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Recap and Q&A

I was shooting in the sanctuary with no flash and I have not yet gotten toe look at the file from that was a d thirty two hundred right what for my cannon five d marks three um I compared the file from thirty two hundred which I knew because of experience from working on my own camera the green and the noise was totally fine then I shot at sixty four and twelve thousand eight hundred when I took the twelve thousand eight hundred file and did a little bit of noise reduction right in light room it doesn't look that different than the thirty two hundred which was totally acceptable to me so I just think it's fascinating that's one of the times where like eric and I was saying I used to shoot film and so I did once in a while bring out you know I did have some eight hundred I s o film that I felt like if I had teo um and so it was used to thinking that way and so when people would tell me with their digital cameras that they were shooting at sixty four hundred I'm like what are you thinkin...

g why would you ever do that and now I just because I got up the courage to check it myself it really is fine um it definitely helps you get the shot versus not having are having a blurry shot so definitely if you if you have a newer camera, you know, perhaps in the last five years, especially in the last three years, at least tested out yourself. See what it looks like in low light, and I'll bet you'll be really surprised how far you can push it and is just another tool that makes your job easier a lot easier. Yeah, and she said it there the beginning too if you go in the light room light room camera raw. Ah, their newest noise engines for the last two versions are incredible, like they have little elves in there that just get rid of all the all the noise us if you go in there, you have a regular noise slider, you also have a color noise slider, so really shoot the max on your s o on your camera's drive a couple files in there and just play around. You'll be amazed both with sensor quality and then what the software is able to do nowadays. There's really no excuse for not shooting high sos and we're going to actually show you that tomorrow we'll take a couple different file, so I'll take the ones you can see a twelve thousand eight hundred how it's not really objectionable on my camera, but then we'll also instead of just having the newest camel will try a couple files from a little bit hold the camera and take a look. We picked up one of the intro pro sumer cameras or consumer cameras with the kit lens just for this. And she shot some with those yesterday. Like she said, so we'll do a side by side six hundred dollar camera versus a three thousand dollar camera. All the new sensors perform amazingly well. We want to know if there were any left over questions that people would like to ask the first would like to extend it to you guys. Is there anything like lingering that you still really want to know? That's a major? Okay, awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Trouble down there. All right. We have our question document list from yesterday. Well, fire away. Yeah, there are tons of questions, and it was, like, somewhere off topic at that moment, so we weren't able to ask them. So thanks for opening this up, and we'll raise grabbing a few if you aren't in our chat rooms yet definitely head to our chat rooms and ask us now if there was something that you tried out last night and it didn't work correctly or you're curious about for today's course definitely join us for today's course, yeah, just real quick, what we're going to do in case people are jumping ahead of the gun for questions uh we're going to cover shooting in direct sunlight when you don't have shade available shooting in direct sunlight when you do have shade available um natural light will flash supplements um strobe light in there and then we're going to do our very best to create over cast light even though it's a pretty sunny day so we're going to use the kind of movie magic techniques that they might use on a film set to try to give us some fake overcast light and show you again how I would shoot it with natural light and how he would shoot it with flash so just so you know that'll be coming up later today as well. Great thank you so much all right first question is from sherry in minutes soda says yesterday they showed an umbrella that had a black removable cover and they said it can be used as a reflector how and when would you use the black part of the umbrella and how does it act as a reflector? Okay, so that's the sixty inch removable cover you'd use it as a reflector if you're all out of options so you can really just flip it over and it has like a kind of reflective material on the inside when you would be using it in the bounce application so you have your black cover attached to it and that normally would fire your flash into that and have it bounce back out and hit your subject. Well, that's bouncing strobe lights so can very well bounce daylight as well, so if you just kind of tilt it down or tilt it up, you can use it as a worst case scenario. Reflector too. If you're running out of reflectors on set and just in case this is also what they meant. Uh, one of the umbrellas that he was showing can be shoot through or reflective bounce, so they may have picked up on that. So if you have the flash pointing into it with the black cover on the black cover prevents any light from getting out into it'll bounce white back on your subjects. Another word softer light versus if you turn around, take off that cover now it shoot through umbrella, which is a little bit more quality of light, like you have from a soft box don't shoot through the black cover. Don't try, teo. Oh, there we go, john's got one. We can show you really quick. Yeah, and so I'm that might be you what they were thinking, but I I actually have in a pinch used, um, reflect umbrella as reflector it once, but so with this application this is a bounce or reflected umbrella so you could be a mean you're strobe in here and having it bounce back out so in this case we would be lighting ourselves if we were to use it and then if you wanted to use it like a soft box that's when you would remove this cover right here and then completely remove this cover and then fire through it and it's like you're shooting through the front material of a soft box so this is a really versatile tool because it allows you to do that we're gonna show you a video a little later where we left the cover on and actually broke it down like this and use it in this application to to have a little more refined direction of the light but still a larger light source like a bouncer brother like this so yeah, just a flatter you too much I know, but I had never seen that before he'll take soft box is as like thee the pollos right the pollos as well as those and he modifies where he leaves on the covers or how far he opens him up close them down to narrow the beam and I would've never thought of that to me I was thinking, ok, I've got to bring four different modifiers on location to be able to have some different control and he'll just take one or two and just modify though so it's really interesting so, um make sure you don't touch on it. Yeah asked on that it's really, really interesting just more than one way to use your modifiers you spent all the money on him you have to carry him around. You might as well get the most use out of them. So this is just like a little uh I don't know smoothie of different questions we have a little collection, all different topics, pro photographer ass. Uh when you use the tripod, you mentioned that you would turn image stabilization off, but do you also turn it off when you use a mono pod? You have a little you d'oh, d'oh! Sometimes you forget when I'm on the model. I would say I do, but that's because I'm like I'm on the lens mount so I know that the lenses pretty stable. I might be a little bit worried if my tripod mount like I didn't have time to switch it. I think you should actually keep a tripod mount on the camera and on the land so I don't have to switch in the middle of a shoot or in the middle of a wedding we don't have time to do that, so if I didn't have it on the lens and I had it's mine on the camera it might be a little bit more concerned but if I mounted on my lands I turn it off I get I know I was told very early on that if you have your image stabilization on it might actually fight it and I was saying I've seen it I've seen it I wanna try from uh likewise my image moving so you should turn it off if you were using a stabilization device yeah so model tripod uh delta day forty four and lots of other people we're wondering the same question if I shoot raw then why do I need a custom white balance good point okay um so here is what it would be if you're shooting raw and you don't have a custom white balance you then in raw or light room or adobe camera you have to make the decision what the correct white balance is versus if you shoot custom white bala it's reading the daylight and the tungsten and whatever else is in there and telling you with the crack white balances because you you don't know that after the fact even if you're shooting a great card for shooting that great card it's just getting the the light that's directly hitting that great card it's not compensating or including everything in the environment so that's why I think you mentioned one of one of you gentlemen mentioned that you could actually shoot a custom white balance reference of each different scene if you have that reference yeah, you could then make the crap white balance and raw after the fact um but if you don't, then you would need to shoot the custom white balance it's just good practices well too, because it gives you a starting point you might nail it in camera, not have to deal with tweaking it later on um also when you're looking at the back of your camera, you're not seeing raw you're seeing a j peg representation of what that rock can be based on what your picture style is and what your camera settings are um so whether you're showing a client you're proofing for yourself you're trying to, you know, show for your subject you want it to look as close to the final result is possible so it's just good work flow does that also help? Um when viewing it on multiple different monitors meaning if you shoot if you have the great card, you'll know that it's gonna be custom so you don't it's not changing different when you're looking at it on different monitors different because if you're judging by your eye and different manners, you don't have any reference you're in big trouble um someone else she mentioned um experimenting expert disk there's one for portrait and one for neutral do you ever use a portrait one too you know what? Some of the shots for the video that we have coming up here earlier I did use the portrait one essentially it's like warmer, cooler, neutral, graze, so it just gives you a reference point. So rather than get in a neutral gray and then going with your temperature slider in your post processing software, it lets you basically select warmer or cooler great cards. So you get a solid reference point and then a clean shift versus just doing it after the fact too many years on that explode instead of multiple sizes. Wait, do that, yeah, that's what I do and I think, don't you only make two? I'm making eighty eight to seven seven that I have and seventy sevens the standard filter for a lot of the pro zooms, and then some of my primes have a smaller filter size, so I just bought one and capital the way down and haven't added issue. Do you want the good news? So this is related to someone was asking, and I want to reiterate this is kind of glossed over the expo disc has there's two different version there's one that says portrait cause it just gives you a slightly warmer white balance if you actually look at, um, some of these watches, okay, this is on the color checker and it looks like there's a whole bunch of like grayish swatches um not true some of them are actually and if you look at it, you can see it some of them lately yeah, this would be this is neutral you're slightly cooler tones, so over here, it's really, really blew, so if you're saying that that's neutral and you click on the one that's more blue, it'll warm up your picture and so it basically did sort of more neutral and move your wave towards warmer so it's giving you neutral but a little bit warmer no, I want the skin tone twin warmer I'll click over to the right more so yes, they're neutral, but they give you different tones sometimes like the same thing where he puts the, uh, quarter cut of ct or orange on its flashed warm things up. A lot of times we like former skin tones it's more approachable, it feels warmer so it's a controlled way to shift your collar temperature were rather than us guessing or messing with your tent and breaking other things that set up for you. I'm gonna have to hold it up right on about your bass briars doing that here again is that imagine same situation you like coming in all the areas, but I'm really concerned about what the bases that where I'm going that's what that's what I hold it but we want to be careful of two is that it's pointed towards the main light on the face so like when there's what I'm shooting like um if I'm shooting in a mixed light situation um I do know that some of your swatches over here might be a little bit more blue and this one would be a little bit warmer and then it wouldn't be equal, so you've got to kind of pick if you're not going to go ahead with flash and balance it out you had a pick which one's more important because that's, what you'll be balancing four it doesn't really like an expert just give you a mix between the two it's kind of get it flows um before I forget, I have not mentioned this yet um these air actually paint swatches they're actually painted on their your fingerprints your oils mess this up and mess up the color. I did not know this and so one of the people at x ray saw me using it incorrectly and told me about this because I just would have my subjects just hold it and that will screw up your white balance in the end so what you're supposed to dio is that so they have this little flap in the back and then they hold it like this it's that you don't so again so everybody as little flap in the back so don't have to actually hold onto the paint swatches yeah I don't know until I got called out you can see a scuff on one of mine where I handed it off to a model and it got like bump my fingernail or something like that so I mean they are I just want to be really careful with them we're going to do an example with that we can see close processing using that yes definitely um what we're gonna do outside in the shade is we're going to shoot one with a great cars and then one with this because in this instance when were you shooting and shade and we could have blew it makes a difference just think of it this way when you're shooting and shade a lot of times when you warm everything up you're basically kind of removing blew right because it looks like a blue picture so if they're wearing blue sure it shifts the blue but you might want that blue to say the same just not with lights uh the color temperature of the light just stay the same so it's it's a lot better for ah shades situations for me I prefer absolutely it's good to have I mean you should be shooting a reference anyways regardless so why not shoot a really good reference that you can pull all the info from if you choose to so all right, you guys there's tons of questions, but I know you also have content. You want more questions or content? One or two more? You're doing one more search and then we'll jump into it. Um our questions later for sure. Uh, right. Make it a good one here. How about from v j photography? How does detail work properly when you are bouncing the flash awful wall or ceiling? The camera doesn't know how far you are away from the subject to get proper x uh, that's. Why that's, why we use tl? Because if you were going off of guide numbers, you would have to calculate a distance and t tail basically sends out a pre pulse before the actual exposure is taken. And it measures that so it's sending light downrange off the ceiling off the wall and coming back than it measures how much came back and then adjust itself accordingly. So that's the joy of tl is we no longer have to try to calculate a distance and then put a manual power to it. And just in case you're newer to photography no mention this yesterday, but guide numbers like way back in the past for flashes, they were given a certain number which would allow you to do mathematical equations to figure out the amount of power at a certain distance, what would you have stopped me? I actually did learn how to do that. I'm very proud to say that I know and I remember about my pride and joy was I used the guide number in a flash at night to do light painting and get a correct exposure and then I'm like okay now I feel like I know I can do the most technical thing out there so eric she's finally and you do like painting at night with your own oh but I was like fifteen so if I had to do it again now but you know yeah still maybe it's like riding a bike right? You remember cool well we'll move on and then we have a lot of questions so if you want to come back to you let's jump in okay so I'm actually start we're doing um appreciates that we did and the reason we did these appreciates it because they it couldn't happen live because we wanted to do back light at sunset and doesn't work within the hours that we have here a creative live and then we wanted to do shooting at night um so we're gonna start with me doing the backlight cool and I will tell you it is a little caveat I was looking for sun blaring into my camera just above the horizon and it was kind of cloudy so I give you the best example that we had in that situation