If you can't light properly, that will always be true. Which is why we generally find "I only shoot natural light" to be a synonym for "I don't know how to light." Mostly due to (a) not understanding lighting and (b) not being equipped to light well. I've never seen anyone who could light well say "I only shoot natural light."
Want to understand lighting? Take cinematography somewhere good- you'll almost never hear a cine guy say "I only shoot natural light!" The reason for that is if you control the light, you control the image, and Hollywood exercises creative control over every single scene of every single film. So do good commercial and wedding photographers.
Light modifiers like softboxes, grids, reflectors, umbrella fabric and colors, scrims, gobos, beauty rings, etc. all control the harshness, direction and color of the light. If it's too harsh and too cold, you haven't lit the scene correctly if that's not the look you were shooting for. Look at the lighting on strobist.blogspot.com and objectively evaluate it- if he can do that with minimal equipment in the field, then obviously "harsh and cold" is a matter of lack of technique and minimal equipment.
Personally, I'd probably go for a Photoflex Q39 XS before I went for a LS- but modifiers work, even the cheapo Stofen ones or an index card rubber-banded to the flash head.
Personally, I think most natural light portraits suck as anything other than snapshots. But then Rembrant and the like have endured because of the way they portray the lighting as well as their skill with a brush. If you want art, you need the light to be right. With people, the easiest way to achieve that is with a flash or two, a couple of modifiers and some skill.
All opinions, I think natural light portraits look *much* better than aritificially lit portraits...if, and that's a big if, you can get a good asthetically pleasing natural lighting situation. Usually that's not easy, so we use fill light to compensate/adjust for less than ideal lighting, natural lighting. I prefer warmer tones in pictures (so does Ken R.
), but I hate extreme exaggeration/over the top vivid colors that look utterly unnatural too my eye (like Ken R. likes to do).
So it comes down to preferences and asthetics. Light does not have to be "right" for art or anything else, who are you to presume otherwise?
Barry Lyndon, candlelight cinematography, but some little known obscure director you might have heard of. Is it better? No, it's an asthetic that the director preferred (noting that much of Barry Lyndon was artificially lit).
Don't recall too many famous flash shots by Ansel Adams. Man Ray, polar opposite (what I see in the extreme examples of the HDR thread)...art of photography, or both. Personal preferences, neither are better.
Both still and video imagery still lacks what the human eye can perceive in tonal/dynamic range, so either are a compromise. You think the indoor barn scenes in the TV series Smallville look natural, or anything like what your eye would see inside such a barn, lol? No, but you are watching storytelling with famous actors well lit so you can see every detail on their faces from a camera perspective that is too far away from what a person being their would see. Lex Luthor's manson, nice stained glass windows, lol. If you know anything about lighting you see all the 'tricks' to bump up tremendously the light levels to be more uniform...there is intense light up there above the camera viewpoint.
Did you ever see the 1st full length HD movie from Russia called 'Russian Arc'? With early, limited DR modified Sony HD camcorder, the two continous shot movie, moves from one room of the Hermitage museum to the other, passing through a stairwell where the light levels were too low, and you could clearly see 'grey' blacks in that scene. You could clearly see WB problems with incandescent lit chandelliers next to a large floor to ceiling windows that view into a snow covered courtyard. But through the rooms of the Hermitage you had ceiling balloon lighting as the camera operator moves from one room to the next.
Human eye has greater range of adjustment for light levels than can be currently caputured or represented in most video or still imagery, so there needs to be a compromise.
For me, looking at a large size image, poster size of that choir picture, I prefer something in between the lower image and the top one, but leaning to the top one for more realistic, rather than 'pumped' up image below that looks like there is a bank of 18kw HMI balloons on the ceiling. Fine for little tiny images being viewed on the internet, but looks too artificial to me.
In the end it all depends on what your objectives are, if you don't understand lighting very well, then you probably don't get the pictures you want, either 'natural' appearance (and again, what that looks like, is mostly subjective), or 'exaggerated'...which is what I see in the lower choir shot.
Is Man Ray right, is Ansel Adams right? Answer is that both are right for what they want to express.
