Lessons

Lesson Info

Scenario Kit: Event

So I teamed up with expo imaging because a lot of what helps me conquer copulating they create. So I have, um, at both being agent adirama, if you search lindsay adler, it'll come up. Um, I think they call it lousy lighting. No one lets me swear, apparently. And in product names oh, which makes them and it'll have an expert to skin it. It'll have flash bender, and it will also have the gels. Um, so there's a kit for the seventy seven and there's a kid for the eighty two. So if those kind of things like man that's something I'm missing, then it's significantly reduced price because his bought as a kid. But we're going to cover all the gear right now that you can kind of find in our gear bags, but also the things that we recommend, regardless of the type of photography you do. So we're actually going to start off with eric covering his events kit. So if he's photographing events, which would be concerts or red carpets or I mean a wide variety of things report fashion week basically, peop...

le moving in large bodies in a really crappy life without being over the control that light, and also this would apply for a reception many times. So go ahead you want talk about it? Yeah, so these are situations where you can't walk in and say, hey, eternal father tungsten lights for me I just want to use the window like this was one where you have to be prepared pretty much under any environment, so I'm just gonna go ahead and dig into my bag so let's kick this chair over just a little bit and this beautifully manicured table that we've been keeping clean through the last three days is now going to become a workbench, so I'd like to start off with a camera that helps I've got my d eight hundred here, which is great because a lot of times you are asked to do photo and video now whether you like it or not, we're in a fusion environment, especially as a working professional so they just think, oh hey does your camera do video? Can you do some of that for me and then that's the end of discussion if you leave it like that so this goes to crappy lighting it's a business tip for you photographers shooting out there we educate our clients on the best time of day to get the best photograph we also have to educate our clients on the best conditions to get video and still photography you may be able to use all these pieces of gear and techniques to get a nice photo but that flash isn't going to be able to bounce off the ceiling and warm the light to create a good video light so again that's a whole nother workshop but be prepared so I like to have camera bodies that can shoot photo and video so we start off with that and lindsay's five mark three will do the exact same thing so we've got equivalent gear she's gonna plop it on the table just we could make a bigger pile of the they can't catch up by the way people are nice it's like facebook page to think some people think I'm serious waken anybody great photographer make beautiful images regardless of the camera just the camera makes it easier a lot of times which is why I actually held on to try not to buy the newest cannon camera that was always coming out but as a professional a lot of times it's worth it cause it makes it that many more shots you get in focus or that much more you can crop in if you need to so it becomes worth it so you have the five mark three um three hundred so yeah on that note I still shoot my d seven hundred which is almost its fifth birthday is coming up now on jobs and events all the time it's lighter it's files are smaller so I don't have to worry it was storing as much I don't need the video function than the video function here is necessary at all s o I still shoot the seven hundred lots it's coming up on ancient eh? So it's not the gear I didn't feel compelled upgrade my camera body for almost five years if there was a job or needed medium format I would rent it there was a job where needed a faster motor drive I would rent it lends protego bar lenses adirama cal you meant they all got him. How about lenses? Lunch choice yeah we conduct a lot of choice really quick so the twenty four to seventy or if you guys have a crop sensor out there this is going to be a seventeen to fifty five so if you've got like a seventy or the nikon d three hundred seventeen to fifty five two point eight on that smaller chip is going to give you the equivalent range as a twenty four to seventy and the twenty four to seventy is a great event lands because often the heaviest thing in your bag or on your belt or whatever kind of event kid carrying case you have is going to be your glass so you're not gonna want to walk around with a seventy two, two hundred and twenty four to seventy and a kid of primes because I mean you're going to have twenty thirty pounds on your back bumping into people at these events so the twenty four to seventy gives you a nice wide perspective allows you to get that wide establishing shot of whatever venture out. Also, the seventy millimeter gives you a pretty good medium telephoto, so you can zoom in on maybe a presenter, a speaker, a band, a brighter groom. So if I'm shooting event twenty four to seventy is there all the time, and I know a lot of photographers on that should events also will shoot twenty four two one o five the problem or the downside of that is it's actually a four? Oh, so if you're shooting in low light situations where you would liketo have, you know, a couple extra stops of later, you'd like to have the ability to shoot it. Two point eight, you lose that. But if you're saying I've got, I can only take one lens and one camera, then maybe that give you a little bit more range, especially if you expected to be able to zoom in and get some tighter shots, another consideration as well as we're using these high megapixel cameras. If you shot twenty four to seventy, if you did have to crop in a little bit, you could sew it za trade office, figure out what fits you best. Yeah, absolutely. And to put it back into perspective, that five point that point for thursday three were mumbling over over here, but you basically lose one stop of light compared to a two point eight, so that would mean to get the equivalent photograph you go from sixteen hundred s o two thirty, two hundred, esso and lindsay showed us in the church that it's really not that big of a deal, so if you need one one, you know, one size fits all approach, don't be afraid to do that. The place you wantto kind of look to upgrade from is the variable aperture lenses you're going to notice that all of our lenses are a constant two point eight or constant for all the way throughout, and that means if I'm zooming in and zooming out, my f stop isn't changing, which makes it a lot easier that makes it difficult to run and gun, especially an event because you're like, okay, I got to get the establishing shot action's happening here, you zoom in an office and you just lost a stop in the third alight manual. So just kind of look to upgrade to something with a constant aperture, so the next thing we like is the expo disc we've got that guy here lindsay roll studio style I am a very utility here I literally wear this or tie it around my belt loop through the entire event because you guys saw earlier how on the night connie really just hold down the white balance button and pop off a calibration shot out the light and you're shooting and you're perfectly custom white balance for that location so it might look kind of dorky or like I've got a flavour flava necklace on whatever it is I can sit there and get custom white balances all day really quickly so the expo disc has is invaluable in those nasty mix, light and environments we get asked to shoot events in so the next thing is the rogue correction kit if you're just tuning in and you've been here all day, you've seen there and heard this mentioned one hundred times it really is one of those utility things um so this allows us to gel are flashes, I'll let the guys get a zoom in here and we're talking events too I mean event could be, um a banquet and a fluorescent lit auditorium or something like that, so keep that in mind we're talking events broadly yeah, so it would be like this is this is the social hall of a church. You might be asked to come in here and photograph an event or a pot luck or something like that for your church group on organization that you're with or you're gonna have a wedding reception or you can have a bar mitzvah somewhere. Robot mitzvah on dh then you're going to be in these kind of environments where you've got these high ceilings, nasty fluorescent light. What do you d'oh? You've got an on camera flash we've talking to off camera, you can bounce, but whatever you do, you're gonna have to correct that light coming out of your flash that your skin tones match the rest of the tones in the entire room. So the road correction gel kit is definitely something that I've always got my backpack and something I wanted to add to this to my kid, and I'm curious to hear what your answer is, um when I do events, I have a bad back, and I don't like to carry a lot of gear, and I'm smaller I don't feel bad for her, um and so one of things I definitely hated was, um, straps that would go around my neck. Because it would get tangled or it would put a lot of pressure. So you definitely want to get a strap that at least we'll go around your shoulder around the hip. You can quickly shoot over like this or so that's. What? He has a solution. And actually, they're both rapid straps. Okay, I actually have thiss one sniper, different brands, brands, same concept. Um, so I have a son, sniper, but a lot of times when I'm shooting a flash as well, I would have spider the holster. So what? The hospital holsters. It's basically built it's black it's it's flush to your hips. But what's nice about it is I can have it so that it has little adapters so I can put the camera on one hip and a flash on the other. So if I need to have my hands for your need to be able to, you know, put the flash on this hip and then attached my flash bender, I'm not trying to figure out howto hold things in attached things because it gives me that flexibility. So that's what I found most comfortable for me and I have different sizes. And I found that it was pretty snug and then if I were kind of moving around quickly, I didn't feel it like bouncing so that's that's what I suggest that this would be another great solution? Yeah, you know, again it's different applications, so I do like the spider holsters, and I really like I wasn't aware that you could do the flash on the other side, but I stay away from kind of like the lens holsters on my hips and then the flash on my hip, because if I'm shooting an event, a lot of the times, I'm sneaking through a crowd. So like there's some dancers, I have to kind of sneak through the people dancing to get the shot of the bride and groom, or if I'm at a concert, I might have to wade through a bunch of people to get the shot up front. So having something stuck here makes me as wide as two people sometimes it's really difficult to get through crowds, so that might work for lindsay. My preference is this is the sling the audio guys are gonna love. This is the reason I didn't wear this yesterday. Otherwise you would catch me all the time with a sling on one of my location outdoors because lindsay put our stuff down and has an assistant to pick it up. I'm usually one man band a lot of time so I have to have this on me if I put it down someone who picks it up isn't going to give it back to me at the end of the day so having this having the strap works really well and as I move around I can come through a crowd okay excuse me I'm coming through here we're bringing back around I can step out that way so I mean it gives you that versatility and at the same time they have little bumpers here that you can then bring down and lock your camera in so it will stay in position as you're moving around on your hip as if it were on a spider hole stir and so then it is just a counter or another thought something to think about how these usually work is they mount into your tripod male so if you think you're going to need to balance on off of a trifon, that might not be the best solution if you're thinking that you want to be able to quickly go onto a tripod so the spider holsters also having adapter so you can actually have a tripod mounted on their trail to get it on and off easily but um something else that I've done as well as I have this better holsters um and I'm worried about the crowd you can also put that hand grip on so that if I need to quickly had a hip, I could do that. But it's, it's, all preference there's, no lake, right answer for explore both options again, going to the camera stores and stuff. Thank god there's still brick and mortar camera stores around because we need to be able to go in and touch some of this stuff before we buy it. So another thing to along the point of the tripod is this isn't necessary in the event kit, but you're going to notice I have ah, bracket on top of my camera, it's an l bracket right here. So, let's, you guys kind of get a zoom in on this it's a great solution it's made by really write stuff and I almost choked when I bought it it's a very expensive round piece of metal, but I've kind of come to terms with it now that I'm actually using it because it basically has artist swiss style mounts on both sides, so if I'm shooting here with my strap, I can leave the little cute screwed into the bottom and I can just plop it down on this side or if I don't have a strap it all, I can quickly mounted horizontally, take it off mounted vertically, I don't have to worry about the lens mount, the caller mount. I don't have to worry about taking this off and then having my camera awkwardly over here to the side or on the top the same time, it also gives me a lot of protection, so if I'm banging around, I'm not banging the bottom of camera. I'm banging pretty much steel armor on top of there, and it also has the grooves and stuff so that I can still hook in amman a pod mount or one of these d rings and stuff. So you look at it a first like man that's, a lot of money for a piece of metal, but then when you actually start using it, saves you a lot of time from horizontal vertical mode, protects your body and also gives you a lot of contact points, you know, them screw in accessories and another reason why it's sometimes, um, for the straps isn't a problem as far as the tripod mount is when I used to want to use a tripod mountains when I'm using a longer lens, well, I can still have attached the bottom, and I should ideally have my tripod mounts on the lens anyway, so it's not going to be a conflict. Okay, now is the flash bender now that they're coming out with more and more flash benders like this becomes a really, really prevalent question. I mean, I recommend just get the kit. I mean, they have a portrait, kid that gives you the big one for off camera portrait large one small one. The one that we used in the church is the is the actual small one. But if I need, like, a more versatile option like you no one stop shop. Eric, I'm have a budget. I'm gonna invest in one piece of equipment. I recommend the large one because as you see here, it's big enough to get me a nice, large soft light but it's small enough that I can still balance it on top of my flash. So if I go to the extra large one, the extra large one is really big. It becomes unwieldy, it's not something that was actually designed to go on top of your camera body. Most of the time, it was more for us. Portrait photographers, you know, in their ear. Give us something that we can take off camera. Give us something bigger. So what? This is great because it's versatile it can be used as a soft box off camera like we've discussed. And it's big enough that you could bring it in close and get a nice soft head shot it's also small enough that can be used on camera for an event so it's really, really versatile I can crank it down when I don't want ceiling balance let it up when I do want ceiling bounce you know really folded all over if I just want a front push alight so you're going to see a lot of flash benders out there I love the portrait because I use every piece of it but if you have to buy one large flash vendors there and I'm honest like this thing gets rolled up up in my back pocket so I'm running around bouncing, bouncing, bouncing I want some softer light I could just take this out put it on, put it back in my pocket and that's why I have an older one that's blue that has blue markings all over it from a blue jeans couple questions air coming in about the flash bender that's like the most inquisitive piece of gear. I think this whole whole of course from people and hornets messes wondering can use the flash bender soft box on camera shooting in portrait or in landscape or is it better so I'll show you do have to do a little afternoon, so thank goodness we've got we've got that ability on most of these flashes so here we are. We want to kind of keep the light source up, and if we're gonna go to a different mode, we're gonna crank this guy over it up like this, take off the jails that does complicate things so here's where he would kind of go into your your lands your portrait mode and he would still get it kind of up. You got up like this, or you could just bring it back around. And then he kind of spinning around back to the front like that. You go horizontal, so it does take a little doing, but you are able to switch between the two of them. And now lindsay's functioning is vanna throughout the day. Photographer model. Does he have an idea? Oh, cool. And what is your favorite one that you shoot with? Because people were wondering this is this is what you with that's when you do, I shot with that for like that was all that existed. And so recently and then I tried. This is much better, but I would use it more for portrait. It's. I mean, it is a little bit big for events and moving around, but I have I have more of a controlled situation so it's a better quality of light, for sure in my opinion, for what I'm doing so by better quality, she means it's bigger and softer and softer for that portrait going get that nice softer life on a mobile situation you're going to be more apt to use that as opposed to a small shooting through umbrella or an off camera. Well, the reason I do this is because I could always hold my flash, okay, I don't meet personally I was always totally happy from him I was always averse to stands because I was by myself and I didn't have anyone to watch it and early on in my career I had to stand and someone knocked it over and I didn't have the money to replace my flash so that was just a consideration for me early on and these in exists early on I had that what I was the loom inquest er soft little soft box that I could hold that just for me was the safest I knew we could watch my gear I could hold it with one hand it was something simple if though I have controlled situation then yeah, I would use a stand but in new york city the second uses stand it's a three hundred dollar permit so that's why I keep kind of going around in circles on and so I can get whoever my assistant is friend family who ever to hold it for something like this there's, no question. There's. A slew of questions on that. Sorry about that. But ali analysis is wondering how far away can you be from your subject using the flash bender? Does it still work wealth with full body? Or is it best for close up shots? Flash bender, it's, it's. Like any other modifier, the larger you get the modifier, the closer it gets to them, the larger inn relation. So I mean let's see your large one, for example here, like, if I want a nice soft portrait of lindsay, I could get it close. So in relation to her it's, nice and large, but I was going to focus on my face because the late doesn't have enough time to fall fall off right here, just going to be my face and think about, like the sun it's, a massive light source, but it's so far away you can cover it with your thumb. So in relation to your subject, it's tiny and becomes a very hard light. So this is great. But if you wanted that full body, lindsay could really kind of hold her hand out and probably hide the whole thing behind her hand perspective wise so the farther away it gets the smaller it's going to get so this is very much more of, like, a portrait three quarter thing. If you're gonna be doing full body, you're going to want a larger modify, right? Yeah, if you're going through a full body, assuming we do umbrella I've done in the past sixty inch umbrella, you can pop it up, and we showed earlier, you can really kind even light that way if you're thinking of going into that. Are you gonna cure zoom? Uh, make it oh, great question. Okay, so, yeah, this is kind of getting into the nuts. Symbols of really utilize, like, really getting the most out of this. Let me go ahead and fastened the top off here. That's a great question, because we didn't touch on it when we're using umbrellas. If you think about it, if you have a sixty inch umbrella. Um, what do you guys come? Grab the umbrella from the back for me? Please. Whenever it gets up here, I'll just kind of demonstrate this. You're gonna want to make sure that you using your entire modifier. So your flash zooms just like there's, just like your lens zooms at twenty four millimeters the light's coming very wide out of your flash at seventy millimeters tighter, one hundred millimetres really tighter, so you want to be able to fill this entire thing so it's only like twelve, ten inches wide so you want to use the whole thing and that's why they have that silver in there on the top it blocks the light yes, but what is going to do is really bounce down so if I were to zoom in my flash it would be shooting straight up on only hitting part of the silver and spreading out so I'm going to do my flash out to the widest setting usually twenty four millimeters and that's going to spread into this light into the interior here hit the entire top silver panel and then spread back down and out really evenly so the goal of this is to give us a larger, more even light so that's a great question we would zumar flash out to fill the entire thing and you consume flash with manual sweater sixteen plastic sleeve so yeah that's that's um annual thing whether you're on t l or you're on manual power output, you're gonna manually crank over left and right so good question I recommend one to would be ideal this is really where uh the kind of flash you purchase it becomes important because when you're doing event photography, you want to be on t t l mode when I go off camera shoot manual mode ninety nine percent of the time when I'm on camera shooting events I need t t l because I don't want to have to be doing the calculations bouncing off the ceiling bouncing off the walls all that kind of stuff that's it yes okay cool. Thank you very much so there are a lot of great flashes out there on the market and some of them are coming into the tt l round but I really recommend that you invest in one nice nikon cannon proprietary flash because it's going to have all the communication with your camera going toe to toe all the ti tl in the exposure compensation lindsey's been talking about and it's just going to give you it's a lot easier to use and invent kind of on camera uh setting so invested one really good one and then after that if you want to start supplementing with manual flashes and stuff go for it because when they're off camera you can set a manual or teo whatever but on camera that's the most important one to have on a t t l availability and so here's how I think of it um for events where I knew that I was just trying to modify the quality and direction of light on a subject's face than a lot of times I knew I could just get away with one flash but if I were tryingto either add another direction of flash like a hair light or to bring up the light in the room or the environment? Then I would start thinking multiple flashes and a lot of times in that case again it wouldn't have to be the tt l I could set it on manual in the room that we're in, for example, which was that fluorescent lit room and I could have them just bounce off the ceiling and so that was a great way to be ableto have, you know, very, very dimly lit for example, reception hall it would bounce off the ceiling no matter where I am it's still bouncing off the ceiling so that exposure for the ceiling would always stay the same and they did not have to be t ell, you set them on manual, but you would need, for example, a pocket wizard or something to trigger them, because if you have the old line of sight solutions, your camera would never see it um, anything like that so that's how I would think of it, I also as I progressed in my career, I would have assistance on the weddings of the events where I would have my main flash here, and then I would tell my assistant to stand always kind of at a forty five degree angle or kind of diagonal behind that subject so they would always have a hair light and it pumps up the production value, but that's something as ii moved on, it would give more separation and always looked like they had this kind of soap opera. Beautiful hair, light glow in every single shot. So that's, if you do have some, I'll help you out with that. Well, so this brings up something I wanted I touched on when I talked about the flash primary. I'm so glad you mentioned the off camera light an option with multiple flashes. Because this is realistically my normal event. Rick. So this is a little custom du hickey. I got here it's like a two dollars straight flash bracket on the bottom. So let you guys get a close up of that. It basically just screws into the bottom of my camera. Where a tripod mountain water my bracket would. And then it has an arm over here with the cold shoe. Just a place to hold some kind of hot shoe foot. And I keep a pocket wizard in here. This is the pocket wizard plus x it's. The new cost efficient ones they came out with. They don't know the fancy tt l they just send a signal downrange through walls, through water through metal of sixteen hundred feet away for a flash to fire, so I'll do this and I'll walk around and if we're at an event place or a concert I do this and I put these super clamp pleas to the rafters and zoom them in where I know the deejay or the singer is going to be and then I attach them to another pocket wizard set them on manual for exactly you know, whatever power I need to light up just that one person or the bride and the groom or just to bounce into the ceilings and then I forget about him and then I run around and I shoot the event like normal with my t t l flash on camera bouncing off the ceiling bouncing off the walls and then when the deejay comes on or the bride and groom get on the dance floor then I flip this guy on and with the cable here through the pc sink on the front door camera into this I am now bouncing off the ceiling getting beautiful tl nice even light on you and all my manual flashes whether they're one or ten are bouncing around and lighting up the room and the environment I can have gels bouncing into the ceilings and I can have hair lights and rim lights so this is the normal event what's going on so this is great because if more than one person is shooting this I know I'm gonna walk away with the unique image because we can all learn these basics and get that on camera flash, but when you add some off camera flashes like lindsay was saying with the assistant production value goes through the roof she's walking around shooting soap opera weddings with two flashes in an assistant, you know? And it looks like I just letting entire concert hall because I put a couple speed lights out there, so you know, this is going to come the bracket. Where did you don't even remember? I've had this bracket for, like ten years or something like that plus lick so it's just a little old piece of aluminum the rubber is literally disintegrated on the bottom, but check out how to rama be an agent of the big camera stores. Sorry, so it is a camera? Yeah, it's not like from a camera from home depot or anything? No, no it's, not totally. D I y it's definitely a camera bracket. Let me take it off. We'll let the guys, uh, get a super zoom on this guy, so if you look there, he was the robber this adjust to go to the bottom of your camera, okay? And it screws in the normal normal of attachment and this is just a cold shoe I mean it's, so old and just kind of ruggedly built made in taiwan doesn't tell us what brand or whatever, but I even put gaffer tape over the whole culture here so that it didn't start messing with like the feet of the flashes of the feet of the pocket wizards I would put in there so this is like is old archaic and cheapest piece aguirre's I've got so this is totally off brand that I've had for over a decade but it basically just anyway tow hook this up I used to take my pocket wasn't plus twos and just gaff tape them or now we could use a rubber band to put them on the top of my flash so before I had the bracket I was running around like this with the cable plugged in so I mean I would shoot weddings and I run around it got in the way of, you know, wrapping around this was one solution before I have the bracket so I'd be shooting here teach yell on top and then the pocket was there be sending a trigger to off camera lights, so but yeah guys two or three bucks do some research online or find a local camera store and I mean this is like, I mean someone someone online said that my camera look like the death star something like that really does after I'm done the rigging these things out it zone beast and I just wanted teo reineri a couple of things because I know that if you hear someone quickly saying a lot of names for things, this particular pocket wizard is pocket wizard plus ex so if you write down plus x, that means it doesn't give you tco capabilities. It's just firing so there's he's mentioned two and three there's there's a bunch of different ones. So keep this one in mind and something else for cannon. You don't have your thinking, the front it's on the side cool so lots of people don't even know what that thing is for until you've gotta plug in and outside, trigger something like that are hard line of flash in it back in the day before you had all these cool things you used to run really long cables from these pc sinks on your cameras to your strobes, and it'll nova trump packet like that on fire for me. What? I had one of those gigantic brackets where the flash was over here and then the court it was most unwieldy. I could just see you with nothing like driving a bus steering wheel. Yeah, it was just very difficult to have flexibility plus is exhausted by the end of the day for sure, okay, so we want to get into lindsay's wedding kit here, so I'll finish up really quick off camera capabilities. We literally just walked into this. You can have your pocket wizard plus exes, which just trigger manual flashes, so I go to set up now is the new lunar pro one lp one eighties. They're like two hundred bucks. They've got all the power is these guys. I slap a plus x on it and I clamp them light, stand them, put them everywhere, gives me a lot of off camera capability for a good price. Then I always have a couple of nikon flashes for the detail capability. And then, like we've been discussing thank you for pointing this out. There are different pocket wizards, these air, the tt fives, he's, the ones we've been using all day. These are the ones that allow me to have tol capability with nikon flashes. So these are great, too, because if I wanted that one off camera light, this is a more expensive option. But this would allow me to get the detail control off camera.