Lessons

Lesson Info

Lighting Discussion and Q&A

we're now outside still in we're pretending to be outside it's cold father time has given us seattle cloud cover so we're ready to do some cool interesting flash work with the couple all right so um before we start I wanted to show you another shot I love this shot because it's a little tricky so what's happening here is we actually have three flashes on this shoot okay so what we have is I'm shooting here and there's their son this is a house and I'm here and the sun is around the house and you can see that it's hitting these flowers and it's hitting the mailbox and it's hitting this bush over here so it's got that nice warm glow and it's it's it's sunset ish and whenever I anywhere I go outside I always look for the shadow side of whatever building I'm around that's where I want to be so I go to the shadow side of this building and it's got these beautiful flowers in front of me and I got the mail box and all that so I stick her there but the problem is she's in complete shadow and s...

o I don't get I love the rim light that's happening here on her do you think that's the sun it looks like the sun doesn't it and it looks like the sun to you because you see the sun behind it giving room lights and stuff to other things so you assume that must be the son but it's not the sun right behind this big bush I have a flash and it becomes the son so I'm always putting a flash wherever it would naturally look like spill over from the sun and that's what's giving me my rim light here it looks like it's from the sun but it's really a flash right over there coming through time and then I have two flashes right here and here giving me a soft box see how there's a shadow side of her nose which is towards me and then the other side of her face is lit well that's not lit by the shade that's lit by two flashes that air about you that far apart so it's a pretty decent sized soft box wrapping her face part of the most of the light is hitting this side of her face but a little bit of the light is coming through and nailing the other side of her face so the shadow on our nose that's created by the first light is not as hard because there's some light coming through here remember that's the advantage of the soft box we talked about that just last session that you have a light here and a light here and a light here and a light here is all over in infinitely you have lights in all sorts of spots and that's what creates the soft box well what we're doing is we're creating the the incremental soft box which is a light here and a light here and that helps wrapped the light yeah I did this degree righted and the jury too as though I don't know tries you took that reside in from space why why do I put the light on that side instead of on the side closer generally speaking I want whatever is inside is further away from me to be lit but also the sun is over there the sun is on this side of her coming around this way and so the assumption would be in the head that all light emanates from this direction if I emanated light from this direction she would look more separated from the background and look fake because the light doesn't seem to come from here see it's dark over here so that you want the dark side of the face on this side all the light that you're seeing in your head is over here so you want the light to come from there so when I come into a room remember I put out the hand and I figure out what's going to look good for the person but then I also want to just look like in our room here we're going to take a picture like this and when you see the windows in the shot you're going to assume that all light emanates fromthe left hand side of this room because that's where the lights in your head is coming from and so I need to make sure that when I started that the powerful part of the light comes from here but if you look at their faces right now this is more powerful because we've got the sun over here but you're going to see that as the light source because it's going to be in the shot and so if I have ah light source that's obviously a light source in the shot I'm gonna start by lighting it from the side where the light source would naturally come from so that your head doesn't think it's a flash your head will think oh that's just naturally occurring light so my soft box will be over here lighting this side of the face and we'll actually make this the shadow even though it's naturally it's brighter okay so this will be a tricky situation because of that because when you see in the room you're going to expect like to pour in from this window because it's in the shot and that's what's happening here I've got light over here and I expect all light come from this side because that's where the light's coming from in the shot all right so uh question came in um on twitter or somewhere about the soft box if I have five lights and each one costs about six hundred bucks that's a pretty expensive soft box why wouldn't you just get a big light with a big soft box that's easily answered number one I hate sandbags and if you have a soft box that's ten feet wide you're gonna have to have a very big softball are a very big uh a sandbag maybe two and maybe a highboy like this toe hold it right and you're not going to take this with you on location but with thirteen pounds of gear you khun take five flashes and some stands also the question was what is the stand this is called a cheetah stand like a god around cheetah huh okay I like to think of it as a cheater stand because it's I'm cheating I don't need an assistant anymore it hold this so the cheapest and you can get tall ones short ones the really lightweight and they just the great thing is you can actually put them you can you can walk through a house or through ah wherever and you're not tripping people while you're walking and then you can actually set it like in the crack between a couch and a table and then when you click it it spreads underneath um so they fit in better places to because you don't have to actually they're not coming down open they're coming down closed and then they go underneath the tables and stuff so they're really really useful stands on dh there and they're pretty lightweight so the reason we want this instead of a soft boxes that number one we don't want to carry all the gear to try and hold the soft box and number two anything that's that biggest soft box is going to require a big flash and that big flash because it's a a normal flash a normal studio flash is going to require a power source that you're carrying a big battery with you which the vagabond batter is great battery but once you get out there you're you're locked into two hundredth of a second I can't shoot above that so if I'm in arizona if I'm outside today to hundreds of seconds fine but if I'm in arizona and the sun or on the beach in the sun to hundreds of second is not fine you're gonna have to get yourself some neutral density filters so that you can lower the amount of light that's coming into the camera and then you can't even see what you're looking at you know sometimes you need a nine stop neutral density filter can't see through it that's a problem so while I'm shooting I'm not I can't see it's a little weird you know so so that's why I used these because they're easy to transport their light and I can create a fifty foot soft box and you can't carry a fifty foot soft box with you I just can't do it so I can create a five foot soft box twelve what I can make a soft box whatever size I want all you gotta do is just add flashes so yes it's an expensive one but really about three thousand dollars that's what you would pay for a bunch of studio gear to and if you never shoot in the studio these air these air great so I love him okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna set these guys up here for a shot and we're going to do of I'm going to do a vertical shot with them kind of cuddling on the couch and put the windows in it so it looks like they're kind of cuddling against this cold you know outside it's it's cold okay so it's really cold and you guys air inside or you're in here in a you're in a car garage and you've got this really great yeah so can I get someone to move this now remember I want this these windows in here so I'm going to shoot from about here like that that's what I want so now I have to think about this circumstance and I know that I need to light them from one side so we're going to start this soft box right about here so this is gonna be the side edge of our soft box here and we want it to be we're gonna kind of rembrandt them so everybody understands that rembrandt lighting ideas so we're going to start up high coming down so I'm gonna take my soft box and this is great I'm doing this all by myself I don't need my assistant to do this that's not to say that assistance aren't important they're people too but I don't necessarily need one for this and I'm just going to move these guys aren't we took the soft box off here because we want we're gonna bear head all of this so this is totally bare headed in flashes and you notice that I'm just kind of wrapping this around them like this and now for good measure I'm actually gonna put one in the center here okay so I've got two high ones here and now I'm going to create so right now I have a long skinny soft box right here but what I'm going to do now is I'm goingto make the soft box increase in size this way by taking another flash and just putting it like right about there see so now the soft boxes this long actually it's longer than that and this wide and now it's tall ok so we take that and then weaken further rap and grab another one here and we'll bring this one up a cz well this one's not a cheetah stands just random stand that we grabbed and it's not as fun oh this one doesn't have ah a tilt mechanism on it here we'll use this one for this flash here we go this one has a tilt on it so if you're going high you need a tilt mechanism on it so I'm just going tio come up like this this one we're going to come down a little bit on this one as well that's too much down there we go okay so now see this when I separate out quite a ways from them so that's the extra edge of that soft books and now are soft box is hope this woman too high way want this one down lou there we go okay so now I've got a soft box it's like this pointing down at them and it wraps and then there's a little extra soft box over it's like an extension so my soft box actually goes like this and then it tapers off to here right because we don't have a lower one here okay so now this one over here we're going to use for some completely different purpose we don't need it involved in the soft box we're going to take this one and we're going to use it for some kind of like a separation light over here or if we get shadows we could put it on this like right over here to create something on the wall either way so for now I'm just going to take it right here I'm gonna we're gonna be shooting this way so this will be out and I'm just gonna raise this one up a little bit like that good now this is c I I actually put these up and didn't think about my groupings so I've got a b c c I'm going to change this one to d so that I can control it independently so let me let me show you that can get a camera here or let me here I'll just take it to you so I'm taking this and I'm gonna turn it to d you can see that it's linked with the green and then we're going to take it and we're going to go to group d so when I have the the the screen up like this and I hit this gr it changes groups so I can go from a b c d or e so I'm going to change it to d okay survey see that so there's a d there that tells me what group it's in and I push this little group button here and it'll change it from a toggle it through the groups so now this one is completely independent of all of these other flashes so I set this back in its cradle here that one is going to be de and they by the way they make all sorts of little modifiers for these types of flashes if you goto the place that sells cheetah stands which is I guess she to stand up come or something like that if you go to one of those places by cheetah stands they also have like little things you put over that have grid spots on them and all sorts of stuff that you khun used to modify the light so you don't just have to get stands there you can get all sorts of stuff to modify because there's a lot of people that do this kind of lighting so it's not just me um all right so what we're going to do now is we're gonna take our our guy here our transmitter and I'm going to show this to the camera here and what we're gonna do is we're going to set up all these channels a b and c to be the same okay we want them all the same but remember we want see over here actually you know what hold on I've got I know that there's another sea where is another cc that one okay can can you pull that down and hit that little group button and change it to group um b so now I have these two on b this one on a this one on see ok that way I can make these more powerful this one less powerful and rap a little bit put it on b so these two are going to be be now this one's going to be a this one's going to be c okay much better okay so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to my transmitter and I'm gonna hit the group uh the uh group button and I'm going to go up to because those air be right and I want them to be um manual so we're doing everything manual here no more ti tl stuff so we're going to do manual power and let's just make that one a thirty second time we'll start there actually let's start it a sixteenth so started a sixteenth and why am I starting in a sixteen I'm just guesstimating that's what I'm doing so I'm gonna start a sixteenth power then I'm going to go out to a because that second one is a and I'm going to again turn the mod to manual I want that on manual go there and I'm going to go to a thirty second power and then I'm going to go down to see lips lock that in and I'm gonna go down to see turn that one to manual mode as well and see is going to be a little bit less than thirty second power not much but just a little less and then I'm going to go down to d and d we have to now turn on because we're using it now and I'm going to take that one and I'm going to turn it to sixteenths power we'll see what it does time now can I get a fifty millimeter lens so I want to shoot with a fifty so I can get these uh these windows in okay now remember I just set all these lights and I'm turning them off turning off because I need to see what my ambience exposure is first I'm gonna shoot it eight hundred of second in manual mode I mean I'm sorry I s o eight hundred I'm probably going to be able to do this at two hundredth of a second for five let's just take a picture and see what we get okay hopefully that's coming in let's find out come in come in go go go no way may not getting beginning our sink yeah something something is awry wei have the spinning beach ball of death let's just force it yeah it's something's going weird with this give me one second we will thank you the ghost in the operating rooms give give me started back up okay can I take a question while the ghost and the let's see that starting up I have a question from a studio's um if the uk if you several flashes to make a virtual soft box is there a problem with them causing multiple shadows if they're close enough together they'll wrap because they add to each other remember that the flash is not completely it's not like a spotlight so it doesn't have just a pillar of light and a pillar of light in a pillar of light you get from here it literally goes out like this and so the flashes crossover and add to each other and so you don't end up with a problem of multiple um shadows because you end up filling in those shadows along the way now if you were to take a flash and put it here and then another flash and put it there just two flashes like that that is not equal a soft box because now you actually are creating one's independent shadow on another independent shallow but as you go like this this close together you're not going to see like multiple shadows on like on a nose or whatever because they're just they're close enough together they're they're filling in each other so clearly it's not a real soft box because otherwise people who shoot cars would have a bunch of flashes pointing at the car is not a real car real soft box but it's a great makeshift son caught soft box and it does it does the uh no I am not so the zoom setting is just kind of normal zoom twenty four millimeter zoom so it's at that normal zoom you could zoom in and change the setting but then that kind of narrows the scope I want the scope to be wide so I'm just leaving it at its natural it's a natural point john and john did ask a question from photo jo from austria who said I didn't see you zooming your flash heads and do you always leave it on the fixem setting or do you always do okay yeah I don't want mine going you know if there are times where I put a flash on my camera like if I'm shooting in a reception or something like that at a wedding on dh then I'll have that flash because these flashes once they're on your camera can become the communication device to the other cameras and incidentally they're not sleight of line of sight this is all radio communication now so it's not it doesn't require any line of sight he's going behind the behind a wall it could be wherever and as long as they're within the range of the radio uh receiver they can fire so it's not it's not the old style on the old like five eighties and stuff those were infrared and so they needed a line of sight they needed to be able to see each other to communicate and then for me I'd get out in the arizona sun and infrared isn't it's nothing infrared can't be seen it just it couldn't ever see it they would never flash because the sun was brighter than the infrared and it just wouldn't wouldn't read it it's too much energy going around or something uh I don't know let's find out it's gonna be a beautiful shot guys the candid okay so we have an image coming in now let's see if it comes to this the little inappropriately place ok so now we're going to come in and we're going to take a shot and just why don't we have um turned this way like turn the whole chair like spin your chair there you go good and then and then I want you to really lean out into the chair and then you lean into him you go yeah like that okay so here comes the shot we're just going to look at what we've got what I'm interested in is the window and I'm interested in the wall okay so that's pretty good like that's our shot with just the light that exists in the room but it can use some help now see that crest right there that's the light coming from here so we want to mimic that we want to make sure that it seems as though all light is emanating from here and that this is going to be the shadow side of the face so in order to do that I'm actually going to bring down my exposure just a little bit okay so I want I'm going to take it from s o eight hundred cause I like two hundred because I don't have to be in high speed sync for these I like two hundred someone st two hundred is a shutter speed and I and I like for five because that's a nice you know it still gives me out of focus background but I can kind of focus on the two of them and because it's a fifty millimeter lens I have a little bit more depth of field than say on an eighty five and so I'm gonna leave it at four five so I'm actually going to change my eyes so in order to dark and everything down a little bit I want these walls to just be a slight shade darker so I'm gonna go to the so and I'm gonna drop it down I say two thirds of stop and now I'm gonna light up my arm my soft box so now I've got my soft box on we're going to see just from snapping at what we get okay it may be way too bright will find out way too bright okay so now I get to dial it down so it's gonna it's gonna be way too bright in there so I'm gonna go to my groups so here we are going to go to my groups I'm gonna go up to see how bright it is there so we're gonna go to a and we're going to dial that down all the way to one twenty eighth we're going to go to be and we're going to dial that down tto one sixty fourth and we're going to go to because b is that's right right b is those okay so b is my one sixty fourth and then we'll go to see which is this little straggler out here right yes straggler out there he's going to go all the way down to one twenty eighth as well and then we're going to go to our our our delight and bring him down to one sixty fourth so we've really drawn that power down so if you set them all independently like this can you drop them all as a group say one stop yeah I don't know what my one yeah you could do that you could bring them all down because you remember you still have your flash compensation here so you can dial down more okay now once you hit one twenty eight this can't go any lower so you're you can't drop down something that's already dropped all the way down all right so I'm going to go to four five I'm actually going to increase it cause I might as well get a little bit more depth of field and that will help to de power these flashes it'll pull them down a little bit and so I'll go to five and now we're going to take the shot again and here we go the moment of truth here we go so now let's look at this shot um let's zoom into that can you zoom into that give me a full screen right on them oh pull out a little bit go a command minus on go there we go and then move them up okay now look at their face this is what you would get if you had a soft box and if it lets come on give me a zoom out one more no that's why am I not getting a it's not resolving well pretend that this wasn't boxy looking I guess where it's not it's not generating its preview so if you look at the face though it starts over here this light right here is actually coming from the the window but then my lights are equaling that amount of light from the window because remember before can you compare this shot to the first shot that I took with thea with just the window light it's the that one yeah so c c how you had a little crest of light here and a little crest of light there well now my flashes of equal that crust of light and they're wrapping all the way around so now I have softened that now quite frankly I kind of liked that crest of light so I can actually pull these flashes back even mawr in order to get them to stop pounding too much light but notice now they're equal to that light that she had on her cheek but the light is wrapping all the way around her and then this other light here is filling in so this light is filling in and how much I raised this light will determine how strong this side of the box is to fill it in and I would like it to be a little bit stronger to fill in or I just need to make these weaker so if I want these lights to be just a little bit weaker all I have to do is bring them away because remember I've already dialed them down so far that they are I can't I can't make them any less strong I could change my I s oh but then I had to change other things as well so it's easier just to pull these guys back like that so I get a little less power out of them and then this guy now becomes more powerful by comparison to those right okay so now let's take another shot and you'll see that we have solved that a little bit we've just we didn't do too much to him it's not like we took him down you know three stops or something can you read off again what they're all set up ok so now the bees are set at one twenty eight power I think or let's say eldon see the bees are at one sixty fourth then that goes toe one twenty eight and then this is it one twenty eight and that one's at one sixty fourth so they're very limited but look look how nice you've got this rap comes around and then there's a little light coming across here but that other light is filling in that side of the nose so it's not a hard shadow it's a softer shadow and the more I increased this one the softer that shadow becomes the more I decreased those the softer becomes because it's not quite as bright there but you've created in a sense of soft box that wraps all the way around a person's face rather than having to put up a big soft box like that and again in a studio bring a soft box and put it up but when you're on location and you just have enough to carry just your stuff this is a great way to create a soft box now the other way to create a soft boxes what just a bounce light off of a wall because then it becomes a huge soft box but we're pretending were outside so there's no there's no extra walls around us we're outside we're in front of some you know outside door with windows or something like that and we want to create that then this is our our next best way to do that you have questions yes she says yes we d'oh I have a question from a mi e j with so many flashes you're getting quite a few catch lights does that ever look strange or weird no because people don't actually look at catch lights you're the only one that does I'm just gonna be honest with you your clients and everybody in the world does not look at catch like they don't care the person that cares is the photographer he zooms in and goes oh how's you lighten the whole it's a soft box and there's a good spot and there's a this and that you're the only one that does that and so yeah if you if you're shooting for photographers then they'll zoom in and they'll go oh there's like twenty flashes over that's pretty crazy but quite frankly I'm looking in your eyes right now and I three c three catch lights those are all naturally occurring catch lights one from a light that's over there one from a light that's over there and one from the light that's over there so you have three now four now five catch light in your eyes and so really when a when a when a photographer comes into a studio and turns off all the lights and puts one soft box here and a beauty dish over here and creates two very distinct catch lights that's when it's odd now you was a photographer zoom in the eye and see that you think so beautifully lit it's got the right things but the rest of us when we look at people in our nationally occurring lives there's twenty capsulize walk into like goto ah car dealership and walk in there and look at your friend's eyes when you walk in and there's fifty catch lights because there's big sodium vapors all over the inside of that building there lighting it and all of them were making catch lights so the answer to that is you're the only one that does that which is funny I was just reading a baby books with my niece the other day and I was like oh you can see the photographer and the baby's eyes and my friend was like what are you talking about it's a great shot like what do you even know that I'm like no look your friend has no clear and doesn't care he just says oh cute baby and blue eyes that's what they see and what you see his soft box and this and that yeah and and the thing is and this is why I talk about efficiency because there's a point in your life where you recognize that the mohr effort you put into something you're not getting anything extra out of it and so you could go out and get a soft box and go through the problem of carrying you know hi boy with a fifty foot soft box and a big sand you know bag and whatever your client's not going to see the value in it other than the dog and pony show that you're creating they don't see the value in it whereas one light two lights two small lights on location it's very rare that I would go to this effort to create anything it's it's literally just put up a sot one one light or two lights to kind of softened and your client's going to be very happy with it you're going to get the same amount of happy from your client for a small amount of effort then you will if you go through this huge effort lots of effort an extra hour of set up all sorts of back breaking work and your clients not going to be any happier with the image such a great point so that's a great point thank you for that you the same question from tsc tempus in hamburg germany also had the same exact questions so that's wonderful um r w arly is wondering why do you use manual flash setting rather than e t t l with exposure compensation okay that's a really good point on you can use all the flashes in e t t l and you khun very them and change them like we did earlier and that's fine but in the end if you move your camera so if I change the crop from sea right now we have the crop where's x amount of light is coming in but if I were to change the crop to be this if I just walked in and saw like oh that's really pretty if I do this with her it would change what the flashes would expose because the light would know where longer becoming fromthe window and so suddenly you would have the flash is powering up because they think there's not enough light and so then when you have this light set up here which I think is really pretty I mean I like the way the light is coming across here that light back there is giving sign of ah ridge like there and separating that part of the eye and then separating out the nose so that's pretty I think I might dial it down so on the next shot will be like you know what I think that that that delight needs to go all the way down to one twenty eight power or better yet here's a good idea let's keep it at let's raise it to one thirty second power and turn it around so now there's a big soft box back behind them so when I come in and do a cool shot in between like this let's do that one again so I do something like that where she's looking at me when that comes in that's all the light that comes through to them see how soft that light is now there's still a nice light on her nose see that ridge there but it's not quite as bright because it's not a bear head it's bouncing off a wall doesn't matter what the wall is right but that's that's a really nice light that's beautiful I think that's a cz good is putting a soft box on something wouldn't you say like you so we've got this big soft box here and then we got a big soft box there now in the wild right in the open open prairie we don't have a wall here and a wall here we just found this grocery store that has a cool side right so the only place we can get light here is by putting up stands with a fake soft box and then we can use some other wall over here and bounce off of right sometimes all if my assistant has a white shirt on during a wedding because usually racks wears a white shirt he wears like black pants white shirt type of thing and so I'll literally have him stand like this and say close your eyes and we'll put the stand right there and he becomes this little soft box just by pounding it into his chest and it just comes back at the cake you know it's only for like cake shots and stuff we'll just go just go my god and he becomes a little soft box so it's it's really a matter of being efficient about how you use your lights you could just set up some stands take the shot remember just walk in get the ambiance than set up your lights take a shot see where they are dialing down and then adjust as needed but I think that's really beautiful light and it doesn't require a huge soft box and I can do it on location with thirteen pounds of equipment I keep feeling e t what is it good question so canon calls e t t l I think nikon calls it something similar to that but it's basically through the lens so what happens is the flash flashes of pre flash so when you take the picture the camera opens up to see the flash flash flash is bounces off whatever subject comes back through the lens and then the camera looks out and says that's too bright sends this message to the flash to dial down two stops and then it flashes for riel while the camera exposes and gets the real exposure so it's it's a really complicated but if you're doing it ptl that means that your cameras actually shooting are the flashes flashing twice for everyone flash it's flashing a pre flash and then a flash so you're you're deteriorating your batteries faster and if they can't the computer is doing it for you and remember I said before if you can get a computer to do something for you you should never do it yourself except when it comes to automatic flash and automatic camera exposure when the computer it's not all that intelligent then maybe you should do it you know and so that the camera is it's ok it's not fantastic doing auto exposure because it's still looking for neutral gray so until they get to the point where they actually exposed based on facial recognition I don't think the exposures are ever going to be really super great because they look at things and they think oh well this all must be grey when really it's all white and so then you get a darker exposure so e t t o t ell and the automatic exposures on the camera all basing that on kind of it's the best information it khun use it just tries to neutralize at all to just normal eighteen percent gray in a digital world we call that fifty percent right but those of you start on film you call eighteen percent grade so jared I love that what you said earlier about the things that only we notice so amy j had another question um she had asked what would the same thing about the customers not noticing apply to a bit of noise in the photo if you have the s o yes and I wanted to ask you if you could give us just like three main things with lighting and post production that you think that we could cut out of our work and make our photo shoots more efficient what are the main things that we waste our time doing okay so I'm going to give you a cut off point so if you're using something that is within the last two to three years that has come out so I'm not talking and I'm only going to mention cannon gear cause I don't know the terminology on the nikon gear but you khun those of you our nikon users anything that's built in the same years the camera I'm talking about is also equal because I really and I know that I like to give nikon users a hard time but there is no real difference between an icon and a cannon they know people like different controls and stuff but under the hood they really are great cameras both of them so if you have a modern night connor modern cannon there's really no competition between them they're just different but they're great um so if you have something from a mark too five d mark two above that date whatever that release state was anything was built after that is pretty good up to about thirty two hundred eso and especially if you turn it to black and white but if you're above sixteen hundred s o the client doesn't care or know the difference and I was talking it's funny was who I don't know it might be out in the audience but there's this there's a guy that I was talking to who called me about an issue and uh I was talking to him and I asked him you know well when you're shooting it this I s so then it's good to add a little extra grain from light room because light room helps toe to mimic the grain and make it even more pleasing and he goes I would never shoot anything over one hundred di s o I just wouldn't do it and I was like and he was really adamant about that as whoa that is a strong opinion about something that doesn't matter at all uh all it doesn't matter because now I can go to eight hundred sixteen hundred eyes so with my mark three client doesn't know the difference and it doesn't even faze them in fact I'm pretty convinced I don't shoot one hundred eso anymore hardly at all the only time I go to one hundred or fifty isso is not because I want better cleaner files it's because I have too much sun and I've gotta dial it down so I'm literally just compensating for super bright stuff the client doesn't see the difference once you print that if you print take a picture with eight hundred s o of a family portrait with it with a mark three and printed on a sixteen by twenty and it looks gorgeous and you will never know that that was eight hundred so so most of my family portrait our eight hundred sl on my mark three camera now if I were shooting with an old five d camera I wouldn't be shooting at eight hundred sl because then there would be problems with the file but the beauty of these cameras now may I go I'll shoot something at one hundred twenty or twelve hundred what is it twelve twelve thousand eight hundred s o turn into black and white I'm fine with it it looks great even in color you can get away with it I've got some cool shots from china that I can't show you because there's people that I don't know him but I took him at night while we were getting on I was curious because we walked onto this plane and instead of walking through like security and going through and getting on the plane we literally got bust to the plane and got on this plane anybody could have gotten on that plane known was checking anything their work that had to check a ticket someone could just walked around the plane and hostile I'm going on this plane too you know but it's late at night it was midnight while we're getting on this plane and all we had was just a little lights that were kind of lighting the runway and I shot that thing it sixty four hundred s o and it's in color and it's gorgeous so I s o is not all that important so that's one thing too many people think you gotta go low on the so clients not gonna notice in fact for the longest time when you shot film what what I shoot it four hundred eso is what the grain looked like at one sixty I s o on portrait film that we used to use in the nineteen eighties and nineties so and it was beautiful grain was a thing now were also worried about smooth and I think actually the smooth you know what truth be known portrait's close up portrait's look better with grain than they do without grain case in point let's actually do that watch this I'm gonna get really close super close the lean into me lean lean in there you go just like that couple in yeah there that's what I like right there okay so watch this so that is at five hundred eso okay so when we come in here I'm just gonna add grain to it so um let's go to the develop module now look at this so if you look at her skin right now you can see inconsistencies in her skin and she's a beautiful girl right right I know you're the answer to that is yes not thank you yes so she's a beautiful girl and she doesn't have like lots of bad skin but you can see I'm so close you can see all the imperfections and if I wasn't one hundred eh so we would see those even better so now watch what happens when I add grain to it go overto the other side to the left hand side you go and then go to the the uh film grains right up there open it up that triangle and now watch this can you zoom in click on her eye so that we zoom in that is really zoomed and do fill right up here to the to the left hand side there you go good okay now look at her skin now hits him eight hundred I uh graine see how the grain breaks up the problems in the skin and so she becomes softer as a result of the grain now go to sixteen hundred so it breaks up the natural lines so if you see like a pockmark and skin or if you see a zit a senior I shoo all of my seniors at a pretty high aya so's right and and I add eight hundred grain to all of them because their skin looks so great that I don't have to do any retouching all of like the lines under the eyes and stuff like just disappear because the grain goes over the line and so it breaks up the natural flow of the line so the I can't see it grain is your friend it doesn't just not matter to the client it actually adds a beautiful texture to the image mean people when you print something they'll add like that texture over the top of the print just add it to the print you don't need the texture on the top of the print just add it to the print so grain is one thing that's a long answer grain is one thing that doesn't matter that the client I mean obviously don't go way too high but you know eight hundred eyes so the other thing that doesn't matter the client is those catch lights they don't care the other thing that doesn't matter the client is whether the proofs are perfectly exposed like they don't have to be dead on like you're not the fuss on every image before you show him to the client now when they order one to be a twenty by forty on their wall that's when you retouch it the client doesn't care to see a retouched image toe choose an image there are too many people that photo shop like eighty images in a portrait sessions so that they everyone looks good just in case the client buys this one you've just wasted hours upon hours of your time in the client doesn't even care because the client didn't want that image anyway weii show them the image is given one or two examples so when I do a wedding I have six hundred images I might show the client I will retouch two of them and give them an eleven by fourteen print off those images and say if you were to purchase a print from me this is what it will look like but I'm not going to retouch anything until you order a print so then they see themselves really beautiful with retouch skin and everything's gorgeous then they can look at the proof and no if I order this proof it will look like this all you need is one or two examples you don't need to waste all that time of so many people spending too much time in photoshopped photo shops a great tool you gotta have it but you shouldn't be spending time there unless someone's paying you to do it I and all country fit so I take it as one of the one to one ways you and I do every day is extremely grainy while the camera why well it depends on what I s so you're out if you're a one hundred it will be less grainy if you're at you know eight hundred will be more than I there are extremely green dad when are you shooting rock is shooting around um I don't I don't know why do you have your camera with you let's look at it and we'll talk about it other questions yes quite a few people in the chat rooms are wondering how to be more efficient with a single flash on camera is there every an instance where you can be efficient like you're chasing around a toddler let's just do this I only have one flash can you turn all these off I'm just gonna take this one flash and we're gonna throw it on the camera and be efficient with it and I've done it it's not like I always have a stand sometimes I'm going somewhere like downtown phoenix where I'm in an alley or something like that and so I know that all I need is this I don't need a stand with me and so I'm just going to take one flash put it on here again now it just changed it went from uh the manual settings that I was on it as soon as I put it on the camera it knows it now becomes the master flash and so the second I do this I could start controlling the same way I controlled with this transmitter I can now control all of my flashes from here so if you happen to be using a flash on camera at an event you can turn this thing to become the master and you just go back into the groups just like you did before here and you turn all the other flashes on and off and this becomes the master this always becomes a group a and then those you khun just bcd right and so I'm going to take this one now all of those air off so this one is not a masters just the flash and I can either do you it by e t t l or I can go mode into manual and dialect and that's going to depend I'll be an e t t l mowed a lot when I'm just running around with a camera on but in this case I want to do it manually and so I'll come up here and I'll click on the plus minus sign and dial it down to say a sixteen and now I'm going to look at them and I say okay I know that the light is coming from this direction and so I'm going to get more light coming from that direction all right so I'm going to go to to shoot them and I can't shoot him this way I have to turn it over this way and then we'll take this flash and I'm goingto pound it right up there like that get in closer yes there we go that's what I want okay so I just flashed it thank you okay so there is the starting point with a sixteenth power on the flash and we still have a decent light situation going on here with your face all the lights coming from here you can see there's a shadow on her chin from her hair so we know the light's coming this way now the problem is is that it's not quite bright enough so at that point I just need to increase the power and probably I don't want it to come in as much from there as I do from over here so then I'm gonna turn it around that way so it's bouncing more against these white walls than those whitewalls I'm never going to go forward with it unless I absolutely have to right so I'm gonna I'm gonna increase the power on it or or let's just go to tl and if I do teach yell and dialling up just a tiny bit so two thirds of stop so it'll be above that white wall you'll be brighter than that white wall there so I went e t t l so it figured out the disc the difference and watch what happens I'm sorry that I'm showing you that way you don't deserve that at all but okay so but you see now that I have brightened it up and now the flash is trying to overcompensate for the wall it's a little brighter than maybe but I might go down one third of stop and then I'd be good now if I'm in a situation can I just have you come up here I forgot your name again ross okay so ross I'm gonna have you stand just like that you can stay right there now in this case I'm going to do a I'm gonna go straight at him with this flash okay don't advise it but I want to I'm going to put that down first because that's going to help to defuse some of that power of that flash I'm going to take this thing and turn it to manual so I'm putting it in manual mode and I'm going to dial it down all the way so if I just want a little catch light in his eye to fill in the eyes that's all I want to do and I'm say right here putting him right behind can you to stand and like you're right about there that that's great yeah and don't stand straight at me like there you go nice that's perfect good so now I'm going to take a picture of him she's just backdrop eye candy okay so watch what happens when this comes in it flashed but only a tiny bit see so it gives him a little extra light under the eyes but it doesn't overpower the natural light that exist and what you want to do is um I heard it best said I have a friend named isaac who had a hay was he took photography in college and he had a professor that said good art is when you go past the line like you go up to the line of like what's acceptable and go past it and then dial it back just a little bit right and that's kind of what you want to do with flashing good flashes are when you go past the line and then dial it back so you'll know what's too right so once you get to two bright dial it back all right so you know where the line is by crossing it so we could just keep moving up up up until we start to see oh that looks flash pull it back right below where it looks flashed and that's where you want to stay you want to fill in the shadows but you don't want to go beyond that so I'm in manual mode right now but if I happen to be in in e t t l which I can dial in right now I'm gonna go to e t t l and I'm gonna go to nat normal so this is what the camera wants to dio take the picture so this watch this this is what the camera wants to do with it which is going to be too much say that weigh too much but if I dial it down two minus three stops and take the same shot there's a big difference in what we get because we've dialed it back we're still going to get the advantage of a flash kind of filling in the eyes but now it looks more natural okay now that's maybe too little so we dial it up the couple like two thirds of stop take one more shot and that's probably going to be where we want to stay so if you're using a flash on your camera then it's a matter so that doesn't look flashed its just filled okay so that's again I caught you in a bad moment I'm sorry okay so uh more questions yes from nick pan tell um I've always been resistant to shoot a vertical image with my flash because it cast a harsh shadow I noticed jared is shooting vertically with this flash on his camera what is his thoughts on that I'm not remember I'm not I wasn't pointing it at them when I had it vertical the flashes are weird because they are right above it so if you're shooting horizontally the reason flashes look bad is that nobody ever sees light coming from above the person's head unless you're a minor the only people that in the world who see light coming from right here people that are mining in like you know a coal mine they see it so that totally looks natural to them everybody else like comes from somewhere else and so that's why I would prefer toe always bounce it somewhere either up and one of the problems with bouncing up is that if I like the ceiling up when it comes down then you get raccoon eyes so if that's the case you gotta put something here to give a catch light into the eyes and fill that so that's what those whale tail zahra about or that gary fong lights fear you know because then you get most of like going up in a little light coming forward and that's the optimal thing but most of the time if I'm in that situation I have a hard time having something this big on my flash because I feel like I'm a circus show I'm up you know and so what I'll do is I'll just take this flash turn it around and back like this because now it's going off the ceiling but a little ways behind me so now it's coming more forward than it is coming straight down and so it requires a lot more um from the flash the flash will work harder but you'll get a much more pleasing light effect but if I have a wall like that I'll just turn it there and then that way I get sidelight so when I come in and photograph here lean out a little bit around him so now it's pounding off of there and you'll see that he gets a sidelight and I I didn't increase the power so shy should have increased the power but see how I get that sidelight on him and it looks really nice but it's just one flash pounding off there but remember I'm not trusting the flash to do all my exposure what did I do first turn off the flash get the ambien exposure so that it's almost perfect take whatever I s so you have teo whatever aperture whatever shutter speed to get the the ambient close to right or right and then add the flash teo to fix the deficiencies in the shot flashes shouldn't be used to make the light in the shot they should be used to fix the deficiencies if you want to be efficient about it if you want to have like thirty flashes and power one in the ceiling stuff on a commercial shoot I'll create my own light that's fine because someone's paying me to spend hours per shot to make perfect your client doesn't pay you enough to make your shot absolutely perfect you can't afford to be spending that kind of time on one shot I mean most almost every shot that you see on my website that shot right over there on the wall of the bride and groom holding hands that's literally one flash on the camera just kind of filling in where it needs to fill in that's it that that photograph over there on the grand canyon there's no flash involved you know these are those of the shots that I get paid for and I don't use hardly any effort to make them because I don't have they're not paying me enough to spend that kind of effort and have thirty eight people helping me so in a wedding reception situation do you set up flashes around the room or do you just mostly rely on your your flash yeah I wish I could show you a couple of these shots but there's too many people in them but if you go to my website you'll see stuff like this where I have so if I'm looking at the dance for your the dance floor and then there's like the head table or you know like the head table's raised up here something like that um and then you have the deejay over here and then maybe the cake over here or something like that so they're dancing here and I put one of these flashes up high on the deejay booth I can just clamp it to his because he's got stands for his speakers anyway just clamp it right below the speaker you know so it's just right there above the speaker any depending on where it is and then I have one other stand over here and they're both facing this way that one's an ai that one's a b and then my transmitter is this right here so then this thing is just pounding in the ceiling to give me a little bit extra light forward if I need it just back like this so it's pointing backwards now give me a little bit of forward light which helps to freeze people that air dancing and kind of separate them out and then I just turn on whichever ones I want so if I want that light I just go in here into the screen and turn on group b fire and I leave those on manual really bright so they just rip a light through there and you get this great edge light that kind of separates out the crowd and sometimes if I want more light or if I want something really cool I'll turn on that light too and then I'll have two lights coming forward at me and I'll shoot at him so yeah I'll have three lights this light and then two lights off behind the people like shooting into the lights and then sometimes I can go in here and do this and catch the light and then I'll get some really interesting well I saw that your work so there's a couple slide shows of two weddings that I just did what I did a lot of that stuff because I have these types of lights so I've only had this whole set up for the last six eight months and you really get a lot of that rim light oh yeah just like go to my website because you can't see it here on creative life but go to my website it's jared platt dot com is my blogged and they're all of the videos and all the slide shows from all of my past weddings go there and the last two weddings that I've done are they're really got some amazing stuff because they're just rim lights and all and it's all due to these types of flashes one more question so and the reception setting your exposing for the ambient light first so I'm assuming your size is pretty high oh yeah yeah that's what I think I'm once the reception starts I'm never go below eight hundred and and even the portrait's if you go to my go look at thea there's an indian wedding that I did a couple months ago and it hindu wedding and it's actually hindu and they had a western sentiment so we had like an hour and a half of ceremony time to like shoot so it was like we just casually walked around and shot whatever we felt like shooting you just had plenty of time to shoot but the portrait's they're not one of them is at one hundred s o in fact almost every single portrait that I took in that wedding that are gorgeous and I've just received the prince for them they're like eleven by fourteen and they're absolutely gorgeous four hundred was the lowest I esso I ever used on any portrait including family portrait so I have a few questions so going back to my kitchen scenario maybe this would be appropriated when they're cutting the king of metal objects so like in the kitchen this shoot I said there's this huge metal pots everywhere and I worried about well yeah then you if you use a direct flash you'll always get little hot spots right if you have one little hot spot and it looks perfect except for a hot spot take it and then use even in light room you can usually remove that hot spot with just a cloning tool I'm or in photo shop but those types of situations if you use a big white board or a big white wall you'll get off a line which is a much more pleasing thing than a hot spot you'll get a line that kind of is a crest where and that's much better so yeah if you if you're dealing with an issue where you have lots of metal objects then you have to worry about your flashes being they need to be soft bought riel soft boxes because there's too many it'll just see glares instead of pleasing lines so and that's why when you do car photography you have to have a soft box that's bigger than the car so that the line continues rather than just being a glare of flash so that is one issue that you'd have to deal with but just turned him on to a wall or turn him on to a ceiling or or bounce him into a when you get on location go to the local michael's or whatever and buy some foam core and just take it with you and then when you're done trust it in the trash you know it's twelve bucks or something can you also talk about compatibility good question so if if you're going to buy one of these systems that the cannon system you need the newer camera so the mark three it works perfectly with the mark three it works perfectly with one d acts it will still trigger the flashes in most situations even in e t t l it'll do all of the basic stuff on the mark too and all all the backward compatible cameras so it's not like it just doesn't work but the tricky stuff that I've been doing like changing groups and changing this one to manual and that one toe auto and stuff like that doesn't work the same so there's certain compatibility issues and you need to check those with cannon before you buy it if you're if you're working off a older camera I'm working out the mark three and so it works perfectly for me I have a mark to camera and it will work but it just doesn't do all the tricky stuff so I can't like change one group to manual on one group tl and stuff like that so there's some issues where it can't do quite a cz much stuff so the compatibility is important but even if you don't have a canon camera or even if you don't have the money to buy these cannon flashes which are awesome there are plenty of affordable small flashes that you may have to change manually yourself but you could do the same thing and and I think there's there's a guy that sells I cannot remember his name but he sells these manual flashes that are less than a hundred bucks and they have manual power from full power tow one twenty eight the power and then he has a little tiny trigger forum that you put on him and it triggers them all and you can change and and and it's like one hundred bucks of flash something like that they're really inexpensive and they're super easy so if you're someone who wants to do what I'm doing here but you just don't have the money to get something that's that tricked out go get manual flash to beg borrow or or find really in our affordable small flashes and start using him you just will have to go to him and do it manually but you can still the same rules can apply it just takes a little longer toe to change the settings