Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction: Understanding Light

my name's shared platt uh for those of you who have not seen my workshops before or you have been um you don't know who I am um I come from arizona I am a wedding photographer principally that's how I make most of my money um and I do some senior portrait since um kids and stuff like that but mostly weddings everything has people in it generally which is funny because when I first started photography I was in college and I studied photography in college and I thought I was going to be ansel adams like that's that's what I was going to do and I wouldn't take a picture of a person it was against my code and uh I realized there really wasn't a lot of money and being an ansel adams copy and so I had to find something I could do a career in and I started gravitating towards people and now I pretty much everything I shoot has people in it even if I'm out shooting landscape I kind of wish that I had a photo of a person in it because to me a landscape is a good backdrop for a person you know s...

o my my home mental activity has shifted from being against photographing people too on ly photographing people so it's interesting how our tastes change photographically throughout our careers but so that's me um I have a wife and three lovely children that air in arizona right now I don't know if they're watching but if they are hi guys um and with that we're going to dive into this workshop now those of you have seen have you guys seen my previous workshop all everybody in the city okay so those of you have seen my workshop know that it was all about post production and file management and being efficient with your time in post production um so that's that's what my previous workshop was about but there's something additional that needs to happen to be efficient in post production and that is you have to be efficient when you're actually shooting the images and you have to do things correctly at the shoe in order to save time in post and so today we're today and tomorrow we're going to really talk a lot about the things that we can do at the photo shoot to be efficient wall were shooting to spend the least amount of energy the least amount of money the least amount of time getting the images that we need and getting them done well enough that when we get to post there's little to no effort in post working on those images because if you're all over the board on your exposures and you don't shoot the image just right then you got to go into photo shop and you gotta brighten this up and you've got a you know burn and dodge to try and get the image that you want but that takes a lot of time so our goal here in the next two days is to get you um to the point where your images are quality enough and they're done quickly enough and efficiently at the photo shoot so that you spend little time on the photo shoot getting them and when you're in post you spend little time working on them so that's that's our goal and then on on saturday on the third day then we'll go into the actual post production of the images and we'll talk a lot about tips and tricks inside of light room we'll talk about the adjustment sliders inside of the developed module will talk about specific uh plug ins that we can use things like that that will help to get the image through the process but rather than talking on a macro scale like we did in the last workshop we're now going to talk about a micro scale we're gonna talk about each individual image so we're going to follow the life cycle of an image from the photo shoot through post production to the end so that you can see how we shot it and how we adjust it for the maximum effect together time so that's what that's our goal and that's what our workshop is about so the first thing that we need to talk about when we're talking about photography is light now I don't want teo be one of those people that says photography is about light because that's kind of a strange statement photography is not about light photography is about people or photography is about places or photography is about the concepts that you're photographing light just happens to be the paintbrush okay but you have to understand your tools in order to do a good job shooting so that's what we're going to talk about light for because we want to understand the tool that we've been given which is light and how do we capture that and what does it say when we use it in various ways so we're going to talk a little bit about light right now just justice an introduction to our um our subject let me pull up my king out here and just a zey just so I understand it out in the in internet land you khun you khun chime in as well I want everybody in the on the internet to know that we want to be his interactive as possible with you so please feel free tio send us your questions and be very be very vocal about your questions so um just interject questions as you can because we're going to be answering your questions very quickly on this we want we want it to feel like you're in the studio with us while we're while we're working so please just just send us your questions as for my studio audience we didn't get in the in the intros a good feeling of how long you've been shooting so I really want to get a sense of that so everybody just kind of shout out how long you've been shooting yeah five years professionally two years two years um I shot for about twelve years professionally and then it took a long break and shooting again so long ok year and a half two years this week two years this wait okay good alright I've been shooting fifteen years professionally and then of course while I was studying and things like that so I've been doing it for a long time but I started in commercial I was a photo assistant in a commercial studio so I learned a lot about lighting and a lot about photography just from that you can learn a lot of stuff in college but mostly it's artsy fartsy stuff you know it's like not it's not really useful it's great because I learned composition and I learned all these highbrow concepts but the practice of photography is is much more difficult then the artistic portion of it I mean in photo school they let you do whatever you want it's like I meant to do that okay you meant to be out of focus great you know great great excuse but in the commercial world you don't have those excuses and so it was a great education for me for a couple years toe work in a studio where I had to get it right and I had to learn lighting and I shot jewelry and and product and people and so I really had to learn to get it right so a lot of what I'm going to teach you comes from that experience um so let's talk about light than um light is light is an interesting um animal because it's it's all science and its it that's light if you want to break down light that's what light is right there that's a lot of science and we know that light is just literally away form right and it's and it's just there's not much difference between light and radio waves and there's not much difference between radio waves and sound waves right it's just all on a different spectrum somewhere going fast so we're going slow somewhere much more highly energetic and others are not so really it's almost like if if you could expand your eyes you could see sound you know but your eyes on ly see a certain visible wavelength and that's what we see here inside I've got this little thing broken out right right here this is this is the visible spectrum and then of course you've got the infrared everybody likes to play around with in on film and pretend to mimic that in digital on dh then you've got the uv and the x rays and so you've got all that microwaves this is what cooks our food I guess um so so but that's the very small portion of all of this energetic waves that air bombarding us on a daily basis is the only portion that we can see and as you get to one side it gets cooler and the other side gets warmer and we actually say cool and warm but they actually switch places because the stuff that's blue is actually hotter than the stuff that's yellow so if you look at flame the top part of the flame is yellow right and the bottom part of the flame is blue or clear well it's the blue light that burns you faster okay so when you see blue light that's actually a faster way like dorm or energetic wavelength it's it's hotter what we call it cool light it's not it's actually warmer um so when you go outside and you change your settings on your white balance in your camera to an outdoor setting it's expecting bluer light because it's hotter and when you come inside and you've got those little warm edison bulbs right those air really actually quite cold but they look we call them warm because they're yellowish right and so when we talk about color balance we're gonna be talking about those issues and we're going to try and balance those issues um but because light is so scientific we kind of don't think about it that way artists because we we don't think science we've we failed science I failed science so you know I was no good at science so so what we want to do is we want to talk about instead of talking about it in science we want to talk about what it does or what it is so lie itself is a physical thing particles and I like ralph waldo emerson's quote says the world we live in is but thick and light that that was an interesting quote but everything we see around us we see because of light right and without without light we we couldn't photograph right but light also does other things besides just show us things um it it speaks to us in certain ways it denotes love and beauty right when we think about light so romeo says but soft what light through yonder window breaks so who's he talking about he's talking about juliet and she's the sun right so when we think of light we suddenly think of love and beauty um we also think of uh sadness and fear in the absence of light right so when we when we think about light there are certain things that light is but there are also things that light does so when we when we're photographing and we're coming up with a lighting scheme for a photograph we want to think about what light is and what it does to very different things so let's let's go in tow light room and I just want to pull up a couple photographs so I made a little collection here um some images and we're going to ask we're going to play a game here and that game is we're going to answer a question what light is and what it does okay so we look at this photograph what does the light do in this photograph answers it's drawing your eye it's instructing the eye where to look okay it instructs you is toe whereto look right so the light does point you this way it points you up here you can see these edges here illuminates the edges that gives you detail in the shadows that's what light does what is right what is it saying that meant is the searcher it's saying oh right it's it's it's calling out like angelique is a church right and so we see the church and then we see the shafts of light coming and it's like goddess speaking down right and so light you can see that when you're looking at an image light will do one thing in the image but it also will say something in the image okay so so when you think about light you can't just think about it I need to light up this subject andi I need it to look a certain way you have to ask yourself what does the light due to the image but then also what does it say in the image how does the difference between all of this vacancy and the soft kind of fogging look all of that light and then this dark horse down in the bottom what does that say so there's more delight than just oh I wanna light it this way so that I've got enough light on this side of the face and that side of the face is filled in that's not what we're attempting to do when we're tryingto light something we also want to say something time so what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about the process of lighting things so we're doing an in studio shoot in segment two and three we're going to talk about the process of putting together a photo shoot in an efficient manner but also saying something with light that we're producing so that's why we're going to do in segment two and three um right now I want to talk to you about image quality I want to talk to you about latitude want talking about exposure and things like that so that we're ready to go into that so think about several concepts quality we're going to talk about quality we're gonna talk about lighting and how to use it to say something as well as to get quality on dh then we're going to talk about the efficiency of putting together a photo shoot that's our goal for today released for this morning and then as we come into the last portion of the day we're going to talk about calibration and calibration is very very important because without calibration you end up spending your wheels in postproduction because you didn't calibrate things at the shoot so you can calibrate your camera so that you know what you're getting at the chute so that when you get into post production it looks exactly the way you intended it rather than having to fix the issues that you didn't know were happening at the shoot