Lessons

Lesson Info

Simple Portrait Shot for Double Exposure

All right, Let's jump into it. So the first part of the shoot, basically what I'm doing, I've got a tethered capture here. We can talk about gear and things like that. If you guys have any questions at home, talk about you know what I'm doing. Why? I'm doing it. We've got three lights set up. As of now, we've got two lights on our back. Drop the's air just in regular reflectors And these air creating a nice white backdrop for us. We've got a medium sized soft box here. Pretty high up there. Now I'm shooting with the This is a canon five D mark three, and basically we're shooting tethered capture this morning, which really helps out any time you're doing a double exposure. Or to be honest, pretty much every time I'm in the studio, I shoot tethered capture because it's just like instead of looking at it, you know, a tiny little screen here You can look at your computer, which helps out a ton with, like, light levels, exposure, things like that. So we're gonna start off. Basically, I'm go...

ing to start off with an exposure. Alex, you ready? All right. Looking good. cool, and I can't see it on my screen, which is the only stuck part about double tethered capture. Um, basically, we're gonna be using our little monitor here to see what our exposures look like to start with. Um, so my main goal bring my monitor around here for you guys. My main goal is to get first a really great portrait of Alex using lighting that makes things interesting. And we're also going to be focusing on combining her with the ferns, which means we need a basically a way to combine those images together. And my idea with that is to shoot rather than, like, straight on to shoot with, like, a side profile so she can kind of have her head turned to the side. And the ferns were kind of, like grow out of the back of her head, making it a little more a little more interesting. So we're going to start off with that and we're gonna be adjusting our lighting here for a minute as well. I might take one of these background lights and put it on her hair as well. Just to get that a little bit more of a highlight there also. So, um yeah. Ready. Start, Alex, Go. Let's do it. Um, all right, if you want to bring your feet around this way, that'll be perfect. And then you can you look with your eyes, like, right around this direction there. All right. Perfect. Um, so we're starting this out, Basically getting a chin down a little bit more. Yeah. Maybe, Like, hunch forward, even there we go. Perfect. And then can you rotate your chest towards me just a little bit ago? All right. So in this stage, basically working with the lighting, trying to create something that's relatively interesting. Now, this is not like this is not like a commercial head shot. This is not like a beauty portrait, right? The whole this is, like, more in the arts section. We're doing double exposure, which is, like, this is like a artsy type of thing. Um, so I'm looking for a light that is a little bit mawr like dramatic and not something that's necessarily like, you know, this is not something you would use in, like a head shot of, like, a job interview or whatever this is like. So don't don't start off with that in mind when you're doing this? Because like, the whole idea here is to go with something a little bit more artistic. Um, this looks right. I'm gonna try playing around with one of my background lights here to bring some light into the hair. So we're just gonna grab one of these lights and basically bring it right over here. I'm gonna lower the power a little bit. It's set to expose for the background, which is pretty bright. So we're gonna just lower the power a little bit, kind of point this straight down and then bring it really high up. So it's basically just lighting Alex's hair here, all right? And the nice part with the modeling lights here, I can actually kind of see really easily what is being affected by our light as well. There we go. And everything that we're gonna be doing today is gonna be edited in Photoshopped. So if this light stand is in the frame a little bit, that's actually not a huge deal. We can totally remove the light stand. Um, no problem. All right, so we brought that up there to take one more exposure here we can see Our background is definitely less bright. But we do have mawr. Um, we do have more light in the hair. Um, for this You guys at home I'm using Capture one to tether my tether. My camera. Um, using capture software you can use, like, light room to tether your your camera to your computer. I'm using capture one for a couple of reasons. One, it's I've started using capture one about six months ago, and I just really, really love it. I think light rooms pretty good for Tyler. Capture Capture One is actually way better. Just it just does a better job. It doesn't tend to drop out. Um, and the main reason we're using it today is because it actually has an overly feature built into it, which will allow you actually see two exposures at the same time. We're not going to start using that just yet. We're gonna nail this portrait, but once we get that, you guys are going to see, like, how useful that really can be. Especially when you're trying to do something like a composite or a double exposure, which is what we're doing. OK, cool. I'm gonna go ahead and bring up the brightness from our light in the background. There we go. And the hair light as well. All right, so we're background light again. Now we're We've gone from, like, two lights down to one, so I'm gonna bring up the brightness here a little bit, and then we're gonna bring up the brightness of the hair light a little bit as well. And then here we go. Continue shooting. So at this point, basically, I'm just trying to create a really nice portrait and something that's gonna work for our double exposure. So it just suggested my lights made the background, like, a little bit brighter and then brought up the brightness of of my hair light as well. So, again, at this stage, we're basically working just to create a really nice portrait of our subject. And again, I'm not so concerned with, you know, the light stand in the shot and things like that. We can definitely remove those at any point in time. Um, all right, Alex, I'm gonna have you look even further this way if you don't mind. Cool and then head kind of like down in this direction. perfect. I'm gonna bring this out and lower this just a little bit, all right? It's weird. There's no music. I always have music during my photo shoots. This is like, the most silent photo shoot I've ever done. Like watching it movie with Not any volume, all right? Looking good. We can see there's a little bit too much highlight on her face out. Simon, actually, actually have you. Look, you get Yeah, Look, May right about here. Okay? Perfect. We're definitely looking to create some like, nice highlight and shadow here with Alex. Um Also, the back of her head here is going a little bit going a little bit dark, so I'm gonna bring in a go one of these little reflectors. Now, if you guys at home, you know are working and you only have a couple of lights, these reflectors are relatively inexpensive, and they do a great job of reflecting light. So I think a lot of people, you know, feel like they have to bring in a whole other light toe, kind of fill in some shadows here. But these guys, you can get for, like, 25 30 bucks, and basically, you just clamp them on a light stand right behind your subject and no reflect light back into your portrait. Um, so they're really good option for adding light, especially for Phil. Like you wouldn't want toe. I mean, this is not going to do a whole lot when it comes to like a main light source. But as faras fill, light goes, they can really do quite a bit. All right, cool. And we'll take another portrait, see how that looks. Hopefully our shadows air filled in. You guys can see the shadows air just a little bit more filled in. And I can always choose to make those shadows a little bit darker if I need to do that in, like, photo shop or whatever I'm using. But I always prefer if I do have shadows that that dark, I always prefer to lighten them up a little bit with my lighting. Just so I have a lot more options during post production. Um, alright, that light up there is not really doing anything. I don't I don't really I don't really like it. So we're gonna move this and this is just part of, like, the normal voter shoot. I mean, if you guys air, you know, doing your own chutes and things like that. Your house is or, you know, in your studio this is just like, you know, your normal, Like, let's play around with lighting. Let's make things look good right now, instead of appointing this light directly at Alex here when actually pointed up. So what kind of feathers down? Because I'm really We just want it kind of like hit her hair. And I'm because I have a modeling light on. I can see what's going on here. Sorry, my studio audience is like, I can't see anything. This is awesome, Aaron, um, we'll bring this up and put it right about there. Hopefully, we'll get some light kind of coming in, um, on her hair as well. And then we might get a little bit of flare from this also. All right, cool. Looking good. And I'm gonna bring our background light a little bit darker cause it's kind of blowing out or background just a little bit. All right, cool. It's just a little bit too dark there up. We're having some strobe misfire. If so, if you ever get like a dark frame. Just make sure to take a couple more portrait's or a couple more images to make sure that it's not like you're lighting because it's is That could be kind of confusing sometimes. All right, beautiful. And the light there, You know what I think I'm gonna bring? I really want to put a little bit more light into into our subject here, so we're going to just switch, are lighting up just a little bit. This is kind of like what I call the play around phase Guys like this is like, Honestly, it's like, Do I like that or doing not like that? That's like the entire criteria of when I stop. And basically what I'm trying to do was, like, bring a little bit more attention. Were hair, but still kind of create a dramatic portrait. Eso with that? Once we get that kind of like, set in place, that's when we actually, like start shooting for real. So I always go through like, a period of, like, 10 minutes of, like just getting the lighting right. And, you know, usually try to communicate that with your subject, your model like, you know, Hey, we're just gonna adjust our light for 15 minutes, like, stay there like, just gonna take a minute. And that way they know they can kind of, like, chill out for a little bit and we can weaken switch to, like, the actual photo shoot once or lighting is right. Hey, a question that came in that is related to that. What if you were doing this for for, like, a client shoot? And the question was, do you let them know that? Say, you're gonna be experimenting with the lights or if it was a regular shoot, the person was concerned that maybe it might look unprofessional if they were playing around a lot. Yeah, for sure. So in the industry would like movies and things like that. They have stand ins, you know, like famous actors, like they don't sit there on stage like while you know, the lighting people get, though they're lighting right. They get, they bring in people who, like have similar skin tone and similar hair and things like that. They get their lighting right with those stand ins and then bring those other people in. So if I'm ever doing like a really client shoot. Like if this was a celebrity here, there's no way I would be doing all this. Like while this person is like sitting there, what I would do is have a standing, like just a friend of mine Coming, you know, was similar. Skin tone, similar hair color, preferably and get all my leading right When you know my friends time and then you know, when it comes time for the clients have them coming into it. So definitely, like if it is like a really quiet shoot like, yeah, you want to get your lighting right before then And using like a stand in is totally It's a pretty normal technique generally. I mean, this class especially, was just like, you know, I figured the process of doing this would be pretty helpful for the students Is so rather than spending like an hour before the class getting my lighting, right, I was like, Oh, cool. Well, we'll just do this in the class, but yeah, on a photo shoot, right? Definitely. Do use a standard if you can't. Well, and also, as you said, this is, uh, like, experimental or your you know, this is very creative artistic shoot. So different scenario? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Now, if it's, you know, like a corporate shoot or something like that, you usually have, like, lighting setups like that. You just know we're gonna look good like a clamshell light with, like, a soft box on the top, in a reflector, on the bottom and, like, one light on the background. It's like That's gonna look good every time, all the time, and, like, you know, if that's what you're going for for the shoot that school. But in this case, we're kind of like we're going for something a little more artistic, so kind of like makes sense toe play around a little bit more. See you do that creative process. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, this is the whole This is like the This is the best part about photography. It's going like from something for me. Anyway, about this'd is the best part about photography. Everyone's like I don't enjoy that at all. What are you talking about? For me? This is one of my favorite parts about photography. Is, you know, taking an idea that I have and, uh, in changing it, and you know, testing out lighting and, you know, working with something that, like looks pretty decent to start with and just seeing if I could make it better and better and better. And sometimes in this process, like to be totally honest, like you keep messing around and sometimes all, like, add a bunch of lights and I think I'm making things better. And then, like a light misfires and like, that's totally the best shot of the day. So, like at the end of the day, like you don't always know what's going to look the best. So that's like, That's why I take a period of time and just kind of like, um, play around and experiment and, like, you know, see, see what comes out of the shots. Um, so that's kind of what we're doing here. All right, here we go. Let's make sure my lights air firing here. All right? Maybe we'll bring this up in brightness just a little bit there. Cool. So we're bringing this up just to bright at a little bit more light to our subjects here, all right? Just like firing. Can you guys see that one? Like the ones like right here. Yeah, the hair light here. We'll bring this up. All right. Let me know if it fires this time. Did it do it? It's really hard to tell. All right. All right. I'm hitting the test button, and I'm not It wasn't plugged in. Yea. All right, so now that's awesome. This whole time, I'm like, why is this, like, not doing anything? Because it wasn't plugged in all the way? Okay, cool. That makes a lot of sense. Oh, it's actually doing something. Now. Everyone at home is like, What is he doing up there now? Okay. Cool. Um, so always check your gear. Make sure like what you're doing, actually is ah is doing something. That's Ah, good piece of advice. There were getting, like, a little bit of a couple weird shadows and things like that on her face. So I just want to make sure like the shadow that's kind of coming down. Um, her ear right here was a little bit kind of weird. So what I did is I brought my life back, and basically that that should eliminate that shadow. Now we should have a little bit. Here we go. You can kind of see we still do have that shadow that's kind of coming down there. So my goal here is to try, and I don't have a grid on this light. So my goal here is to try toe, get this light to hit her hair, but not necessarily hit her face so much. So at this case, it's going to be like a question of like, how, um how high it is and what kind of fall off we're going to get with that. So even even if you do have a light that's like pointed, you know, way up above someone's head, you know, light coming out of these strobes doesn't just like it doesn't just come out in a straight line, you know, spreads out quite a bit so you can use the fall off for these lights light people. There we go, and we can kind of see the difference between those two here. You guys can see that there. So there's the before and the after so you can see it is lighting her hair, but it's not lighting her face, and that's basically just because I was pointing it up at a direction that's not gonna hit her, hit her face. So there's gonna bring this up and brightness just a little bit more, and then we'll find the place. Here we go. Cool. Where it becomes a hair light. Getting is really interesting texture in there, but it doesn't affect your face. All right, Cool. While I'm liking the light set up so far, the background looks good. We're gonna maybe light in the background just a little bit. So to do that, just gonna bring up our power here on our background light, and then we're going to start focusing on our light for Alex here. The main soft box there. All right, cool. Looking good. All right, Alex. How you doing? Good. All right. Cool. Um, yeah. So we're gonna have you. Maybe you look right about here, and then I'm gonna try bringing the soft boxes down just a little bit, and we're gonna try bringing it in from, uh, from back behind a little bit more as well. And I'm using the modeling light right now to kind of get a good idea of what is actually being lit. All right, Cool. That looks good. It's obviously like way too bright. So we're gonna pull the power down quite a bit here, all right? And it's just a little bit under exposed. We're gonna bring this back up now. Cool. All right, So all this is just kind of like playing around with light in getting something, that getting something that we like and something that works for our shot. So I think, you know, the light is relatively simple, but it does what we want. Here it lies their subject's face. And we've got a light that's hitting our subjects hair as well as our background. Um, we want to keep the background pretty light in this case because we are going to be combining different exposures. So in this case, it's we're going to use a clear background. And then in Photoshopped, I'm actually gonna be adding some like color and some vignette ing into the background after we bring the fern and everything. So doing this sort of stuff is like it's always interesting, especially when I'm on a shoot with, like, a client or subject, like when you plan a lot of photo shop. The shoots themselves tend to be a lot more like boring and simple cause you're not I'm not shooting to make this portrait like incredible. You know, I'm shooting, like, one piece of ah composite here, so that's that can always be kind of tricky. It's like, All right, I know this doesn't look amazing, but the end result will look amazing. Um, so I always just started Communicate that with my clients or whomever. I'm photographing that. Like, yes, sometimes the composite work like the end photo was amazing. But oftentimes on set is kind of boring, Especially if there's no music. So many in the audience wants to start singing. That be, uh, every nice. Alright, quote ready. All right, so now that was like, the lighting set up. Basically, time takes toe, like, get our lighting set. And then now we're gonna be focusing on working with Alex and getting like, getting the actual shots that we want, So, yeah, if you want toe start. Yep. Look there, maybe bring your chest a little bit towards camera. There we go. And then kind of looked down. So this is like an artistic type shot again. She's not looking at the camera. She's not like smiling. This is not like a corporate headshot. This is a lot more like looking like forlorn. And, you know, um, maybe I was, like, right around here. Cool. Um, we do want to see some some of your eyes. There we go. All right. I might actually have you hunch over a little bit if you can. Here we go. Beautiful. Can you bring your neck up just a little bit? All right. And then, actually, if you can rotate your legs just around this way a little bit more. There we go. Perfect. And then Yep. Looking good. And if you can bring your chin out that way a little bit more kind of neck, neck down. No worries. It's kind of like, look, right around this direction. Okay? Kind of Straighten your neck out there were perfect. So what I'm doing is basically trying to match like, Oh, and then I Zaken be back in the Yeah, beautiful. That's really nice. I down just a little bit for me. Very cool. And my hairline is doing definitely a little bit something weird on our subject here. So we're gonna just bring that back there just a little bit more as Well, all right. I'm gonna have you bring your shoulders a little bit more this way again. We'll just kind of, like, never go nice and natural. Like you don't Don't feel like you get it. Yeah, Just, like, nice and like, kind of resting. Cool. Perfect. Beautiful. All right. And I'm gonna bring my hair light back a little bit more. This is kind of where we go. A little bit tricky trying to light her hair. Um, but not necessarily light. Lighter face. All right. I'm gonna have you sit back up again. Cool. Doing great. There we go. OK, these air. Beautiful. Now look with your eyes back towards me a little bit. Chin up for me. Just a little bit. Here we go. Cool. And then kind of look out in this direction. Yeah, It's kind of like maybe down here, just Yeah, look like you're looking off into the distance. Perfect. Yeah. Is your gorgeous um can you actually look up with your eyes? Just a little bit? Here we go. Beautiful. All right. Um, maybe not so far up. Just kind of like right about here. Go. Perfect. All right. These are awesome looking great. So now basically wounds like a quick break. Um, basically, at this point, like all usually shoot in bursts whenever, especially for a composite or something like that. Usually all photograph my subject for a little bit and then kind of, like, take a look at my photos for a little bit. Figure out what I like, Communicate that with the subject. Usually, you know, if can you see the screen? Yeah. The subject can see the screen. That helps out a lot too. So they could be like, Okay, that that looked good. I'll try to do more of that. Um, so basically, just couldn't going back through the different shots now to kind of get an idea of, like, what? What worked? There we go. I think that was kind of nice. Actually. We had you kind of like looking a little bit more towards the front. Yeah. Okay, cool. So we'll go. We'll go back in that direction a little bit more. Does that make sense? Is we go back to the photos you can kind of see which. There we go like that. That type of look. So you're looking a little bit just so the camera can see both your eyes. There we go. All right. And it should auto events there. You want to just kind of, like, face me and Yep. Perfect. Shake it out. Nice. Very cool. And then Yep, with your head. Just kind of looked out in that direction. Cool. I'm gonna have you rotate just on your stool just a little bit. So your legs there? Yep. That's perfect. All right, cool. We'll shoot a little born like that. Look out that way. Just a little bit more with your chain out. Oh, that's gorgeous. Beautiful. Yeah, that's coming in Really nice. Can you freeze? Like, right there So I could get some light on your hair. All right. Perfect. And I can combine these exposures as well. Let's bring the brightness, though. Just a little bit. Like if you do get an exposure. That's like, really nice light on someone's hair. There we go. That's really nice. Um, but it doesn't do like what you want on their face. So, like these exposures, for instance, like that I don't have a lot of light in her hair. There's not a whole lot of detail there, Um, in this. That's kind of like two weeks overexposed. But there we have a lot more detail in her hair. I can combine those exposures pretty easily as well. Um, basically, just take the portrait, take the face from the shop, and then the hair from that shot combined those together and photo shop. So sometimes I'll just kind of, like, shoot for pieces rather than trying to get the final image. Um, from the very beginning. All right, let's do a little bit more. We're gonna bring our soft box up just a little bit. I want a feather this again. Um, kind of similarly to how we did the, uh, the hair light here. So it's it's still it's really bright right in this area. So I'm trying to make it brighter in her face and darker here just to create, like, a natural focus, um, on Alex's face here. All right, cool. Looking good. Bring this around just a little bit. All right? You guys have any questions as I'm as I'm going along here where you think from whom? Definitely. Yeah, Go ahead. Yeah, Erin. So when you spent a lot of time focusing on the hair light. And is it correct to assume that that's mainly because we want to bring some of the texture of the hair and blend that with some of the texture of the ferns later? Yeah, for sure. That's exactly right. Not only that, but it's Her hair is relatively dark, and it's like, kind of curly, So it just kind of absorbs light. So what I'm doing, I'm trying to basically get a little bit of highlight in their end, a little bit more details just so it doesn't go like so dark, because in post production is going to give me a lot more to actually work with. Um, oftentimes, like dark hair can just be like a It could just be like a real black hole. Like, you know, you probably photographed someone with dark hair, and I have dark hair, so I know like it just sometimes it goes completely dark, and if you want to bring up like highlights or you know things like that, it could be really tough. So all I tend to like over light dark hair just a little bit, and you can make things darker in photo shop or light room really, really easily. You know, you just like use your curves or levels make things darker and they always look good, going darker, but bringing things lighter. That's a lot of time when you run into trouble, because if there's no detail there, you just if it's all black and you try to just bring that lighter than it just goes from, like, black toe like gray right, it doesn't There's no hair there to make brighter. So that's what I'm trying to basically carve out a little bit more detail in there. Cool. It was a really good question. Yeah, great question and kind of a similar in terms of what you're envisioning for the full, the full double exposure. The question is, has you put the model in the center of the shot? Are you currently thinking about the space around that you're gonna be filling? Or is that done entirely imposed in terms of like where you have her situated? Yeah, good question, because we are shooting this in part, it actually totally doesn't matter where she's sitting. She's in the scent of the camera to reduce distortion, mostly, but she's basically which is gonna be cut out of her background in the final image, and she's going to just be like, ah, floating head in photo shop so that floating head you can kind of like you can put anywhere you want it, and I can move everything around. So, um, it's faras framing goes like basically, I want to make sure that I include enough of her in the frame to, like, give me something to work with. So I want, you know, some area around her. Her hair is well, Aziz, you know her chest. Um, that's just like what I want to include in the frame rather than like zooming in really far. You know, I'm giving myself a look, a little bit of extra space, but yet the framing itself that it actually will wind up completely changing and maybe one more from Nandi. Who says, Is it a good idea to sketch the concept? Like what? Why are using the fern or versus smoke or something else? Like, have you actually sketched this out, or is it all in your head? Yeah, it's a really good idea to sketch this out. Um, I do that in a couple different stages. Actually, Yeah. So I did sketch us out, like, weeks ago. Basically, like, had a you know, like a good idea of what I wanted that to look like. And in Section two for this tutorial, I'm gonna be sketching it out again in photo shop, using the actual elements that I have. So it's definitely sketch things out in the beginning because this is I mean, this is a little bit more what I would consider like art. Not necessarily like straight portraiture. Um, And with that, like one of the big things you want to keep in mind is your composition, like we want to create, like, something beautiful that exists in the space. So with that, like if you really simplify a composition down, you're basically working with, like shapes like circles, squares, triangles and things like that. And like balancing those shapes in your frame is a way to create a good composition. So we're getting a new element here with the ferns were going to get some other elements. And then we're going to be bringing those in, and I'll be sketching in Photoshopped just with, like, a brush tool or whatever, and then bringing all those things together. So, like, yeah, especially when you're creating, like, art like this. You want to sketch, like, every step along the way because you do have, like, you know, everything that I capture now is not set in stone like I can go in. I can use the liquefy tool hair on our liquefied tools to mess with her hair here, I can totally change the shape of her hair. You know, this image is gonna like we're gonna play with the light in the shadow. It's gonna get re touched a little bit the ferns. I can move those all around and Photoshopped to, so everything is totally variable. So sketching is a really good idea to like Know what you want your final to look like. And then you can just fit all of your pieces into that final. That was a good question. Nice. And that looks killer. Done it. I love that shot. So again, we brought our fill light in here. We're gonna bring it in just a little bit more. And basically, that takes some of the light that's coming from our soft box. It's hitting a reflector here and just filling in our shadows a little bit more, which gives us something else to work with. Here. Cool. Look a little bit further out. Flooring and chin down a little bit. And I down a little bit for me as well. Beautiful. Well, I actually really like this shot to back. I think that's absolutely gorgeous. So that's basically what we would go for now if this were like an all day shoot or like if Alex was just like a friend of mine, we were like, messing around. I'd probably shoot for, like, another hour to like, you know, we got this shot I love. It's totally beautiful, and it's gonna definitely work for our concept. If we had all day long, I'd keep shooting and try to get, like, you know, four or five shots that I loved. And then we would call it a wrap and then continue on. But for now, I think we're good. We're about minutes away through our class, and we're ready to start shooting our firm. So, Alex, Awesome job. Give around, replies everyone, Thanks, Alex. That's a gorgeous shot