Lessons

Lesson Info

Portrait - Male Model

so I'm actually in. Turn up the power just a little bit on this. I'm gonna go up 1/3 of stop and then we're gonna start firing. Are you ready? Okay. This is when you gotta look great. So stop doing your hosting duties. Here we go. Turn your head just a little bit. This way. There you go. Chin down. Just a right. Uh, back up just a little right there. That's it. Good. Que no glance right at me. There. Right there. That's it. Good. I'm gonna do a little wider shot. So now we'll we'll actually do the whole thing, actually. No. Keep it. Keep it up. We're gonna let you do like a hosting shot. All right, Eddie. All right, Chris, the host. All right, Now look right there. Yeah, that's good. It's really dramatic. Hosting shot. This is what it's like to really host it. Creating live like this is this is Chris doing double duty? Do you get paid twice for this? Three times? Three times. Look, right here. Go look down and then just peek up at me with a smile. There you go. Good. That's it. Right o...

n ice. The smirk I didn't even get a smile. I got a smirk. Right. I cannot look up longingly to the light. There you go. Yes, they're not to the light. Look. Look right over that. That was better. That's it. Right there. Wistfully dreaming of things you could do other than this. Okay, so now let's get rid of this. Go ahead. And, like, lean in there and then look back or right there. That's it. Nice. Love it. Now, just kind of glance at me right there. Okay. I think we got good stuff. All right, so notice that it's really dark, but that's cool. I love that drama, right? And as it comes in Oh, it's back in color again. The problem is that I forgot to do something. So let me show you that. So when you are shooting and you've changed something to black and White So let's go back to where we change this to black and white. So once you've done that, if you go and say all right, I'm gonna go back to the last one, and I'm gonna say whatever we were gonna do Samos previous and then we're gonna go to our actual settings here inside of our tethered shooting area, and we're gonna click Samos previous. So now every time it comes in, it will show it in black and white. But this is what it looks like in black and white. Right here. So this is our That's our shots. Real dramatic or losing his shirt, all that kind of stuff. But remember, we're targeting just his face. Now I can take this and widen it out a little bit. And now when I start shooting, I'm gonna get his shirt and his co a little bit more, and I gotta turn this down a little like this. I'm sure that that see how Now I'm getting a little bit more there. Okay. So let's see what we get now because we want we want to get that scar for sure. See that? See how we're getting the scarf in there now. So we're getting scar forgetting his face or getting see? We've got that nice rim light right there, and it looks like it's coming from over there. So we're looking really good here. Now, I just want to show you one last light that we can add. Okay, so we've got the drama down, You can see how like it's that's Ah, we're gonna have to go to a different shot there with eyes open so you can see how we got that kind of Rembrandt lighting thing going on there. It's a beautiful shot, but it's let's say it's too dramatic, just a tad bit too dramatic. So now all I need to do is take this soft box or a really good way to do. This is a shoot through translucent umbrella because that just scatters light everywhere. But we're gonna go in just like this. We're just putting this light right here. Now what's gonna happen is when I turn this light on, it's gonna fill in, and it's just gonna kind of do this and it's gonna wrap around from here and hit this edge of his face and that edge of his nose. But all we have to do is just bring it up just a little bit, just a little bit more, and it'll just start to fill in those shadows. But notice because most people would take this light and they would march it around over here, and they would put it right there. Okay. And then they have just ruined everything that you had created. And now you have a light source coming from the wrong direction anyway, right? So, generally speaking, there are some exceptions to this rule. But generally speaking, all of my lights originate from one side of the person or the object, and then they wrap around until about right in the front. And in the end, very rarely do this. The only time I do this is what I'm doing. Stupid, ugly group portrait where you just have toe light everybody evenly and just be done with it. All right? It's the only time I hate doing it. I feel like a I feel I feel cheap and dirty when I do that. Okay, so you see how I've got this, and it's just extending this light source. So this is our main light sources of the thing that creates the drama. This is the thing that extends that light source out just a little bit. Okay, so we're gonna turn this on just like that, and I'm gonna turn it down to, like, say three. So it's pretty lows power. And remember this one this other one that for Nell is only a 3.3, but it's a much it's magnifying the light, and it's closer to him. So this is probably a stop and 1/2 darker than three would suggest. Okay, so we've got that all set up, and I'm gonna take a shot. And I want you to look at the difference between this shot that's here and watch the next shot that comes in. Here we go. Okay. Watch this next shot coming in because it's going to fill in those shadows. Do you see what just happened? Okay, let me let me do a side by side here. So let's just do these two images side by side. You see that those really dark, dark shadows and then see how they fill in. And the transition is softer, but it doesn't look much different than this. It didn't add any more, you know, major light to anything. It just It just softened the transitions from the highlight to the shadow. It just kind of made it softer filled in the nose, just a little bit filled in that shadow. But because the direction is coming from the same places the For now, it's just softening all those transitions, so it looks much more pleasing, especially if you're doing this on a woman, right, and you want her to look soft. Put this in. But it's still dramatic. And then the more soft he wanted to become, just raised the light source. I like it where it is, But if we go up, let's say a stop and then we take the same picture. You're going to see that he's going to get even. I'll make sure that we put all of them together. So that one that one and that one. You see that? So it's like harsh, pretty dramatic, but softer. Pretty soft. All right. And then we'll look at these a little bit more detail when we get into the editing phase of our photo shoot. But it's every understand the principles. Yeah, I'm gonna actually take this back down to say 3.4, and I'm gonna take a couple more because I want to get the ost the best shot possible of you. All right, give me some smile on it. Too. Nice. I like that. Good. Now it's back to serious. Good. All right, now stare me down. Make me fear. All right, Now give me smiles. That's good. Nice. Good. Love it. All right. So way to go. You can return to your hosting duties fresh from the Fred now. Fresno For now, for now. Right now I think it's French or something you're supposed to say I really like for now on the front. Okay for analysis. It's a pretty expensive toy. Yes, it is. Is their like. Could you achieve something similar to that? If you had, like, a great and a 20 degree like a reflector in a 20 degree grid would yeah, if you, um you could actually dio like there's an O. C. F um, silver beauty dish, and that will accomplish a fairly similar look. It won't be exactly the same cause it's it's not. As you know, it's not as directed, but if you put a grid in front of that, you'd do pretty good job, because the silver creates that that directional light because it's things when it when light strikes a white surface, it scatters. But when it hits a silver surface, especially when it's the right silver surface, it hits it and go straight doesn't scatter as much so that you get a much those speculate highlights or better. And so you get more of a glow to the skin things like that because it's going straight at the object, so so that's important. So a silver surfaces better for that kind of a circumstance and the mawr directional, you can get it, the better it will be. So the more silver on, the more directional, the more it will start to copy that it won't get there, but it will copy it. A little bit of the other thing you could do is go find something like this. Lenses like this and all it is a silver surface back in there. It's got, like, kind of, ah cupped mirrored surface in there, and then it's got this kind of, Ah, you can get these glasses anywhere, especially if you go to like some old studio or whatever that has. One is like, It's just there. It's actually I. I worked at a studio that had an actual friend L Light, like the old school with bread and whatever, and so it was there. It was just for looks because him didn't have a power court on it so you can find stuff like that and then you can just put your light into it, right? So that's what they're doing is they're actually giving you the friend l housing. But instead of a light source, they're putting a flash in it. So yeah, you can you can garage band a lot of stuff, Andi, if you understand the principles of light and what's happening in light if you understand that white scatters light and become softer as a result of that, um, if you understand that silver and con cave type of surfaces like a deep umbrella focuses light so that it travels Maurin a straight line on because it's silver, you get more speculative highlights if you understand that kind of stuff. And if you I understand that grids keep things going straight rather than spreading. If you understand those things, you can kind of GarageBand almost anything. And I know that you work with your speed lights and when you're working with your speed lights, you're trying to make these, you know, amazing effects with something that you already have, and that's great like you did. You should never feel like I can't photograph in a beautiful way unless I buy something super expensive, right? That's the way to go out of business, right? So you buy things that are expensive when you can afford things that are expensive. But before that understand the principles of lighting. And if you understand the principles of lighting, you can use anything to achieve something. It just he usually just takes longer, and it's more difficult. And it looks weird when you're trying to do it. Like if you have a client in studio and you're like hanging all this stuff and trying to, you know, and it's just not as efficient, it's not as beautiful. It's not as um, like, for instance, your speed lights, um, can't recycle is fast and stuff like that. So you just have to realize what are my limitations and then slow down the chute so that you don't end up popping your flash before it's fully recharged. Because that's the best way to get a beautiful shot that you can't use because one of the flashes didn't fire, right? So But, yes, you can grog ban that you just have toe play around with it so Yeah. So you notice though, that I was I was doing several things, and I think we'll just kind of recap what we're doing in the photo shoot. Number one. I walk in either look for the drama that already exists or create the drama first. Then once I've got the drama, then I'm gonna bring my model in. Then once I've got the model in, I'm gonna add the forward light that makes them look pretty inside of the drama. Right? That's what I did. But remember that I was looking at things four black and white because I knew I'd be shooting in black and white. That doesn't mean you can't take a portrait that you shot and then turn it to black and white. And it won't look great. But if you want to create a beautiful, amazing black and white portrait, think black and white from the start. Think texture. Realize that color can be your friend to help pop out your coat or your scarf or your hat or whatever. And so we'll show you that in our editing when we go into editing on these portrait, you'll see that I can actually work with his coat differently than his scarf as a result of having different colors in the in the black and white portrait. So think black and white when you're shooting in black and white, and then remember that black and white is all about texture and all about shade and shadow. And so the mawr directional light. You can give a black and white portrait the more beautiful it will become, because then the textures actually start showing and the shape starts showing. Because, remember, there's no color. As soon as you lose color, you lose all of that beautiful contrast. It's already in there as a result of green looking very different than, say, red, right or blue and red kind of strike off here, blue and orange. Those are very different striking colors like, for instance, every single one of you that I'm looking at here has a warm toned face. That's just how our skin is right. And then I look and some of your wearing warm tones stuff so you just kind of match. You just blend right? But then other people are warm tone face and then blew right? So I'm What was your name? Tanya So Tanya has this warm tone face and then that the scarf is white, right? And so that sets her face off. Contrast like tone ality wise. But then her warm toned faces striking off against the blue of her jacket. Right. So those colors, once you get rid of them, they don't exist. So now she's gonna look hurt. Her face is gonna be similar to her coat. So then, when you're in black and why, it's a really good idea to at that point, to have our wear blue so that you can then take her face and warm it up and brighten it and have the jacket fall.