain across the window and turn it into a giant softbox, or use the hard shapes on purpose and let a stripe of sunlight fall across the frame.
  • A north-facing window in the northern hemisphere never gets direct sun, so it stays consistent all day. South-facing is the equivalent below the equator. That room is where you take the shots you cannot afford to lose.

When the room is genuinely bad

Small window, dark walls, no space. It happens, and the fix is never a bigger aperture alone.

  • Shoot in the doorway. Doorways are the widest gaps in most flats and often catch light from two rooms at once.
  • Put a white duvet or a bath towel just outside the frame on the shadow side. A hotel bed is a two metre reflector nobody thinks to use.
  • Raise ISO before you drop the shutter speed. Grain is a texture and clients forgive it. Motion blur on a face is not recoverable.
  • Go closer. Fill the frame with two faces and a hand and the ugly room disappears without you having to fix it.

The ninety second room check

  • Biggest window found, everything else ignored
  • Subject one to two metres from it, depending on how shaped you want the light
  • Window at roughly forty five degrees to the face
  • All lamps off, white balance on daylight
  • Light wall or bedsheet on the shadow side
  • Background checked before the first frame, not after

None of this needs a bag. It needs you to spend the first ninety seconds looking at the light instead of at the client.

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