Lessons

Lesson Info

Shoot: Capturing Entry Ways And Small Spaces

So, we did the overall shot. We shot it with a wide lens that was a 17 millimeter tilt shift. Now, we're gonna move into a tighter shot. It's the doorway that was visible in the first shot. So, we're connecting the narrative, you're going from where we were doing deeper exploration into the narrative of this story, who these people are, where they live. I've framed up the camera here. There's roughly speaking I've got one of the pure, the wall. I want these elements of the foreground. I want reflection. This is a mirror over here on the right side of the image. It's overexposed right now but in it I know that the city's reflected there, so I'm gonna be able to bring the city into this view. So, we've followed pretty much the same rules that we talked about before. We're at a comfortable ... We put the camera left to right to see what we wanna see. We've put the height of the camera a comfortable viewing height for your viewer. There's a fortuitous situation in this house that this wind...

ow has very dark screening that can come down. It's an electric screen. Ryan's gonna hit the switch. And this is a good example of how keeping the foreground darker than the background. And right now, it's all very flat. The screen's going down, and we're gonna see it happen right in live view here on our screen. You can already see how your eye is looking at that room not this room. And right now I'm just lighten it a little bit. Now, one thing that does, of course, is kill the view of the city. So, we can't do the whole shot like this cause then we're taking a picture of a roll down screen. So, we're gonna double expose. We're gonna do one bracket for the lighting just like this, and we're gonna lift the screen up, and we're gonna do a bracket just for the reflection in the window. And then in post production, we're gonna merge them together. First, I'm gonna organize the foreground and composition, get that structure. And then Ryan's gonna move a few things inside. We're gonna double check the focus. We're gonna do that a couple times each shot, especially just before you shoot double check it. By framing the shot like this ... Framing is a really good technique. It's easy. It's almost always available. It just gives you depth. You have a foreground, and you're looking through something. Also in this case, your background is actually in the reflection. You do have a foreground, you do have a middle ground, and the background is not beyond but it's in the mirror. So, you do have three places for your eye to go. So, you're gonna have a dark foreground, which is these walls here. A lighter middle ground which is this room. And then the lightest point of view will be the reflection of the city there. The idea here is that the traveler's eye skips very quickly past the foreground, studies this room, and then is gonna see the city. So, Ryan, let's leave the screen down. I'm just gonna adjust the plant and the sculpture. Okay, this one first right here? Sure, we can do the plant. Let's move it away from you. Rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. That's pretty nice. Move it to the right, away from the mirror. More, you'll have to move that tray out of your way, I think. Okay. Good. So, this is gonna be our closest foreground. Is there anyway to massage those leaves down a little bit? The ones near your face? These? Yeah, will they curl down? That's better. Better, it's good. The more you can do that the better. Okay. I think those are starting to relax. Definitely better than it was. Watch your back. I've got this. We're gonna move this around a little bit. What? What do you wanna call it? Spear. Spear. We're going to move it towards the window about four inches. This is a foreground element. It's also just a great shape. It's a very beautiful, primitive shape. It's primitive spear. Primitive and modernism go great together. Simple forms, simple silhouettes. You see it a lot here. There's a mix of periods, and art, and generations, and centuries, and cultures. And that juxtaposition of all those things is what makes this beautiful. And this, such a simple, elegant shape in the foreground. One thing it's a little odd is that it's tilted but that's the nature of it. I am gonna ask Ryan to turn it a little bit, one way or the other and see if we can make this look a little straighter, just from our point of view. It's getting better. Yes? More? It's getting better. More? Yeah, a little bit more. That's great. Move it into the shadow an inch. Excellent. It we wanna straighten this, if this bothers us then later on in post production this is very simple to straighten out. Now, let's style the interior room. So, the chair is actually in a nice place. The table needs to move into the shot towards the window. Which table? Not that one. Leave that one. This one here? Yes, slide that towards the window, pick it up it up as you move it. About six inches, eight inches. That's great. Let me darken my exposure so I can see this better. Move the instruments from behind the sofa. The two black ... What are those? Cases for the-- Yeah. Move those please. Another thing to note here is one of the reasons we're shooting this shot later in the day is cause the sun is long. And part of the story of this home, is this hard direct sunlight that comes in. So, this is tremendous energy coming from outside the frame. And the pillows ... Oh, that one you gotta redo. Puff it up. Yeah, shake it down. Pick it up, shake it down. And face it to me a little more. That's nice. Is that a coaster on the table there? Yeah. Let's take the away. I wanna think about that-- How about the throw? You can give it a little bit of smoothing. And also, it could be a little longer in the front, like an inch. How's that? I think we're in good shape. Yeah? So, we're gonna do a bracket here. The first bracket's gonna be ... We're gonna do a full bracket. It's gonna be good exposure for the interior room. It's gonna be a good exposure for the room we're standing in here. And then we're gonna do another bracket with these blinds up, and that's gonna be an exposure for the city. So, Ryan you can come out. Oh, one thing. Hold on. I noticed one thing. Sorry, the lamp should move away from the window an inch or two. This is too tight. Wait, Ryan. This is too tight. Move your head. This tangency here. There's too much tension there. When there's tension, people look at it. Their eye goes to it. Pull it out of the shot a little bit. Let me see that. Hold on. How's the lampshade? Bring it back into the shot. This is not the greatest moment in this sofa here. It's possible we can hide that. Another half inch. Hold on a second. Let me just check the top. Yeah, you're almost perfect. Hold on. That's great. That's really good. Is it tilting towards the window? That's not bad. Okay, I think that's a good height. We've hidden this little unfortunate moment there with the upholstery. In terms of the decision here. I know before we talked about ... I'm gonna turn the level off. We don't need our gray door guides anymore. We talked before about negative space. So, why are we not freeing up this lampshade from here? A lampshade is a lampshade. We all know what a lampshade is. A lampshade has a function. It's not the most elegant or important thing in here. You wanna express it, but you don't wanna make it a hero. So, by cutting off the point of it, you break it down a little bit. It's less of a focus. So, in this case, the decision is rather than find that negative space more important to me is to reduce the importance of the lamp in the room. So, we're good. We're gonna do a bracket. We're gonna just talk about this bracket really quickly. We're gonna start at the ... We're gonna expose for the highlights in there. So, I know if we start at a 60 ... Well, there's even highlights in here. We're in good shape there at a 60. So, I'm gonna shut this live view down. So, we're gonna start out bracket down here. That's our hottest part. (camera shutter clicking) You're hearing that double click of the shutter because we've got that half second delay on it to avoid vibration. (camera shutter clicking) Two inch of a stop between each exposure. (camera shutter clicking) So, we've almost got the entire bracket we need for the interior room. We've shot the highlight details for the interior room. We've now pretty much got the shadow details for the interior room. And we're pretty close to having all the shadow details for the room we're in. (camera shutter clicking) And I'd say that's that's a good enough bracket for all of this shot except for the windows. So, now we're gonna expose for the windows. We've finished up the shooting of the shadow details at 1.6 seconds. Obviously, we don't need that long of exposure. Let's see where we need to be. There's the city. You can see it there. It doesn't matter it's out of focus. It's New York City. We just want the experience of it. Doesn't need to be sharp. That's 125th of second. I'm gonna go a little further. So, we'll start at 250th of a second. (camera shutter clicking) There's our preview. Plenty of density in the city there. And now, we're just gonna bracket it back up. To the point where it's pretty close to where we had the shadow detail. Where the blind was down and that'll make it easy for the retoucher to work and merge the two files together. (camera shutter clicking) I expect that she's gonna use this. And that's enough. This was a fairly simple shot to do. Very quickly. It took us about half an hour in total. And we were able to really expand on the narrative here, talk about the program a little more. There's a little dent off of here. We've walked through the shot quite a bit. We're created something very beautiful. It's a beautiful room. And we followed all the, what I would call rules that we've talked about. Darker to lighter, softer to sharper. Foreground, middle ground, background. I would go on an shoot more shots basically, from the front door, coming through the foyer, down the hallway where you see this big room. The big shot there we did. An elevation detail of the bookshelves that are over here. This shot that we just did now. Then going down into the bedroom hallway, and then there's another study back there. Then there's the master bedroom of the house. And we might shoot a bathroom also. So, that really tells the whole program of this house. And then we'd finish up with a shot of New York City at dusk. Because that's a majestic thing. So, it's gonna have the view and it's gonna have a little bit of the foreground. So, that will give us the experience of what it's like to stand in this room as the sun sets. Should be a very soft light, very cool. I think we'll have come away from today with a great group of shots. And think we would have touched upon a lot of lessons.