This is a chance for anybody out there on the internet any of you here ask those final questions as they relate so when we touch on a subject I'm going to pause after each one just to see related to that topic this is the time to ask um and then after that we know that a lot of you out there are giant gearhead nerds like us and so we're going to talk about the kids we recommend maybe if you're a portrait photographer versus the wedding photographer versus an event and where they overlap on dh eriks more of a nerd on this as well. So he's going to show some of his favorite little tools in his kit a lot of the grip that I have is this studio at my home, whereas he has a lot of this crappy lighting kit that he can use so we'll go through that um then after that we are going to talk about okay. Everything that we tried to address so far really is about keeping it simple let's not overcomplicate it but let's get the job done. Okay, but what happens if you've learned that and you want to go ...

a step further and so eric will be covering things kind of related to how he was doing the high speeds flash like taking it a little bit further but multiple flashes on locations a little bit bigger rigs and having diffusers and reflectors and flashes and all of that together so you can get an idea of where you can take it. The reason he's going to be covering this for a lot of his he uses his off camera flashes, whereas I would be using my studio gear on location, so just just two different approaches um, and then post processing, post processing, um, what happens if you mess up that job, you mess up that shot and you've got to save it what tools you have and trust me, I've done that plenty of times where I'm like light room photo shop, you have saved my life, okay, so we'll be covering that we focus mainly on light room because we think that instead of having to go in photo shop and tweak every single picture a lot of times in light room, you can tweak one and then we go fix the rest of them and then we'll find out on photoshopped, says that's a look forward to what we're doing today, so we're going to get started with our overview. So again, chat hose this is the time where we want people when we're covering a topic, if there's something related to that ask this is, you know, this is it, this is a time because we have those photos they're so dream on so we can kick over to my laptop here we've got acute over up ok cool so we're looking forward now we're gonna go back in time if you guys the hashtag is what's your hashtag again crappy crappy light lives if you guys have any questions that's how you fire them through she covered that here is also our twitter address is gonna be like man you guys are amazing or wow you guys really suck on twitter so we'll jump in here most challenging lighting situations starting off with our favorite favor right this is hands down both of our absolute favorite lighting direction flash fluorescent light so you want to start off here because I think you shot this one and it's been a long short accomplished a lot absolutely s so this is where you kind of start off with fluorescent light and so this is how we solved it walk into the fluorescent lit room and the first thing that I do is like all right let's see if auto white balance helps me out all right so click to the next on planes perfect and so you can see here and I think this is gonna be a great reference at home so if you need to screen grab or of course by the course you know that is just deposit later yeah take a look this is what auto white balance does with no flash still looking a bit green especially in the shadows so it's it's close ish ok next would be switching it overto white fluorescent white balance now something that I wanted to make sure people know if you have a slightly higher end like pro sumer or pro camera dig deeper into your white balance presets because fluorescent for example when when we clicked on his camera, for example, which is a hundred eight hundred nine hundred had like seven different precepts for fluorescent just just fluorescent lights I mean the older vapor ones the newer ones the daylight this one's the energy efficient ones and you know, that was news to us because I think tha cannon five d mark three didn't have that I hadn't really explored that a whole bunch so we're digging through there it's like, oh my goodness that when did they had all these so there's more than just that base preset that you see on the surface nowadays on a lot of cameras? Absolutely and so what we did as he said, all right, this photo right here direction of light is awful you know? We've improved a bit the color of light and I will tell you for the audience doesn't look like that there, but it is on and on the screen so we've improved the color but the direction is awful scott highlights you can see on her nose on her cheeks just we know pits of darkness in her eyes there's no flattering direction of light so we took the umbrella off camera raised it up we use the flash but because we set our white balance to fluorescent to counter act the green you add magenta so basically neutralizes the scene so because we've done that when we introduce a white light now it'll look magenta and so it won't match and you can see her face looks pink and so we know that we've got a match the light and so we went ahead and we grabbed a full cut ctg color temperature green is just a green jell o and we use the rogue gels they come in different cuts so I mean if it were even still not matching because the room is so green you could plot a quarter you could pull out a half and layer them up if you want it tio so those are basically just different intensities of that one color we covered orange and green and like you said, you can really mix and match and get precise with this just like those presets now we're getting pretty precise we have you have fluctuations within the flores and spectrum and so we're gonna have to go ahead and add that and if you look it is much closer and so for you watching online you can see that maybe there is a little bit of color tone a little bit of difference but absolutely this would be one hundred percent passable looking at our screens here it is very pleasing to the eye and much better so that would be my recommendation to you know, one thing that we did cover and I didn't shoot here is maybe we're in may ex lay or maybe it just wasn't working out for you that's when you might grab your expo disc and try to get a custom white balance and figure it out from there but eric's going to talk about that and how he sees it in his next section here yeah so just that guy's right there's will be ended with him to scroll back here what we started with so that's that crappy lighting situation and really, really quickly if you guys were here on day one I mean it didn't take lindsey very long to overcome that and walk away with a shot that is really good looking with control in direction of light. So but she mentioned expo desk the expo disc is a great tool because it allows you to get a custom white balance in your camera so when you're shooting you've got a realistic looking color on the back of your camera but it's great because it's not just a flat surface it's actually something that goes on top of your camera lens and you fire into the light sources so it's able to gather different colors or different temperatures of light coming from different directions and averaging that out for you. Um, so mixed light is a great place to go ahead and use the expo disc versus maybe fluorescent, where you're just kind of battling one consistent light temperature, so this is what we're working with here we went upstairs into the beautiful kind of lycopene lobby area of this church that we've been shooting in, and we've got really warm tungsten light coming from the side lamp, a table lamp, some overhead lamps, and on the left side of this photograph, you're going to see it's really white, cool and blue because we had this beautiful a month of cloudless skies here in seattle, so we had beautiful blue light kind of pouring in through that window, which is great if you're out there shooting and it not so great if you're trying to get a photo right next to that window indoors. Eso auto white balance wasn't doing us any favors here. Auto, white balance what it does is tries to get you a neutral gray so it's trying to pick a middle of the road and be good enough for the tungsten good enough for the daylight. Not really good enough for us is photographers, though, so we have to make some decisions here. So the next thing we did is basically we pick and shows our battles, and instead of trying to combat both of these, we just said, ok, let's embrace one, so we turned her to the left. All they did was take a couple steps over to the side, turned her into the light I'm shooting with daylight as my predominant like now, so we went ahead and put daylight white balance, and that looks a lot better than that. So we changed the color temperature and also the quality in direction of light, because now we have a big blue soft box essentially coming in through that window, so we did a couple things. They're just by rotating her around at the same time. If I wanted something a little more moody or a little more cooling backlit, I could turn her the other way and use the tungsten lights overhead is my main light source get a little different direction because they're now coming down from overhead light versus that big push a window and by white balancing for tungsten. We've got good skin tones on her, but you noticed what happened to that blue light. Got even more blew it really blew it out enhanced it there so that's a look even go for or we're really trying to give you a different option so we're gonna come in here and kind of hard to incorporate one versus the other and we closed our blinds so by doing that we're taking control of the environment so first step was trying to get a white balance for everything didn't work, so we embraced this daylight got a good photo and ace the tungsten got a good photo now we can take control of the environment because we're not always like we discussed the first day I mean, we're directors if we can take control of it let's do it to enable a better photo for us and for our clients, so we basically closed the blinds and now we're using the high tungsten overhead life balance for that as our main light source with a little bit of light coming in from those windows. But if you notice here what's wrong with the picture on their face, we still have horrible quality directional later, right? So we have to fix that now we've gotten a predominant light source we've got a color temperature we're working with lets out a flash is this a great place to bring in a flash to control the direction of light and add a little something to the scene so in this photo right here, we've basically took a light stand one speed light what we're using here the umbrella or we use an expo desk are flash bender flash bender so we had a large flash better it's the new xl one with a soft box attachment on it. So we basically had a little soft box that's super portable can go in your pocket your backpack set it up really quickly and took a shot. But if you notice here we're back to mix light again. I mean that's what we started off with I thought we almost fixed it. Now we created the problem all over again because that flash is going to be a cool daylight white life like a son outside. So when we hit her with it it's almost like we brought in a second window so later face the direction and quality of the light is a lot better, but our color temperature is still mixed. So to fix that we basically put a full stop or a full cut of cto, which means we got the thickest cto or color temperature orange gel that we could get, and what that does is it takes that sixty five hundred kelvin light temperature and drops it down to thirty, two hundred calvin, which is a close temperature to what we had in our overhead lights and then you can see the lamp back there so the light on her face looks like it could be the same light coming from that lamp because of the color so we're able to anchor her in our environment but because it's our speed light were actually in control of the direction and that allows us to shape out her face get light in both eyes get rid of those shadows and get kind of a really pleasing look I just want to add something real quick for this situation does this like kind of look familiar remember at the end of the day yesterday where I had the girls step inside the doorway and so the light was totally frontal it's very similar it's like window light but you can do that anywhere and it may be in a uh the entrance way of a church if you have someone stand there perhaps you don't have windows like maybe it's all I'm going to be staying glass you don't have anything close and easy so it's actually pretty similar and the other thing I would add is when I photographed ah lot of weddings I would mix kind of what you did but the opposite so what he did his he chose to balance with the tungsten right and so he moved over there and overpowered the daylight I would shoot this with a light pouring in behind the bride add my flash but bounce for daylight and overpower the tungsten so I could improve the quality of light and it gives you that heavenly glow so it's the same thing but a little different he chose to balance for the tungsten you could see how a bride would like this to though I mean they're like glowing other wedding day and it's like all right, let me put this like heavenly light just blasting around behind you so he says nice highlights on either side of her face if anybody's seeming my studio classes kind of that three point lighting we have that nice division on either side um just something to be aware of my own kaavya is no to isn't hair if it's really really blown out light and someone has hair like me it'll kind of piece apart so just if that's something that you think would bother you or your client you wouldn't do this but if somebody has the hair of tight I mean this is this khun definitely look beautiful I've shot this well basically every wedding ever because it's beautiful and what's cool about the two another thing to keep in mind is blonde hair we're gonna discuss it outdoors when you were shooting our blonde model outdoors heavenly backlit shot like this is beautiful but that blond hairs going over exposed really really quickly so just a couple things to keep in mind but like you said these air stylistic choices so if this is the kind of work that you shooting are really drawn to your client's going to drawn to that as well, so they're gonna let you get away with, like, a technically not perfectly exposed photo, but one that elicits an emotion that you're looking for. Yeah, like, all the time, they don't know that, it's technically wrong, because it's beautiful. So in the end, I mean, we've learned all these rules to overcome bad light, but really, they're just creative tools for us to express ourselves and what our clients and what we're looking for, and so we would like to take questions on the first two, just in case and for you guys, anything lingering, I have questions, write him down, we want him, and these questions aren't necessarily related to justice, but really, I'm coming in. Uh, dougie five eight from rochester, new york wants to know what tip do you have on photographing musicians and stage performers who are illuminated with different colored jell lights? Whatever else they're using to save on expenses, that light also changes, as many of these performances are an outdoor show, you see, and I was we were considering putting this in the book because it it's it was kind of like that, so we kind of covered it in dappled, so he shoots a ton of events you want to yeah I still do a lot of events in like video for big festivals and stuff just because I mean it's fun I mean it's jobs what I mean you get to hang out and check out great music basically starting off with white balance because we're on the topic of ah lighting conditions I usually keep my life my wife balance on sonny which is going to give you pretty close to your flashlight balance or a nice white light it warms up the skin tone just a little bit because a lot of the lighting texts you have on those shows are lighting for all of the viewers obviously so they're just seeing it with the naked eye and they expect to see decent skin tones so the lighting guys at these festivals and concerts and stuff have access to weigh more light here than any of us could have report around anywhere so embrace that by going with a sunny white balance you'll warm up the skin tones off your musicians because they're probably are in a bar or their rv or their their bus most of times they could use a little bit of a tan so if you go to a sunny or cloudy white balance you warm up the skin tones and you'll still keep true colors from all the awesome lights and things they've got flying overhead kind of light up the scene um same time be careful of lasers, lasers will fry sensors have happen to a buddy of mine's camera? Not too long ago I think f stoppers posted something about it too. So it's not an urban myth that happens on dh third you're gonna want to go with a slower shutter speed later on we talk about shooting in low life and dragging our shutter having that slower shutter speed enables your your photo, your camera have time to see all the different light colors and stuff that are coming around. So I used to go in and try to shoot an event and freeze everything's kind of a really fast shutter speed. Well, when you click that camera, I might have a spotlight on the singer and it'll freeze him but there's not enough time to get all those other cool flashing colors all around the background so a slower shutter speed will allow you to get all those neat colors and really get that atmosphere and that feel otherwise you're just kind of capturing and, you know, a guy in the spotlight versus a guy in this amazing light display. So and I would say sometimes, depending on what it is, you have to pick what's most important because there are really bright spotlights on somebody's face and then it might be dark in the background, so if you're not using a flash which one's more important and so usually it's the highlights usually it's the person that is in the spotlight there and so that would be their manual or average priority with exposure compensation to get those highlights correctly exposed and just a little bit of its hip usually it's easier to bring up shadows um then save highlights so if you over exposed a little harder to bring it back than if you under expose a little bit and bring a little bit more like in and then also I have a shot um flash for events it all depends on the events because if it's about mood and it's about the color like don't worry about the the jealousy the late on stage he did that on purpose like they want that look that's okay but it's also the same way that he was using remember when I was sending a balancing with the ambient light where you had all the warm tungsten behind me it's cool and it's nice and moody so you can go ahead and use a flash to pop a little bit of light on that person's face freeze them just like we did there and then use a longer shutter speed to record all of that and being beautiful light that they're doing on purpose so it kind of depends on the event can you use a flash? Can you get close? How high contrast is it so you pick what's most important what you're trying to achieve. I just put up a block post, kind of like looking at a new off camera flash, but it was highlighted during shooting a concert event, so I had a flash lighting, just the deejay and that I was using really slow shutter speeds like everything else. If you want to go toe eric valen, dot com slash blawg, you confined that you'll see photos, you'll see what the camera here I was using and kind of what settings and stuff, too. So that answers that question directly and that comes under control because if you can also tape flashes all over the ceiling and you used what he has I mean, if you have those has his his pocket wizards, he can control I want that one on right now or that one on, so I have a lot of control that way, right on that kind of answers, the next question I had lined up for you guys but cameramen one, two, three forest is asking, is there every time when having mixed lighting is acceptable? You kind of touched on that right there. But how about in general portrait ce I mean it's it's interesting say that because what we were talking about, kind of like the ones we called in the eighties corporate shots where they would purposefully create mixed lighting because it would create atmosphere and interest in the background. What I would watch out for his mix light on the face, especially if it's highlighting something you don't want it to like, the nose or the forehead, or something like that so mixed like in a scene if it's creating atmosphere that's, that's totally fine, I would I actually do that on purpose a lot, but mixed lay on someone's face most of the time is not flattering, because then some part of their faces skin tones look weird. That being said in fashion all the time, I have like the beauty dish on this side. On the right hand side, I take a green gel and then I d saturate the skin tones in the left so that it's, white and green and, like so fashion you get away with murder literally it's moved and of love breaking mills talk about fashion e rolling like I would take a picture later, I tried to remove blues out of the shadows and all the time I had a blue gel to my shadows in fashion because it makes it, like feel like cool and sexy. Well, speaking of cool and sexy, can I flash you in the chat room eyes asking from santa monica when working with flash? When would you use the flash value lock? And what is the advantage of working with the f on button while in single shot mood? Thanks for a great class ps I've had some lightbulb moments that you read the points one more time yes, when working with flashes like there was a question of working with we flash when would use the flash value lock and what is the advantage of working with the a f on button while in single shot mode? Okay, these are both you because I I shoot manual single focus halfway down my my lock just I mean right now if I understand it correctly, I never used the half life for focus for me, it's because I'm focusing re composing or I will use my trigger, which is for exposure to get exposure for something in the environment, and then I can lock that in, and so you could do that either with your trigger or you can lock your focus with the back button because right now by default, usually in the front you have exposure and focus and trigger so that's why I would use the f but I'm just trying to separate something so I could lock and focus separate from exposure separate from trigger for the what was the very first part he's a flash value lock I don't even know what that is I don't even use it so I'm going to say it's probably blocking exposure as you would for your cameras exposure so same way I mean you're running off your tio or your meter in same meeting system for both your flashing your camera exposure because you know, usually when I use exposure compensation I mean it's picking I'm telling it what to expose for so I'm just going to say it hasn't been an issue for me it doesn't mean and by the way, if anybody out there like, I'm totally fine to say when I don't know if there's somebody out there that has something useful, could you talk, toss a link into the chat room for this person if you are out there and then would you guys save that and kick that over to me? So I think thank you. Perfect. All right, so if we keep jumping on, go for it. Terrific. What do we have next? Okay, next is oh, uh, okay, but you guys like this. All right, so this is what I want too, okay, um, low light with no flash, and so we chose a sanctuary, which was like you guys saw it how dark it was it was miserable so I've got shots where I'm moving to shoot that the far shot and then the close up okay fashion is our what kind of kills because these pictures are like not so pretty so just look at the technical part of it that recovering okay um all right so first shot beautiful I'm on a tripod or a monologue I got right beautiful like mmm um on a tripod around a mono pod and I'm shooting there at thirty two hundred s so crisp this is no noise reduction added at thirty two hundred with my cannon five d mark three zoomed in at about one hundred twenty percent is that objectionable noise? We were pixel people were sitting at the coffee shop or like zoom in farther zoo and for its like enhance like on the t c s I shows this is between one hundred fifteen and one hundred twenty and it's about asking yourself that question is this objectionable? And then if it is when you add noise reduction through light room is it still so just take a look at this? This is on a tripod ramana pod so what I said is first we'll pump up your eye so and try to get your lens stabilize making sure that your tripod mount is on the lens because that is this center weight of that set up instead of having on the camera because it will still wiggle and give you a blurry picture when you're on a tripod ramana pod turned off your image stabilization alright, so flipping over, I took a picture without image stabilization and with on my camera um, I had it set to image stabilization one and that's called normal normal for canon nikon um what that means is there's also two or active, which would be aware of camera shake when you're saying I am intending to pan, but watch out for camera shake like that, let me zoom in and commune idea left was not I s right was I s so it's like when you think image stabilization is some like marketing gimmick, it's actually works sometimes like it will really save your butt, especially when you're zoomed all the way on a telephoto lens. It makes a big difference, and so what you're trying to look at here is yes, a little bit. The noise looks a little less on the left that's just because the pictures out of focus it's not like more flattering it's actually slightly saw saw focus picture and this was me trying to hold really, really still I wasn't I mean, I was definitely not purposely blurring if I was purposely boring, you would see it and it would be ridiculous so this is the kind of sharpness difference the reason that this comes into place is a lot of times let's say that you captured a moment maybe during a ceremony or an event and ends up that you need to crop in that's when this becomes a problem that that slight saw focus because here not a big deal it's when you need to pop in because that's what they're requesting that it becomes more of an issue right let's take a look at something else so I decided all right let's go from thirty two hundred which I know I'm comfortable with two twelve thousand eight hundred on my five d mark three all right, so let's take a look this is zero adjustments added this is just let's take a look at these zoomed in a one hundred twenty percent there's definitely more noise but if I'm not zoomed in at one hundred twenty percent and this isn't a huge print it's it's definitely fine for me uh it depends that maybe if you have really large albums where your printing something that would perhaps be sixteen by twenty and then you had to crop it then maybe that becomes a little bit of an issue but I was able to gain several stops of light and it still wasn't that bad but what I wanted to show you also is when I did in a tiny bit of noise reduction in light room one on the left is the before and the one on the right is after and this is a slight like I dragged the sliders you will to see it like ten points takes like a heartbeat and light room thanks harvey and khun batch this to all of the files that you saw you took at this s o so if you look at this so this is a twelve thousand eight hundred on the right with slight noise reduction and then the thirty, two hundred on the left from the shop before really not that much of a difference if you had to bump it up. Okay, do I think you should always shoot at the highest I s impossible? Absolutely not like there's. No, I mean there's no reason to why would you give yourself extra pics, elation or noise in your image? But if you had two rather than have a blurry image it's not that objectionable um now for the people that were asking about the older cameras or cameras that aren't known for their amazing low light sensitivity, we took a d thirty two hundred I don't know much about how is that older or just not not approach has been around for almost two years and it costs maybe five hundred dollars at best buy like it's the most affordable entry level but dear slow you can get so this is what I got at thirty, two hundred I so with no noise reduction whatsoever looks pretty three I mean, I think and that's that's I think that's amazing, I think that is completely completely acceptable if you look at it, I thought it was maybe a little bit softly you lot liked a little bit of contrast compared to other images, and that wasn't just the one I chose here. I did compare all of them, so I thought there was a little lacking an edge detail, but if we're looking specifically at noise and that may have been lens I was using or something like that, but if you're looking at the noise there, I had a little bit noise reduction it's back to completely completely acceptable so well, that answers the question for people of I'm saying, I'm shooting a five d mark three and I'm shooting this and that well, this is a you said, you know, five, six hundred dollars camera that was affordable is you get for a dslr so looks great so that's just what I want to kind of these people's minds I know for the longest time I thought that it was bad to go over a hundred then it realized okay, okay, I can go to sixteen hundred honestly I didn't like to go over sixteen hundred till last year when I finally tested it I'm like oh my gosh okay never mind thirty two hundred and it was no problem so just don't be too don't dwell on that too much you absolutely can pump up your eye so if you need him yeah I think it was probably the time with the book and you saw that high eso nikon file and you were like, oh my god there's a hundred ways and in almost two hundred percent they look fine green is crazy and that's a five year old camera that we were looking at files on it was incredible um so low light indoors you don't always have to shoot at sixty four hundred so you could just turn on your on flash so what we're gonna do next if you're allowed you always want to check because a lot of sanctuaries and churches and stuff they frown upon flash because it can be distracting and then I'm pleasantly remind your I was also I photographed meets a photograph dignitaries I had an internship right out of college or write in college my freshman year where I worked and I photographed it congress the library of congress photographed at the white house is all over these days most of them were no flash don't distract and so I mean this isn't just weddings that was the point I want to make so you don't want to interrupt any kind of board meetings, anything like that, a lot of journalism and stuff. If you're covering like events or hearings and things, you're not going to be popping off flashes the whole time, either. So this is hi I s o performance comes into play a lot, but if you can turn on your flash, you're gonna get ugly snapshot like this. So this is basically your flash directly on camera, decent eso aperture, shutter speed to maybe get some light in there in the background, because, again, this is still in the dark church, but this is that wonderful snapshot look that we get, and this looks like a snapshot because the flash is directly on camera, so it's not created any shadows that are then sculpting our subject. So if your flashes on camera directly hitting them, all, the shadows go behind them so you can't see them and that's. Why we want to get that flash off camera to create some shadows that are visible to the camera and creating depth and contouring there. So what we can do really quickly without even removing the flash from our camera is to simply just ratchet the guy up and shoot straight up. So in this case we lucked out because we were able to find an area in the back of the church that had a nice white ceiling you really want to be careful because you're like takes on the characteristics of whatever it bounces off of. So if we bounced off something else we've just seen a second we might run into issues but here no problem shot it right off a low white ceiling it was perfect this is like ideal scenario you run into an event anything you're trying to cover with an on camera flash you don't want this, you want to put it straight up and get the bounce, but if we're really going to nitpick here, you're going to see that there are still a little bit of shadows under the eyes we've completely changed the direction now here it's going straight ahead here we've got a nice big soft box essentially over our subject but it's so directly over her that is shooting straight down and casting some shadows under her nose. But if you look at her eyes were seeing bags under the eyes that I didn't even notice there when I saw the girl in person yeah really young so you're not do anyone favors you're accentuating things that may not exist to the naked eye, so what we want to do is he's a little bit of phil and to do that nikon can overnight not to give us this tiny little phil car this bounce card on your flash there this doesn't do a whole lot of good but I'm thinking this was here to kind of put us on the right path and get like a curious photographers mind going it's like ok so if I bounce straight up and I still have those shadows coming down how do I fill those so I get a second flash going forward or you could just use a bounce card like this again this is so small it doesn't do much so we put on a robe flash bender that's much bigger probably about this big so it's going to gather a good amount of light to push forward we'll still letting all of the light go straight up so that's gonna give us the best of both worlds so in this next photo we essentially have a large soft box directly overhead firing down that's all the beautiful light are model and we're just directing a little bit of it forward still with that flash bender catching it pumping forward to philip the eyes so look there really dark shadows under the eyes look here now you can actually see color in the eyes of a softened shadow yeah oh yeah oh no way left here there was no time to photo shop everything putting this presentation together until the middle of that that was not doing retouching it was ambitious to be like, okay, let's shoot all day two days and then compile everything so you guys aren't seeing any retouched images here? These are we're baring our souls here naked. Another camera photograph? No, no instruction, no nothing, just that's it. Yeah, this's really deals you get, um so right over here, the other option is you can bounce off the wall. I like this because you don't really run into that the shadow into the eyes of did you want to add something to this one? Well, excuse me, I'm just going to say, uh, the time where this would be really important for trying to do is if somebody is perhaps a little older, maybe it's photographing father daughter dance and the father is a little bit older and so you do that and it's really going to accentuate all of the wrinkles if you just bounce off the ceiling, which is why you need to kick a little light for your helping people out by filling in those less unflattering shadows. Yeah, absolutely. And if you can't do that or you don't have that ceiling, this is my favorite. This is this is a great way if you walk into a room and you're trying to shoot some portrait, you may have a bunch of lights set up but if you have a white wall, all go and have an on camera flash to bounce off that thing because I might not always have a seven foot soft box with me. So this is basically bouncing off a white wall rather than having our flash straightforward like we started and straight up how we just did in the last photo, it's just ratcheted over to the right, so I'm taking a photograph light's bouncing off the wall, going from a small point light source to what is now coming back as a six or seven foot large white, soft, diffused light source and that's what you get that much, much, much softer light there. So if you don't have a seven foot doctor bank, this is a good way to do it. Just basically go find a large white wall in a room or a studio or wherever you're photographing and this gives you that same effect. There was a wedding that I did that I did kind of a photo booth. Um but my photo booth is I had a flash in the standpoint. It into a wall, a white wall. And then there happened to be like, this pretty textured background. And I just felt it everyone in e that was easy and that's what it looked like so cool thing is you probably put those on the website and people are like, oh, man, what kind of gear to xu brings an idea that's what it looks like so so super super quick and easy way sorry, soft box manufacturers, this is the easiest way to do it. If you don't find that white wall, then you got to go buy a soft box. Um, the next shot is what happens if you bounce off off colored wall? This is fashion, right? Okay, so there's a really good photo that there actually are some really good editorials that has that kind of color but on models and it's supposed to be edgy, most people know you need nice neutral wall to bounce off. I mean, be careful because sometimes great walls even have slight blue and when you add blue to someone skin tone it's their skin looks ashen. Yeah? Or if you have, like, a really creamy wall, like an older one that's kind of like satin back our god forbid there were smokers there at one time like that wall is gonna have a really warm, warm tinted light coming off of it, so you might really kind of overcook someone color temperature wise, so been neutral um not like this so this is basically the same thing is this instead of bouncing off a whitewall bounced off a red wall and you see it would get so the next thing is we're gonna go off camera with it because if you don't have a ceiling that you can bounce off of or a wall you don't want that on camera light you've got to take the flash off camera to get control and to still create those shadows so look how we're starting to create shape here we're casting shadow on the face shadow on the face shadows down no shadows so that's our goal is to have it off camera enough to cast shatter to make our model look three dimensional and beautiful again so what we did here is basically if you watch the video we attempted to do this with the detail cable that malfunctions so instead we use triggers there's a million ways to skin it but we basically got that flash off of the camera so this is lindsay's favorite one so she's like just you know pumping over here I don't exercise that's the idea okay seventy two hundred on this on this hand and that big old flash modifier on this hand and you're good to go but with this shot right here we just basically had it right off camera again a nice flash bender soft box that we can put on top of this you see the camera settings right there I was using a little bit of a hiatus so like you discussed earlier I'm using a wide open aperture and a slower shutter speed to try to get some of the background of the church there so I'm not just photographing her on a flat black background so that's why we did that with those camera settings I'm going to give us that beautiful off camera light there so were there any questions related to the low light no flash or low light with a flash amar spain asked for the last photo I think against the window do you always use flash to fill the shadows um I would shoot this in one of two ways if I can't turn off the overhead lights and that's the quality of light on the face that I have then I would use a flash because I need to over part it's not it's not doing her any favors for sure but if I could turn off the lights in the room sometimes and I'll just use a silver reflector up high to try to kick some of that window light back in and that produces a beautiful quality of light and that's what I prefer to do so if I can like uh it's in the preparation room maybe before a wedding or whatever it may be if I could turn off those overhead lights all this kick a reflector in and that's usually my solution on the theme of the week has been trying to get our skin tones warm you know no matter what we're seeming to put you in an orange gel on everything whether it's cool, light, warm, light, whatever either matching lighter but what you just said there you'd have a real white you know, type face there you don't see you'd be looking to go ahead and cool down tone her skin tones in that situation absolutely be something where would grab a great card as well but I would probably grab my passport color checker because of those little swatches where I can pick one that's a little warmer okay so I can warm up her skin tones correctly um and I'm not here so I'm sure if I can turn off that tungsten light I'm not trying to balance it anything it's actually just daylight behind her and daily on her face so I can just set it to daylight white balance and then it's probably still a little cool it should the flash bearer than warming up in post yeah, the passport you'd be that color temperature on our face and skin because that's our daylight white balance but everything would be that color temperature because we wouldn't have a mixed light environment anymore and part of the reason to that sometimes the color temperature doing this doesn't quite look right is because you're getting lens flor you've opened up your lens you're shooting directly into a window and that degree the quality of the images the light bounces around so they look a little flat this is one of those instances were probably you do need to add contrast back in post and warm it up a little bit to get the skin tone you're you're looking for it usually doesn't look quite right out of camera and that's true for me in the studio I create a lot of back lit situations in the studio on purpose and in camera I don't always want to show everybody because I'm like I know where it's going I have to add contrast I have to warm it up but uh that's just that's just what it is when you back like usually cools things down it flattens it out a little bit yeah and this is very similar what we're going to cover in the heavy backlighting scenario a couple of slides from now but you can use a silver reflector here or you could even bounce that flash off the ceiling here if you have a nice neutral ceiling so either scenario worked but either way you're going to notice that we're trying to change the quality of light on her face while still maintaining this and we're actually exact opposites as faras for me because I go for the fashion he look I never add a warming gel to my um my flash unless I'm trying to balance with tungsten we're trying to balance a little bit with sunset but in a normal situation like outside during the day or inside for a portrait with window I I don't at all and so I mean if you look at all my photos like my bride's air like pure white porcelain skin there's no like warmth but it's porcelain it's perfection is like kind of what I'm going for versus he's going for approachability and warmth and so but this kind of just two different approaches to it all right fast forwarding to the present image that you were just discussing in the church you know, backwards for us we're like on back to the future okay pro photographer and uh let's see serena photo both are asking if you ever use or your thoughts on different flash diffusers such a stephan omine abounds our gary fong lights fear a lot of photographers out there utilize these for events especially weddings and what your thoughts I have I think I've owned like eighty different ones um I had a lumen quest soft box for the front at one point uh west cut popular box on the front I had the most obscurely named fung pieces like I had like the whale tail at one point and and whatever a lot of them were completely fine I mean a lot of them produced a nice quality of light my only complaints particularly about the ones that were plastic is when I'm on the go they didn't fold up and stored neatly and I'm a little and I don't like to carry a lot of gear and so for me I don't really have a good place to put this it was it was almost the size of another flash sometimes esso I liked having something like a flash bender that I could just roll up on shoving the outside or shoved in my back pocket or something too easily grab um and I also I mean they're pretty strong but I always find a way to break things like always and lose all the little pieces for me there isn't much to lose with the flash man that's why I like it I just anybody who's assisted me knows what I'm done using something I put it down and then I forget um so I'm just trying to keep it simple but also I like that you can get a difficulty different varieties of the flash better because I can use it as white phil I can add something on the front to make it act like a soft box to defuse it, soften it a little bit uh and then I can also had silver reflector if I need um a little bit more contrast a little bit more pop of the late to kick a little bit further so I mean that's just my preference but it's kind of just tested out things and then also I mean I have influenced by price and I kept buying more expensive things and I think the flash is a pretty reasonable yeah um really it comes on application so I get this question a lot because I teach a lot of speed lighting workshops and stuff and people are like well what do you think of the tupperware I'll just call put them all together as clear tupperware it is about is broad and ah has brought a stroke is you can hit something with because if you look over this photo here what's wrong with this we've got light bouncing off of a wall and contaminating our light source all right, so what happens if you have a piece of tupperware on top your flash it is bouncing light off the ceiling and giving you this it is letting light go forward and giving you that fill it may be bouncing off this wall and given you that light it may also be bouncing off the other wall and giving you this light so the reason you get recommended products like that a lot of time is this starting photographer and camera stores is they don't have the time to teach you an entire workshop of controlling light and direction in color they know that if they give you this you'll be able to walk into mine rooms and hopefully bounce off of enough surfaces that your light looks soft but you really have zero control so you guys after watching this know all about control direction and quality of light so you guys are totally graduated to have a much more precise accurate tool something that will allow you to only ceiling bouncer only wall bounce or do a ceiling bounce end of phil bounce like this or come over this direction and taken off camera so they are a very good brought their like hitting it with a bat versus you know, a very precise like finishing nail you know, I think that is perfect explanation that's that's great, yeah, I've definitely had that problem before um and the flash bender has a little thing that could block off from the top because you can open it up so that it it will fill or you can close it off yeah that's perfectly said broad versus specialized in it's okay, if you have something in mind, you're gonna want to direct that like a little more control. So thank you for those guys bringing it out because I think you get that question every single workshop no matter where I am so awesome one more question and the media will move on camera mom one, two, three four asked could use a gel to change the red wall cast if you don't have a a white wall t that would be difficult. Yeah. It's easier just not to bounce off. Uh, well, there's a couple of things. First of all, if you are, if you're doing that because your jelling what you gonna set your white balance to for a red gel to make it look correct? And I know you're trying to counter act that there isn't going to be something you can match perfectly long story short, you're trying to figure out exactly what color is that wall so that I can do the exact opposite to bounce off of. And then if it's not quite right and you have to compensate, you've got to find a white balance. Yeah, there's like lee in a couple of the gel companies make a lot of different kinds of gels, but when you get into reds like this and blues, they're called theatrical jail's, so they're they're intentionally to kind of have an effect. They're not something that has been precisely measured out in a calvin temperature value that we can then easily neutralize, so you're going to want to stay away from this kind of stuff, if at all possible and that's why you you must always bring your flash off camera or god forbid, you just keep it on camera and just soften it because you can also just take your flash up and then put the flash bender on and put the diffusion material on the front and now you have a soft box going directly forward, so you have better quality than this, but you're not bouncing off of anything to get that contamination so awesome. Thank you know, molly mama's uh, what is lindsey? Add to the front of the flash bender in the or eric teo soften the late oh, bringing has, uh, diffusion material that you can put in the front of it and so it treats it a little bit more like a soft box. And this is what I like again if I have somebody an event or whatever and where I'm photographing, where their skin is a little bit rougher, whether its blemishes or wrinkles, because when you add that diffusion and decreases the contrast and that makes it more flattering on the face, this is basic flash bender that you are seen in these photos, so this is basically allowing it to so we're not there yet this is the one we were bouncing off the wall and bouncing forward to get that nice filled. So the question was, what do you put on it back on this so it just diffuses it softens it, and then this on the top blocks it off in case you have a colored ceiling or something like that and you also knows this is silver, so it's going to catch this not only block out but punch it so you get all that out put back through so it becomes a really efficient soft box just really quickly kind of snaps on velcro and trying to broker lindsay's hair kind of like tux under and that you have we got a cool little soft box right? Like that? So that's what I'm talking about like, if you can't avoid bouncing off of something and you're stuck with an on camera option, don't go for this put a big diffusion material making many soft box on your camera and you're gonna get a much softer direct light so at least we can change the quality if we can't change the direction cool let's, jump in heavily backlit this is all you okay? And we went over this yesterday, so we've kind of seen this all this kind of crossover it lightly uh, what you want to pay attention to here, it's, how I'm changing my shutter speed to try to compensate for the light and my copy it was it was I was looking for really intense backlight so I could catch that light and then redirect it using different types of reflectors unfortunately we didn't have the strong back like we're looking for that sissy kind of ah ah toned down version of probably how I would handle the situation so I use my camera and I was using in this case and put on a valued of meeting I pointed it and this is what my camera told me was right because it has a bright sky in a dark face and it's like ok how do how do we navigate the two of these and so just pick the number in the middle and so this is what I got neither the background or the foreground is correct so what I would do is I'd put my, uh, camera in africa party exposer compensation and open up and so the reason I like this is because that sun is dropping quickly shopping really quickly and so the exposure is going to very quickly get darker and so for me when I'm on manual if I happen to forget or maybe I'm not chipping nonstop and I'm not thinking about the fact that it's getting darker the aperture priority gets me close and it makes sure that I have an image that's usable and this is for me was really important when I was photographing weddings or events like that where I'm worried about a lot of other things and I would forget and if I were on manual and it's twenty minutes later I missed a lot so it's really convenient for me um one of things for me is that I would separate my trigger and what locks my exposure and my focus point so that I could focus and recompose and not have to put a focus point necessarily just on the edge a lot of times in back the situation's um I end up having to use a center point for focus because are a lot of our cameras that is the most sensitive point for achieving focus it's looking for contrast and that's the one that will give you the fastest focussing time so I did that and I asked eric to bring in a reflector and solicit him standing with six, seven feet away it's not bright enough really to capture a lot of light but it gets a little bit of catch lightning pay more attention to the top of her eyes you see that it pops in just a little bit of catching which is more flattering um for portrait and then I had him move right to the edge of my frame and it gets a little bit brighter that's inverse square law so basically when a light source which happens to be the reflector in this case even though it's the sun it's bouncing when that light source gets closer that's going to kick more like the light will look brighter you know the light hasn't spread out or diffused by the time it reaches her face so it's a little bit brighter really not that much difference because it's not a very heavily backlit day. If the sun were pointed right back towards us like we wanted, that would make a huge difference. That would be a huge spotlight. I know in this situation that if I had a lot of light to work with, I would either have him back up in you silver, but likely I'd have him moved closer and use white or something like that depends on the exact circumstances, but what I ended up preferring is just kind of this natural. A little situation here, I don't have any reflectors, I don't have any diffusers going, I'm just making sure it's correctly exposed and if it were a bright day, what I would try to dio is locked my focus and I would move so that the sun had focus of the sun was originally behind her head because that makes it easier to focus if the sun's pointed right back at your camera, it gets confused. Your camera doesn't know what it's looking for, what to focus on you, right? You don't, you can't see anything, so what I would dio is I would put this on behind her head, I would lock my focus, and then I would move just a little bit so that the sun peeks out over. Her shoulder and would give me that beautiful lens for that wraps around the neck rapture on the hair gives me the nice bubbles and so I didn't have that in reality, so I faked it because this is what I would do in post, but this is the look that I would go for when I would recomposed how it's really more yellow on the left hand side there with hair because I would just barely peak the son out of that side of the hair it would catch my lens and give me a little bit more lens flare, so that would be my end of day heavy backlight solution, which brings us to heavy backlit with flash, but in all honesty, I really, really love this look for lifestyle stuff and this is a very popular look for both wedding important stuff, but also in the lifestyle world, this is a very natural area kind of looks so if you have, like runners of people on the beach, a lot of times I'll shoot a natural light solution like this much like lindsay did, I'll just put it in manual mode, bust the thing wide open, try my best to find focus on dh, then get some shots like this and then I'll bring in a flash where I've got an option that I can see the sky and all the details in the scene so if my client really wants to see the whole environment they've got it if they just want to see that cool moment they've got this two on dh this is great because a lot of times if you're working with models and brides and stuff, they're not used to be in front of all the strobes so it's kind of it's less daunting than a lot of approaches where you might bring out big strobes and things so it's easier to catch moments exactly but it's a lot less cluttered on set so is a beautiful, beautiful look but if you want to bring in flash which all of you should after watching this or at least try a heavily backed with flash this is how we're gonna jump in your notice very, very similar right that maybe she's a little more smile in my photo I don't know what that wass I like dramatics so there we go same thing I'm shooting on an icon but the signal eighty five works on both good lens um one hundred s o f one point four in one fiftieth of a second so this is wide open in a lot of light and it's way over exposed so we need to fix something I want to see detail in the skies the goal of me bringing in that flash is toe crunch that dynamic range so what we're seeing here is really, really really dark shadows really really, really, really bright skies and this is trying to bring up the shadows on her face and we completely lose the sky so did this shot I closed down two point eight cut two stops of light out of it and now we're getting her face a little more in line with the exposure that we want still can't see the sky so it gives you an idea of how much we over exposed for I mean, at this point we open to close down two more stops were still pitch or super wide on the sky, so if you have the back of your camera, you're going to want to go into your menu and go to your display settings and turn on your highlight warnings there called like the angry blink ese so if we have tike shot this photo into the sky, the back of our camera would be blinking angrily right now because that sky is pure white still so to fix that we had to speed up our shutter speed so started here everything's blinking, angry over here just the sky is blinking angry over here, our cameras finally happy with us it's no longer blanket so we're on we're on the right or on the right path here and it's kind of like angry birds only different yeah exactly there's no like you pigs and stuff yeah but this shot right here we're at our maximum shutter speed to which I might have planned or might have just worked out that way, but one over one twenty fifth of a second is the maximum sink speed for your flash on most icons and almost cannons around two hundred very similar what we're doing here though now is I've got the detail in my sky, which is what we're looking for, but we have lost our pretty girl. She is now in super super dark shadow. Our camera cannot see all of the detail in the sky and in the shadow all in one shot so you could take hdr portrait's of people, which is when hdtvs first came out, we thought we all wanted them until we saw sports announcers like every pore sweating out there on the field all day that we realized maybe we don't want hdr people all the time. So that's, why I started picking up a flash because I want that dynamic range without seeing too much of the detail. So this is where we just pop on the flash it's simple is that this is a manual exposure, so base, look, I think I was that maybe one eighth power, one sixteenth power, you don't really need a whole ton if you're shooting here in the evening like this. But we turned on the flash it's right here, right over my shoulder. Lindsay was hanging on to it so it didn't blow off the roof and what that did is that basically on ly lit up our shadows so I pick and choose my battles here I'm not going to try to light up the world with the speed light, but if I knocked down the world with my camera settings, I can then build up my subject, which is a lot easier to dio, but you're gonna notice her skin tones might look a little bit cool. I mean, we have this beautiful warm sky, but we're hitting our model with a white white light. So again, we're getting that despairs er describe the difference there in the color temperature, so what we did is we added a full cut cto gelato this one again that's just fancy orange plastic is thick and dark oranges they'll give it to us and that broader color temperature more in line with the setting sun. So one of the first things I see when photographers are just getting their flashes off camera is they want to run out and shoot golden hour, which is beautiful, but one of the reasons is beautiful is because it's so warm and inviting, so when you get out there see a lot of photos of perfectly exposed people and backgrounds, but if you look on the ground, you've got beautiful orange everything. And then you've got a white splash of light on the ground and white very pale looking subjects. So how you fix that is just added gel. There you go a little balance it out with that background. And also, I see a lot of people in this instance setting their white balance to auto white balance. So what ends up happening a lot of times is it's reading that warm sunset so little kind of compensate and then they add the front and in the end, I see, like deathly blue skin like it ends up just not not looking nice and you appeal skies you just lost all the beauty in the sky to yeah, yeah. So just be careful of that. So, uh, so white balance right here was gonna be sunny. So again, that's, like my go to sonny is very close to flash except it's a little bit warmer. So one of our audience members engine a little bit earlier, I liketo warm up everything I liked to make people look tan, you know, even if they're from michigan and it's the dead of winter, so, uh, we'll warm her up a little bit there and that's the big dipper these two photos and in mine a lot of times for how I was shooting without a flash when I would shoot my sunset lets say that because you're looking at her skin looks not that warm you know it look pretty pale no not not well it looks little better there but on our trip was pretty pale um I was actually shooting and shade white balance because it's going if there is some detail in the sky shade warms everything up so that warms going to become really warm which is what I want and then because her face is lit by open sky a lot of times the open shade is cool it's blue from the little bit of that blue in the sky in most instances and so what I would want to do is shoot shade it'll warm up her skin tone and then that light behind your becomes even more orange sometimes this isn't correct white balance when you look at it looks really orange but I'm going for dreamy end of day sunset look and so it's actually okay so for me usually I'm not using flash I put on shades white balance at the end of the day yeah and you know we've been we've been using correct throughout the day but correct I guess really isn't the right word for it I mean if you want to have like technical accuracy or something like that it's basically a starting point I mean, we fault our cameras for auto white balance and auto exposure by giving us an eighteen percent gray we're like oh that's not what we want well, they're giving us a good starting point so knowing howto achieve technically neutral photo or technically accurate photo gives us a starting point to them blow out some highlights or get some lens flare bringing some warm so it's really being able to get a zero point and then going where we want from there so here's where we're at so far we've gotta warm cto jail there were able to see our sky mission accomplished so there we go I recomposed the whole goal was to get her with the cool space needle there this is my first time in seattle I was like going on the roof I need a photo of that so you'll see these were just easier to get I'm just going through the motions there to get the photo that I want then you can really recompose and start shooting and this is where it gets fun because I said everything to manual mode so other than the sun there the sky get in a little bit dimmer nothing's going to change so I can go through a million def proposes aiken recompose lindsay's like oh man let's get some hair blown she jumps over there with the reflector she's blowing the hair allover the place and that's, when we can really just focus on the fun and getting a cool photo in a fun moment because nothing else is going to change. We did all that. We did all the technical work already. So, uh, same time if I wanna start mixing this up now, maybe you don't want so much contrast. Maybe you decided hey, the first natural light photo I took looked great. You know, let's. Go back and get that nice backlighting. All you have to do is slow down your shutter speed. So one over to fiftieth of a second one over thirtieth of a second gives you to drastically different looks in the sky. Right? Although look at her face, we still have the control in direction of the light on the face. So with the natural light option it's difficult, unless you have a really good reflector, a nice backlighting to get direction to the light on the face and only falls flat with the with the flash, we could get a blown out background or nice saturated, dark background were still maintaining the direction on the face to make it look pleasing for a subject. Okay, questions on those that have it, you guys, I have one that's, a touch up top off topic, but on your finished image there, when you put the bouquet over, you mentioned on the first day that you there were christmas lights with a blend mode on were they colored lights or did you de saturate them? Okay, so what I did is I they were originally colored lights, I de saturated them, and then I did hugh saturation with a colorized and set them toe kind of subtle orange, ok, so it would pick up that orange tone in there, but, yeah, I would normally dislike this photo because of, you know, the bright back, but you're throwing those on there, and I'm just really they'll go and and just for anyone who doesn't know this trick, it literally well, I wasn't going to spit let's put this so I was going to spend much time retouching here this week because I don't have time to sleep so thiss literally took me all of forty five seconds because I had that file ready, so yeah, and one of the reasons he's saying, this is the reason you would want teo de saturate it is if you have these christmas lights and it's, the red and green, whatever other colors the color when you change the blend mode well, actually interact with the skin and the the bones of the hair, so she would have red spots in green spot so when you do saturate it now it's only getting the highlights atonality is the luminosity of um of that texture in this case the lens flare and the reason I added a little bit of warmth into that texture into the lens flare is because since it does interact with color it would actually warm up my whole photos so you could see before without remember how I was complaining that it was a little bit cool and I usually put my white balance on shade white balance to kind of compensate for that well when I over laid this textures that has more to it now warms up the whole photo did you do with the okay file and light room where you had more control over luminant sorted just do that right in with the right post all right enough photo shop but what was good is because I actually had it d saturated and I had the blood mo turned on when I was moving around the the different colorized for that I can see it real time what it's doing instead of having to kick it back and forth or make it smart object for example um and I was working on an old computer that struggles with its ancient hadn't transferred my files thank you yes okay, I'm getting back to your white balance settings on your camera when you're using flash or not um on your camera or off camera do you ever set your white bounds to the flash little icon or you always choosing something else? So what is the actual number difference between flash and daylight couple hundred it's minimal out of like a scale of thousands defaulted to flash you could get close to what it is very, very close but usually when you put it too son I like I was actually teaching a class with another photographer and we're teaching studio lighting I was on one half of the room and she was on the other half and so is telling everybody put your white balance to sun and she's telling already put your white balance of flash and everybody's getting all confused it's a very small different I just like skin tones better when it's set to the daylight I just like what it looks like from me it warms of that flash to be a little more flattering to the face I prefer it because the flash is cool perfect white light so it just gives you a kiss the warmth just like I like to put a quarter cto in here same kind of effect if you go with the sonny white balance is going to give you a little bit of warmth not something where shade shade white balance is going to give you a large shift is gonna be noticeable that's like that's a creative effect whereas you're just a quarter cut a cto or your daylight white balance is just gonna be a subtle warming so yeah, very subtle did you say that uh that filter did you include that in the if you purchase you have a class on that like a no I'm saying like with the christmas lights um no no ok, but I promise this is what it's security take a bunch of christmas lights big mass of them set them down and when you focus, turn your camera manual focus and when you turn out of focus turn it towards bigger so that those of okay those highlights get bigger instead of smaller and that's all it is and or go to a bar where they have it wrapped around a pole photograph that that works too has some good ones for that. So good photos from bars you think those are tools everybody already hasn't there was right there a great big pans and after question from the internet dice marie design as can you add a color corrective gel on your flash attached to your camera yeah, they attach the same way your flash on camera or off camera we're using the road gel kits they have a correction and I mentioned the theatrical gels earlier and what's great about it is I mean I use a lot of s p eight hundreds and they've got the smaller flash head the new and icons have the nine tenths have a larger flash head the five, eighty six twos have a larger flash head some third party vendors and stuff have a really small flash head my camera bag weighs as much as lindsay does she'll be over here in a second so partners for two seconds let me go ahead and grab this because we're going to start really going into kits but I want to show you this for the question this is great because so many people out there having like specific questions on all the pieces of gear you've been using oh yeah we're going to follow up this with an actual breakdown of some of our kids so I mean we're going to nerd out we're going to like pyle holding here here you're going to make the internet very, very happy good guys we're on the same page with all right? So here is our normal gel there really there's a ton of them in here? I mean, I've compiled a couple correction kids just so I've got like ten of everything in case I want to go all joan mcnally and used fifteen speed lights on a shoot um so basically there's the different cuts and intensities of the oranges and the greens and the blues and it's really, really simple if one of you guys can get like, kind of a close up here have you hold the flash for me? Pretend like it's on a stand or on your camera to hold it on there, there's two flaps that you see there and that's a simple is this rubber band and on and now this could be then slept on top of your camera and shot. Or this can be put on umbrella bracket like we discussed yesterday in the first day on the flash primer. And it could be on and off camera, and you can then stack theis so a lot of the times will put, like, a full green and then a little quarter of an orange and that'll give me a fluorescent balanced older fluorescent bulb, perfect color temperature. So it's, really easy to stack them. And just in case, um, in case that question was asking if it will still work, it will, because he it in every think, every example, when he added a gel, it was off camera. There wasn't any reason, except for hugh stepping up his game. He's like, okay, let's, set this up, take it from being on karen let's, take it off camera and give it a better quality in direction of light and fix the color, so it wasn't really a reason, so I think it has to be. Jelled everytime it's off camera or it can only be jealous when it's off camera it's just that's how it that's, how it would fall in when educating good point and both approaches worked because t ell, if we're doing detail with flash compensation, it sends a pulse through here so it knows it's gonna eat up some of that intensity and it will adjust automatically or when I put them on, I read it and it tells me how much light so this one is saying, hey, you have to out of one more stop of light now to me because this is going to absorb a stop of light. So whether you're doing tio or manual, these air a great gel option because they give you the information you need or the computer in your camera can do it automatically handsome, I would not have his jump ahead. Sounds great. Thank you, lindsay. Um, it must be this up a little bit because we saw this stuff yesterday long story short he's shooting the back like the sun sets and turn around like beautiful purple clouds, and then I see the color draining out of them every second. So for me, I didn't want to have to calculate with flashing and have to calculate with manual, so I turned around and I pointed, and this is what I got right off the bat with aperture priority and I'm like, okay, that's not the perfect so I quickly dialed down and did, uh, thing was about a minus two. Well, see the difference there? One third. You know what? I got thirtieth. Okay? Yes. Okay, so I mean, it was over two stops in that case. So it's two to two and a half stops I dialled down so it's minus and I'm like, okay, good there's my color great turn on the flash and I had it just it's flash with compensation, but I didn't compensate just put minus a third, like a little less and full power. I'm like okay want the shot? I want her to be correctly exposed and correctly exposed. If I don't do much compensation, the camera does kind of decide. It says this is what we think the exposure should be for the face and so I pop off a shot and this is what the flash and the camera decided was a correct exposure for her. If it was too bright it quickly go to the top of the camera and just dial it down it was too dark and quickly go to my camera on the top of my camera that little trigger and dial it up. And then I had eric add a reflector just to fill in the show's a little bit, but I prefer this one. So in other words, it's just I had seconds, so I dialed down my ambien, put on the flash, and then I had the ability to tweak it in a couple seconds. I had available so that's, why I was using to tell in that situation. So, yeah, I mean, all these were taken within a couple minutes of each other. So we literally shot both of our set ups, both different directions, both different approaches in, like, five minutes. So both of them, if you figure out what your preferences in style, you can get it done pretty quick. Um, so here lindsay jumped in. So we sent our lovely model home because I went downstairs and he was wearing his boots in this cool jacket stuff. You are so much more appropriate for this location's let's do it. So she jumped in for us, and we've got our white balance tools over there. Do you want to jump in here because this is this is a fun playground that we discuss a lot more this afternoon and we did not see this yesterday just so you know these particular images so it's going to break this down so we photographed a great card and the color trucker uh but this is what you want to take a look at the light on my face was from his flash so it's daylight the light in the background however it's tungsten and it's not a little tungsten it'sa lot tungsten so what would I set my white balance for? Well, clearly I would probably set it for whatever's on my face just watch this when I hold the great card so it's being hit by the light from the flash if in post I use my white balance eyedropper and select the great card it gives in picture on the left so it puts priority to the color of light coming out of the flashing it neutralizes for that so you'll see my skin tone looks nice and neutral however on the other side of that if I just turn a little bit and put the great card in the tungsten light if in post I used my eye dropper to select that it's going to prioritize the tungsten light and so I go completely blew so this is why it's very important where you put your great car you've got it put it in the light that you're prioritising we're going to take a look at this later because what you're going to learn from me and photo shop is how to use smart objects two double process of file in case I did not want that green or that orange and I wanted everything to look neutral you can actually completely nullified different colors even it out using smart objects in photo shop that's fine it's a new feature and uh no bcc allows you to open raw files of smart objects and it is amazing haven't seen five understand oh you fancy cool so now we're going to go ahead and get the proper exposure variant r I s o we cover this a little bit yesterday but I'll run you through it again this is what we do if we set up the shot and we just pop it off like we didn't know what we were doing where did our environment go? We know it's there because we're seeing it with our eye but we haven't shown it to the camera yet, so I s o four hundred f four one two hundredth of a second I'm in a boost that I s so until I can see some stuff so I double it still can't see any background double it again sixteen hundred barely getting the background thirty, two hundred finally seen some background sixty four hundred we have an environment, and the purpose of taking her outdoors is to shoot her in that environment. We don't want to shoot her against the black wall. We could've stayed inside in the with a beer for that. All right, so this approach, though we've shown earlier how sixty, four hundred eyes I was very usable in a lot of cameras. That doesn't mean you have to shoot a sixty four hundred s. So all the time, in this case, this wasn't a wedding ceremony, anything we're on the street, we have permission to be there. So I set up a tripod and rather than getting that background like through ramping my eyes, so I'm going to get that through ramping my shutter speed. And this is a shot to show the noise and that sixty four hundred shot these air unedited she's jumping in front of the camera no retouch at sixty, four hundred esso and we're good. So that's again, the g eight hundred. Incredible! I could do this with a five year old d seven hundred still incredible. Don't be afraid of your s o, but if you are afraid your eyes so shame on you, but I'll show you different way to do it very in shutter speed here. Same thing I s o two hundred four one one hundredth of a second let's, slow it down one stop and not in a flight. Slow down some or slow it down some more. Slow it down some more finally got some light. But if you look at that we're at one fifth of a second. So this is why we're on a tripod that's pretty slow. But we did this on purpose. We could have taken to approach use of this environment. We could have done the so we could have done the shutter. I chose shutter because as we were out there setting up, I saw a lot of cars going by. And I wanted to get some of those light trails and ah, high shutter or high I s o gives you the benefit of having a fast shutter speed to freeze things. So this is great if you want a lot of environment but you also want to freeze motion like people dancing or people walking around at an event. But if you want to show environment, I prefer to use a low. I sew in a slow shutter speed because then you get the movement and I'd probably do something in between you personally, I probably foot my s o maybe it like sixteen hundred or something around that but then have a long enough so the shutter speed so I could have some movement of the dance in the background or something of that effect and then that makes everyone happy because I so isn't super high and I don't have to be about hand holding too much yes if you go back here you'll notice this's exactly were around lindsay and I was shooting in the church we had a middle of the road I s o plus a nice aperture plus a decent shutter speeds you can get the best of both worlds it was definitely creative choice for us because we discussed that were like let's get those cars and stuff so remember the photo from yesterday we got some cars and stuff swinging by and made for a really cool final photo but she's bashful she put it on her facebook page that you're not so bashful yeah I just don't have it there s o I have direct sunlight on her face poor girl not doing her any favors. So this is assuming right now that I don't have shade anywhere to work with its that wedding ceremony to decide to get married in the hill in the middle of a gigantic field because it's beautiful and oh but their ceremony was at noon and so you've got to figure out what to do and so the first thing that I d'oh say oh let's go edgy black and white okay so I just wanted you to know the option is there okay go fashion embrace it known modification but what I would probably due for a portrait honestly works well for pretty people yeah pretty people yes I wouldn't let her shoot me like that don't you like the manly contrast please alright so at least what I want to do is get her face out of the drawer it's on light so I turned her around that's all I did was one eighty turned around now one of the problems we do run into with this solution is that her hair is blonde and it goes really over exposed depends on how important that is to most clients aren't going to say anything eight to put sometimes it's really severe so I have had it so severe that they look like they have halos especially if they have kind of like messy blond hair and just this glowing mess so don't get me wrong there are times when it doesn't look good now one of the issues you ran into yesterday was trying to get really bad light which we're standing on concrete it's not white it's kind of thing just like gray and so if you look closely at the catch lights in her eyes you can see the concrete reflecting in the bottom of rise I don't have a reflector here actually looks pretty it looks pretty decent you know it's a little bit flat last flex a little bit of contrast but not too bad so but let's take a look at some of the other options let's say it didn't have that natural phil from below so the first thing we have is the mistake that most people use have when they use a reflector will think okay silver reflector I need to fill and light and they catch it at full power and it puts a intense contrast e beam of light on her face the problem is it's not flattering in yuzhou causes people to squint and I know that when I first started my business I did this I was just like oh I'm building up the light it's not flattering so instead what you want to do is instead of using that center being that it's catching you feather which means you use and ej you're using the agile a so I had eric just turn and not upper down but turn away from the subject and I caught the edge of reflectors you still get a little bit of fill a little bit more light compared to this so here's the first one and feathering guys feathering is used with your soft boxes endure reflectors feathering is think of your photo shop brush you have a hard edge brush or you khun put the softness up and feather that edge so this right here is like painting in with a photo shop brush with a hard edge this right here is you catching that outside soft, smooth kind of radiant transition and you in between and anything in between yeah, so you're amy and the intensity the hard part past her not on her dress or face so uh another mistake follow this rule of thumb anytime you're reflector is the main source of illumination on that subject's face you want that so that reflector above the subject's head said you're casting a downward angle of light in this instance this is what I see many people do is they hold the reflector underneath her chin now later on an overcast like I did have the reflector underneath her chinks I'm just popping a little bit of light in her eyes because that's just feeling a little bit this is the main source of light on her face and so when it's underneath its monster like it's very unflattering it's letting underneath the chan underneath the nose on beneath the cheeks and so we've done is we've raised the reflector above her head and what I wanted you to know here is when you stellan assistant or whoever you have holding the reflector just touched him light reflect light back in it matters how far to the left or right or behind or wherever they are so this is when eric is standing further off to the left of the frame here because you'll notice the downward angle of the shadows so you can see by the shadow on her nose that that reflector was high up into the left of the frame here okay, well that's why I really like this for men especially because a lot of times like outdoors especially on a sunny day it's super flat it doesn't really bring out a lot of masculine qualities so I will have somebody hold the reflector but hold it off to the side to give more shape and dimension to the face but in beauty photography a lot of times I'll do flat light and if you think about if you work in the studio paramount light where the may be the beauty dish or the soft boxes right overhead and get that little butterfly of light underneath the nose it's pretty flat but it's high up because you want to carve out the cheekbones and the jaw line same things we did hear I just had eric stand almost right behind me with the reflector high up and so you see get a lot less shadow on the side of the face and to flatter look but it's also nice and I like how it carves out her clavicles that's why? Well so let's another solution now see the difference between these two the difference between these two is this a silver to the quality of light there it's a little more contrast, and he is not using that silver a full effect, it's feathered silver imagine if you're doing it full effect there and then this is white, much softer, much gentler. It doesn't have as much intensity, though, so if you're in a dimmer situation, you're trying to catch more light, and it might have to be a silver if you're trying to brighten up the face. So I like that. Uh, the only note that I wanted to say here is that from using silver, if you're trying to light the entire body, you back up really far because it has more intensity and it can spread out and you can catch late. So it's like somebody's underneath the tree and the closest pool of light is, like, ten feet that way twenty feet that way, you might use a large silver reflector. However, if you need to be really close to the subject and want to light them full body, you'd probably be better off using a white at that point. And so this is when it's white close up. Okay, we'll take a look at a couple other things in this instance, this is when we're using a natural reflector, and this is when you want to go on location, you look around and you look for a white wall hit by the sun or a white moving van hit by the center any neutral colored surface being hit by the sun and you put your subject opposite that so for me it was a large white wall is our fake quite well, but it was behind my back, so you put the light source behind your back and you photographed towards a subject that's what you have here nice, soft and even all right now another option I'm keeping moving through all the different options we have here is another option, so we've got bright sunlight on her face I can use a diffuser and the diffuser that we recommend for inexpensive and easy to use solution is a seven foot shoot through westcott parabolic umbrella pops up, one person can hold it it's less than one hundred dollars so even he's out the contrast on the face, it softens notice it doesn't actually change the direction of light because there's still more of a highlight on her nose there's still a little bit of shadows in her eyes but it's much softer and so those highlights aren't as bright in the shadows on his dark. It evens out the overall contrast exposure of the scene, but I'm looking at this and if you look, she doesn't really have any defined catch it's in her eyes, she has a little bit from what the concrete to the side so the real catch is actually where the direction of that light is which is off to the left hand side so I have heard ahead, turn and look up towards the light and you could actually move your camera angle so that when she's facing you should be looking at the light in this in this case I just had her turned her head and I'll do that I have people moves that they have catch lights and better directional light on their face I did one other variation of this instead of having her having to turn and look uh I got her to sit on a bench and I stood up on a stool so now because the light sources overhead when she looks up she's catching the light from the overhead sky which is why she has those nice big defined catch lights where the she was looking straight at me the light is overhead and even though it's soft it's still overhead we're missing those catholic and she had bigger shadows in her eyes so having to sit down and look up she's catching the overhead light also her eyes of big whatever's closest to the cameras the caramel looks largest so in this case if she's sitting down looking up at you her eyes will be closest if you want to emphasize the eyes this is often a good solution uh, the next thing that I would do is put her in the shade. That's, actually, probably the first thing that I would do if you do have shade. If you're not in the middle of a field, just put someone in the shade. In this case, we had the natural reflectors from the concrete. So that's we doing nothing it's natural, full from the concrete. But if you didn't have that, I would do the same thing as we did when he put this under the back of her head, grabbed the silver reflector. Grab the white reflector, hold it above your head. Cast that light down. Um, to give direction of light to her face. That would be fine as well. Um one other everything when you confined shade know that there are two distinctly different types of shade. Not all shade is the same. So let's say that there's a garage and somebody is just standing on the shadow side. There's nothing over there. Head it's just the shadow cast by the side of the building. That's called open shade because there's nothing above their head. And so that open sky actually is a direction of light. There was still be light from above, even though it's not direct light because they're in the shade. And what that will do if you look here a little bit see how there's late on the side of her nose and light on the top of her face and the left hand side of the face looks a little blue because it's from the open sky the right hand side of her face is actually that concrete being filled in a little bit. I'm fine with this picture because of that, phil, it doesn't bother me that much there's still catch lights in her eyes because of the concrete. I know that if that concrete wasn't there, I wouldn't like it there'd be no catch lights and it would basically just highlight the brow on the left hand side of her face so it wouldn't do anything for me, but I just want to see the difference I had to take maybe what three steps back into the doorway and you can always find a doorway whether it's a church or an event and what you're having her do is stand in the doorway so there's no light coming in from the left or the right or from overhead a black self overhead and so it creates a tunnel and it's basically like window light where your backs to the window in the subjects in front of you so it's just flat lit or putting a soft box right behind you and photographing straight onto your subject so it kind of flattens out the life so it's all from straight ahead, and it just changes the quality of light a little bit. And this is the very last one for me, for this direct sunlight here who have direct sunlight on her face. I pop open my diffuser, but notice again that just because you defuse that light doesn't mean it's good, it softened it. But she's got a little bit of darkness or kind of dead spots in the eyes, it's not as flattering, so I would add, fill the wood out a reflector before we had the concrete, which was really nice it was filling in from beloved ones. If you don't have that, I might take a white reflect or a silver reflector from below, because it's not the main source of illumination is just feeling a little bit. So in this instance, we took a white reflector, had some nice wind and there and so it fills in and gives her a little bit more of a catch light it's flattering. I like this photo is very fashion. Yeah, yeah, there was another one that flapping the reflector she didn't even notice no, it was windy. Oh, you just know it was that I think there was one without, but I had to pick the the wind blew we won because I was like I need some of my fashion stuff in here uh so they have all of the notes here okay, so now we're gonna beat up that sunlight ready because I mean a lot of the time we have a million different ways to do that, but sometimes you get on location and you just don't have someone to hold the reflector or it's so windy you're afraid you don't want to put it up on the stand and have it blow over there's a million reasons why you wouldn't necessarily be able to use that so there is an option to use your flash unfortunately, when you put your flash on, you're limited to your maximum six speed on your camera. So if remember lindsey's photos she's shooting pretty quick here in some of the outdoor ones one thousand three twenty eight hundred some of them a little bit earlier shoo shoo in like two or three thousand shutter speeds that's way, way fast doesn't synchronize with your flash anymore so we're tied to an aperture of f sixteen so if you see our audience over there they got caught in the line of fire you can see all of them super clearly because we're shooting at such a stop down aperture like f sixteen that everything is in focus this is great for showing off everyone in the background not so great if you're photographing someone and you don't want all the clutter in the background or you don't want the busy structures the busy trees you don't want to see the guest of the wedding party so what you need to dio is closed down to two point eight cousins you issued a two point eight everything beautiful and out of focus right? The only problem is when you do that you are massively massively over exposed we basically closed down about five stops so we need to speed up our shutter speed equal to that to get a normal exposure again so here's what we get so here's our shift same exposure now we have that super shallow depth of field. The only problem is we have a ridiculously fast shutter speed that's as fast as my camera will go well the cool thing in your with your flashes you can enable something called auto f p mode so basically when you go over your shutter speed or your maximum shutter speed it will automatically switch mode on in your flashing camera that instead of doing one burst of light it will pulse multiple multiple times over the span of that fraction of a second so almost acts like a constant light allowing you to use super fast shutter speeds well beyond that you can normally do with a stroke this doesn't work with studio strobes it only works with speed lights and most of you guys, if you get out your camera menus in canon it's going to be on your flash menu night kind it's gonna be inside your camera body menu enable auto f p mode if you if there's a two fifty three twenty just do auto f p to fiftieth of a second enable that and forget about it. When you use studio strobes the next day, it won't go on when you use a speed light under two fifty of the second, it won't go on. If you do go to something like this where you want that, shall it up the field with the fast shutter speed, it will automatically turn on for you. You go back under your shutter speed, it'll turn off so just said it once and forget it and you'll be able to do things like this. She'll be able to get that shot with a flash at ridiculously high shutter speeds, which is awesome because allows you to get that creative, shallow depth of field the same time, though you can get really fun with this and you can take these flashes off camera. So this is on camera flash doesn't really look too bad. This is one of the few times I don't mind on camera flash because we can do it out in the middle of the day. If you'd taken off camera though we get that nice direction and quality of light we've got actually three flashes now set up in a silver parabolic umbrella because I want to be able to pull it way back and one of the drawbacks of this function is that it does sap a lot of the power so you are able to get a fast shutter speed to turn down the lights on the world through your ambien exposure but it's going to stop the powers I wouldn't do this all day I would do this selectively and it's nice if you've got a couple that you can and stack up so they help each other out one last shot I wanted to have some fun with it we had our subject our model stand on top of a bench we have light in him with a giant parabolic umbrella were shooting into the sun and mind you when we were out there yesterday if you guys were watching the sky didn't look that blue with your naked eye you looked up and it was a white sky because it was that bright and over exposed so just to give you an idea what you can do with this this neat feature is with a couple speed lights you can really overpower the debt this sky turn it blue more blue than you see with your naked eye so it's really really a powerful technique all right, so we're going to try to wrap this up in the next five to ten minutes, we're going to kind of see it through these you've got dappled light and over overcast day, so I'm just gonna quickly go through these again in such questions and doesn't make sense feel free to ask us after the break uh, dapple lights mix light on his face you can't get everything in the exposure, the highlights go too bright or the shadow and the shadows go too dark either wise. So, um one day you could try to do is at least move him around either get him all and highlight were all in shadow as much as possible and then filling with a reflector so it's a little less objectionable but still not ideal. And so my solution would be to pop a diffuser overhead. Just soften the light quick it's it's okay, it's a little flat. Perhaps I'd give him catch lights by adding a reflector underneath. I could do that as well. This is white reflector and that silver noticed even though the silver in this instance is not being hit by direct sunlight, this is just from the diffuse light overhead he has bottom like his neck is the brightest part of that frame and you'll see the shadows going up from the collar there so that's, what I would recommend is pay attention just like oh, no, I'm filling in the late in the eyes and it's. Okay, because it's not the main source of illumination. Well, it's still not here, so just just be careful. Just be aware of the light. But another option is let's. Say you don't have a diffuser on you and your stuff with the situation anything around you that's neutral it could beauty's a cardboard for me. I use use white foam core or the bottom side maybe the black side of a reflector. I put over their head and it blocks it off. So it looks like he's in the shade here versus in these other pictures. Like something like that. You can tell he's in his environment it's, it's. A different feel. And, of course, you can block over overhead and add a reflector knight, I like this one. You know, this was one of them that that that drew me. But you can also use flash. Yeah, you can really quickly overpower it. So we have really low shadows and really high highlights. One thing you can do is have your flash on camera and that's teach, yell down. There's even way down. So your flash, normally a tt I was going to try to give you an even nice exposure so it's going to try to overpower everything so it gives you a flat exposure on the face and get rid of all the dappled light? It doesn't really do us a lot of favors here was kind of like using that silver reflector still not so much a good solution, so I turned down the flash power almost all the way, and that gives me a much more natural kind of look this time we have the diffusion overhead to kind of eat up a lot of that pattern, and then we're just pushing light into the face to get a nice, even exposure. This again is with the diffusion overhead, the flash off camera with a silver umbrella now, so we kind of changed the direction a little bit flat light. Now we're seeing a little more shape to his face and boom, there you go so really quickly on camera and off camera it's going to give you a lot more even exposure, but you're just noticing we're still kind of defusing or blocking the light overhead, defusing it, embraces it, you can see a little bit of the light on the shoulders and the hair. If he was a total black bloc like here you're going to see that you're totally gonna isolate him from his scene so it's really kind of you want to pop him out or make him look like he's in there a little bit and it doesn't have to look like it's a flash photo it's very very natural all right so the last thing that we did was photographing in a drab overcast day and so the main point that I want everyone to know is that even on an overcast day there's a direction of light so in every scene depending on where the person's facing and where they turned the light will look different so this is when she's turned towards the wall which means she's facing that wall it's kind of eating up the light think of it like negative phil you never used that before like a big black negative phil cardio eats off the light and gives you shadow so this is awful like not just crappy like horrendous like this since the situation so instead of facing the wall I just turned her around she's facing out toward the open sky even on an overcast day if you have a large white wall it'll still give you fill it won't be a strong but that might be the direction of light so I turned around it's not horrible but there's still shadows in her eyes I don't really have a catch life so my first solution would be at a reflector. And this is when it's okay to put a reflector underneath the chin. A menacing. Since I used the white reflector, when I tried silver, it gave me a little bit of bottom, like, a little bit too much. Now, here I have the reflector just out of my frame. It might even be a little bit of phil for me. I was trying to fill in under her eyes. So let's say that it flattens out the face too much. Maybe if someone who's a little heavier and you feel like it, it gave too much highlight underneath their chin. You could just drop the reflector down. Just back it off a little bit. All right, now, let me show you a couple other things in this picture. Take a look at the two here. Okay? This is when she's just standing in open shade. Okay, she's just standing in the shade there, nothing above her head. In this next picture I asked it was either john or eric toe hold a piece of black foam core or a black reflector above her head. You see the differences? There isn't overhead light in this one. The light is reflecting off of whatever is around in the environment, so you don't have the highlights on her nose and on her cheeks, in the shadows, in her eyes, it flattens it out, and so the direction of light is around, and this is one of the most commonly use solutions that I have in one of the reasons I like it is when I'm trying to fake that a date isn't driving overcast and lighten it up because I blocked off the light and her face I have to open up, and so I went from one two fifties of a second toe one one hundredth, and look how the background lightens up a bit, so that would be my solution. But eric actually has ah, flash solution so we can go ahead and add some flash here. Here's the first thing open shade again, a really bad light, really not fair to the model we can just simply pop open umbrella with an off camera flash. I mean, I don't care for use in manual mode or to tl mode just bring that direction of light off and get those catch lights essentially same thing we're doing with the reflector when you bring that off, you do get control of the ambient light. This is kind of bringing in that silver reflective of the left we still have some shadows under there so we're just gonna bounce those up just a little bit with the silver reflector and you're gonna notice in the background too that if I slowed down my shutter speed just like she was blocking off overhead it brought the background remember that are shutters be controls ambient light so we could have just slowed our shutter speed down and brought up the background as well so you want to keep in mind your environment and also your subject right over here is the fun one this is kind of a little more advanced at some time in the end of the day so we brought in a couple flashes we brought our male model in here again drab, horrible overcast light we popped on one flash manual behind no jail nothing we've got john hiding in the leaves over there and this light coming over the shoulder is going to mimic the son I promise. So in this next photo we simply put on two full cuts of cto gel so that's two of the thickest of these oranges gels that we've got and that gave us a very, very warm life now there's a reason I did two of them were looking at the light source so it's going to overexpose if you remember when we over expose our blue sky it gets less saturated, it becomes a pastel if I had one orange gel in here as it gets over exposed, you'd barely noticed the color, so by using extra jell more than you might think you need as it gets over exposed it still retains a lot of the saturation you'll notice though, eric there's environment but your face still looks like crap on this guy because there's no light still that overhead shady light what we're going to do is just manual flash from behind bring a silver reflector from the front to bounce some of that light in just like lindsay was bouncing natural light and we can bounce our fake natural light and and then we can slow down our shutter speed a whole bunch to let that ambien like come up so all of a sudden it looks like a nice sunny day, some sun in the background he's well lit and we could go really fun with it to hear there's r r we now added an umbrella rather than a reflector no longer have a reflector holder now we have a lot more control of that direction of light we're not trying to catch the light and bounce it back anymore now I could just place the umbrella right where I want it to and it's going to give me that line of that line of light all the time I like this shot, though in my mind I saw more of a sunset rather than like a beautiful warm day, so he spent up our shutter speed cut down or ambient light and that's what we ended up the day with, so we've got a strong, nice directional light on him makes him look good, and we have that beautiful background light, and the funny thing is, we started with crap that's where we ended, and so I guess my call to you guys as well and to everyone watching, um, if you've watched the last few days and you would like a quick reference guide for yourself, of course there's our book, but this would be a great part to keep in your mind, bookmark this so that whenever you need a refresher before a wedding or before an event over before something where you think you're going to run into a bad lighting situation, just if you just watch this part, it gives you a solution for everything so you can jog your mind kind of bounce around just as extra preparation before you have to photograph that wedding or whatever the event, maybe so I think that's a nice summary of everything that we've done from now we're going to take a break, but we're going to go on tio kit next and then we're going to be done with these crappy lighting situation, so I would say, if you have your questions, ask them now or forever hold your peace or just come from other parts of the book, yeah, yeah, we'll be around for that as well, so after that it will be post, so come back questions, all right? There are a lot of questions coming in on the gear and the kids, so we'll save that for the next section, but there is one that I can ask right now and it's from mamma's fun shooting wide open at one point four two point two what are the guidelines for depth of field? Can you talk about how far back you have to be to make sure all the faces and focus your it's a millimeter it's a hair? So actually just going to be a nerd there's, an iphone app that will tell you this you could rejection iphone app that in it you can say your distance, your focal length and your aperture, and it will tell you how much of depth of field you have and he's absolutely correct at one point four as close as you can get to your subject, whatever your minimal spoke with focus distances for that particular lens it's going to very I believe it was something like at eighty five one point four at minimum focus distance I mean it was two feet of it were first I mean definitely less than an inch it was fractions let's put it this way if you focus on their eyelashes there I will be out of focus I think it was something like crazy and if someone has this app mind son on me it was something like point one six of inch like something like tiny tiny and a ce faras your distance to them your lenses no matter how much money you spend on them are going to perform their technical best ifyou're pixel peeping at wide open so if you buy one point two lens and you're standing way back and you're trying to get a group photo with everyone in focus at one point two you're going to get a crappy quality photo than if you just went to f four five six and stepped back and got everyone and focus so that one point two is generally for the out of focus area toe look really nice and smooth but also that selective focus on the eyes in the face so shooting wide open is muchmore it's much more beneficial if you doing portrait's three quarter that kind of stuff over group photography because as soon as you pull back your losing image quality, you're not doing yourself any favorite one to shoot in a group from ten feet away

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Lindsay Adler

Fashion photographer Lindsay Adler has risen to the top of her industry as both a photographer, educator, and Canon Explorer of Light. Based in New York City, her fashion editorials have appeared in numerous fashion and photography publications including Marie Claire, Elle, InStyle, Noise, Essence, Zink Magazine, Rangefinder, Professional Photographer and dozens more. As a photographic educator, she is one of the most sought after speakers internationally, teaching on the industry's largest platforms and most prestigious events.

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Erik Valind

Erik Valind is a freelance photographer, born and raised on the Florida beaches, now living in New York City. He specializes in commercial lifestyle photography and environmental portraiture with airy and energetic imagery defining his style and vision. 

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topics covered in this class

Lighting

Ratings and Reviews

Victor van Dijk

Besides all the more or less 'technical, theoretical stuff', the greatest thing I'm taking away with this outstanding course is the plain joy and FUN of trying all sorts of (crappy) lighting solutions!! Speaking for myself, and I suppose also many others, as an 'advanced beginner', I strongly tend to end up to my eyeballs in all technical nitty-gritty, gear 'n' stuff, that I totally mis out on all the sheer FUN of trying out, and often 'muddling through' all kinds of lighting setups! Such a joy to see the fun exchange between Lindsay and Erik! Really catchy. There should be more classes and courses like this, redirecting students to what it's actually all about: sheer creativity and fun! Having said that, Lindsay and Erik demonstrate that there is hardly any crappy light situation that can't be overcome by creative thinking. And more often than not, it doesn't have to be high-tech or difficult! They really showed an exhaustive list of crappy light situations AND their solutions. And I highly commend Lindsay and Erik for their fun energy, and even more important, pragmatism and frankness. I recommend this course to ANY photographer AND videographer, no matter 'beginner' or 'highly advanced'! Lighting is the basis of it all, and most of the time, it isn't perfect...! I highly re

Julie Addison

I thought I understood about light before I took this course. How wrong could I be? I have re-watched this course over and over and I just love it. Quality of light, direction of light - so many crappy light situations. Learning how to actually set a white balance instead of purely relying on the camera presets and learning colour correction by the color checker was also invaluable to me. This course is so affordable. I would recommend it to anyone from beginner to advanced as you will get more out of it than you think. I love the way Lindsay and Erik work together. No right or wrong way - just showing the differences in their styles to accomplish the same end result. Well done guys. Now to have more courses by Erik would be great. Again, can't' thank creative live enough and Erik and Lindsay for this course. Love, Love, Love It!!!!

a Creativelive Student

I hope I can tune in tomorrow. Erik and Lindsay, you guys were awesome today. Some of the things I needed some refreshing on but you definitely had a way of educating. I thought the demos were great and really validating. Light is a difficult thing to keep on your good side, especially with me, someone who primarily uses ambient and available lighting scenarios. This course is great and I'm planning to tune in tomorrow because I really want to see what you have in store for outside. Best of luck guys!! -Sim

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Recap of Shoot

Recap of Shoot

Lesson Info

23. Recap of Shoot

Lessons

Class Introduction

Crappy Lighting Conditions: Direct Sunlight

Crappy Lighting Conditions: Fluorescent and Mixed

Crappy Lighting Conditions: Low Light

Crappy Lighting: Dappled, Backlit, and Overcast

Setting Your Camera Up for Crappy Light

Shoot: Fixing Fluorescent Lighting

Focusing and Shooting Modes

Shoot: Mixing Daylight and Tungsten

Getting Started with Flash

Shoot: Low Light without Flash

Shoot: Low Light with Flash

Recap and Q&A

Crappy Lighting Condition: Backlight

Crappy Lighting Condition: Low Light Outdoors

Shoot: Direct Sunlight

Shoot: Direct Sunlight with Shade

Shoot: Direct Sunlight with Flash and High Speed Sync

Shoot: Dappled Light with and without Flash

Shoot: Open and Covered Shade

Shoot: Overcast without Flash

Shoot: Overcast with Flash

Recap of Shoot

Scenario Kit: Event

Scenario Kit: Wedding

The Next Step Slideshow

File Managment and DNGs

Creating Color Profiles

Noise Reduction in Lightroom

Using a Color Checker

Post Production: Basic Adjustments

Post Production: Smart Objects and Color Processing

Class Materials

Lindsay Adler

Erik Valind

topics covered in this class

Ratings and Reviews

Victor van Dijk

Julie Addison

a Creativelive Student

Student Work

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