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Shoot: Dealing with the Sun

Lesson 10 from: Efficient Lighting & Post-Production

Jared Platt

Shoot: Dealing with the Sun

Lesson 10 from: Efficient Lighting & Post-Production

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

10. Shoot: Dealing with the Sun

Lesson Info

Shoot: Dealing with the Sun

in this case we're in california and so it's you got kind of that foggy effect from it's the marine layer and so the marine layer makes everything soft so we don't need an extra flash I mean this right here is a regular day like there is no flash needed on this because it's soft white but I want it to look like there is light and so I actually added the sun crest here with a flash so the flashes back there and it's coming towards her from behind and creating ah son because there was no sun it was just all overcast and so I added this little crest of light because I thought it would be nice if the sun was over there giving me a crest of light so I take one flash and run it over from behind and just use it for the crust of light and that's all so the one light can be used in various places so like uh so this is this is what shanghai looks like so that's that's what you get in most days and shanghai is just so overcast with smog the there is no sun son doesn't exist it's just this glowy w...

hite which is great for photographs because that was a clear day this was very uncommon in shanghai so that's the same place that's what it normally looks like and then that's the one day that we got a clear day so is perfect for this shot but see this light this one this is during the day no flash forward there's no flash the skylight is what's lighting them in the front it's actually the sky is a little bit off to the right coming this way so there's no actual flash or soft box or anything lighting I'm coming forward I set them down in that little garden area and I have the skylight coming in and getting and then I have a light on a stand over there way off and it see it looks like the sun is kind of barreling through and cresting them but it's not the sun it's just a flash but it helps to separate them from the background so all I need is one light but I'm not using it for forward light on the person I'm using it for back light now why do I do all this and why do I care about where that flashes it's not just for beauty's sake it's for efficiency sake it's easier to turn the person away from the sun and get them in the shade and then add a crest of light somewhere than it is to try and combat the sun and face them like halfway away from the sun so that like for instance that's what's your name christina and ross so if I turn kristina like this uh come come grab her from this side and you'll see that that's a really rough thing to deal with I've got shadow on this side I've got son barreling down and it's missing her eye because that's in shadow and it's getting your note it's it's awful and I'm supposed to try and take a flash and try and like solve that not a good thing to do but if I turn her now turned towards me there now if I get her from this angle now she's completely on her own shadow I can expose for her face so I look at her face exposed for face and then I'll have to deal with is this crest the crest of lights going to help separate her from the background and now all I have to do is take a little flash and just add just a little bit of light back in they bring her exposure up if necessary so it's all for efficiency sake really I mean it it does look beautiful that's a byproduct of that efficiency just simply turn them away so when I walk into any room so I would just walk into this room uh ryan you've already got my can you put in eighty five on there instead and uh okay so and all those air link now so I'm gonna walk into this room so I walk into this room and I and I go like this I immediately put my hand up like this everybody put your hand up like this sterett the knows that your thumb is the nose and then you just turn around the room like this and keep watching that thumb and you can see where all the shadows they're going to look and you know exactly what your clients face is gonna look like because you see their nose and you see the sides of their nose you see all here I've got a nice crest of light on my head on the head and I have completely I have a little shadow on this side of the nose and I have a lot of shadow on that side of the nose so I'm out now I'm gonna turn it around and let's grab grab my hand and as I turn this light here watch as I want closer to the light now there can you get that you see I'm a crest of light up here on the top of my hand but it's in shadow here but if I turn a little bit too far this way then I start to get too much light on this side of the nose and then a shadow on that side so I know exactly what my subject's face is going to look like just simply by creating a nose out of my thumb and this is the head so I just walk into a room and I go like this and I spin around until I know they're so now christina is going to stand come forward but she's going to be like that because now I know that there's going to crest alight here shadow on her face all because of this I don't have to have a subject with me just just a thumb if you have a thumb and a hand you've got it on I'm assuming everybody that uses does photography has at least one thumb and hand I suppose you could be one an armless person and still have a thumb and a hand but you probably wouldn't be if you had no thumbs and hands you wouldn't be shooting photographs yes I have a friend to itch of blind toggle vote e I want to meet that guy ideas they good dime how was huge just him doing that technique is evie's legally dying well he can presumably still see light and shadow and light shadow he can still pay attention on ly the light and shadow where because he knows what his thumb's gonna look like he's just looking for the shapes and shadows not necessarily tax sharp so that's what I would suggest all right so now we pull out our camera and we're going to go to town here so I'm just gonna have you just kind of sidle up next door if you go see and if it works for one person it works for two people okay so I all have to do a set them together and now I just need to take an ambien remember we come in and we first take the ambient exposure so I'm gonna turn the top transmitter off because I don't want any flashes firing so I can turn this off now no flashes or firing and I've got my settings on manual I come into this circumstance and I'm just going to point at them and just look at the meter and right now the meter's telling me that if I were to photograph his shirt and her dress because this is gray this is black so there's a good place to get a reading from if I get a reading from a peer I'm going to start seeing all of this sunlight it'll confuse my meter so I come in and I just kind of point at the general grayness areas and I'm going to get to fiftieth of a second two eight but I don't want to eight because there's more than one person so I'm gonna go for like a five f five which is right on the edge of what I can do and I want his shirt to be a little darker than like middle gray so I'm gonna go one stop darker winning what I'm looking at here than the meter the meter wants me to be in the middle so wants me to make it zero I'm gonna come in and I mean just pointed that shirt and I'm gonna put it about three thirds of a stop underneath the middle of what the meter thinks and that gives me one sixtieth of a second at f five and I met eight hundred eso okay now if I were outside it would be probably two hundred s o or something like that if that was a really son but it's not a real son some we're pretending but I remember I'm okay with a hundred eyes so so now I can take the picture just to see what they look like oh I still haven't black and white remember yesterday we were playing around with black and white I still have it there turning it back to camera neutral and take another picture so if I look at this so now if I if I look at my um hissed a gram and I look at them I can see that there's no blinking lights so I don't have any major over exposures let me just make sure my blinking lights oh that's disabled helen enable the highlights okay so the only blinking lights that I have in this photograph are right on the crest of his shoulder and right on the top of her head that's the only lights that I only blinking lights that I have and so is the crest of her hair really important not really and remember I'm looking at a pre warning all right so I know that if there's a little bit of linkage I can recover that there's a lot of linkage I need to worry about it but then I'm looking at my history gram and my history ram tells me that the only way the only color that's actually going out pretty far into the right side of the entire history ram is red oh yes thank you that's a great great idea we're gonna test this all right wear now tailored let's just start our tethering system here oh I think we're ready hold on oh but hold on it's gonna be just there goes importing but it's going to create a new folder does everybody know howto tether shoe would this be a good time too all right so for all those that want to do tethering shooting obviously we wouldn't tether shoot these guys outside but I'm going to show you how to do that just so that we have a good understanding what's going on so in this case because we're actually tethered um via a cord you need to open up the us utility and in the eoe s utility you're going to tell it in the preferences so you go to the preferences and you tell it in the preferences to send so you find a destination folder and you tell it to send the images to a specific folder so I'm actually telling it to send it to the raw images image what's that image drop folder and it creates a folder inside that folder with the name of the date so it's making a folder with the date name and then it puts the image whatever image it receives from here it puts it into that image folder so once it does that you have to take one picture first so that you know where it's going so we're gonna actually open up the hard drive and look at that so we go from the hard drive to so we're going to the working drive here and we go down to my folder this you go down to my folder there's jared plant and then inside of the raw images here an image drop and see that it's a new day so it's going to look for the images in this new day here we're gonna highlight those and we're going to delete them which is weird because I just shot them so you'd think I'd want him but light room can't do a watched folder situation if the folder has anything in it right now so you have to give it an empty folder so then once I have an empty folder that the cannon software is created then I can go into the light room and I could go up to file in auto import and I can go to the auto imports settings and I got two folders that I have to deal with the first folder is the watched folder that's the one that it's looking for so I'm taking the cannon image it's delivering it into the watched folder okay so I have to tell it which folder that is so I'm going to go back to the image drop area and I'm going to choose this one for today that's that's our watched holder so once I've chosen that light room's going to start using that as the watch it's gonna look there for the information so as it sees something come in then what it's going to do is it's actually going to steal it out of that folder so it's going to pull it from that folder and put it in to the folder that you request the image to go to so I'm telling it to go to this folder which is the auto imparted folder in the raw images folder so I've already requested that so I don't need to actually change that and then remember yesterday we talked about making presets for specific define things that you do so if you are tethering a certain type of thing always in the studio or you're always tethering a certain way then what you can do is you could actually choose one of your developed settings here and simply go to one of those global settings and have it do whatever it is you wanted it to dio and it will apply that setting as it comes in so for instance um my brother is shooting christmas party on saturday I'm not there but he's shooting it and what we do is we want people to see the image as it comes so we have a monitor that's out where the line is and as he shoots it tethers it goes to the folder and it comes back and it's already gotten the vignette on it it's already got the treatment to it's always got kind of that that warm tone color that I like to it it's got its he even has some burning and dodging on the edges because the camera doesn't move and so it looks like I've just done a lot of work on it but it's actually getting applied on the way in so before they ever see it it's just there that effect has been applied to it so you can apply stuff to it you could apply kate keywords hit okay and so now if I go to these the not the final selections I goto my auto imported folder remember this is these these are the images that we shot yesterday they've got all of these shots and now we're going to start adding to these shots we're going to come this was yesterday's shot so now we're going to let me change my um image quality because I'm now shooting j peg plus raw there we go so now we're just shooting raw and now I'm going to take a picture and it you'll see it show up there so it's delivering it and then right now light room is seeing it being delivered and now it's pulling it in so now when we look at this photo it's super beautiful love the clothes but you can see now there's our history graham and the only thing that's really it's going to the develop modules so we can see this better so the only sorry to present you this life um so if I hit the jakey you can see that the only thing that's being overexposed is just the crust of his shoulder and there which I'm not too concerned about if I am I can always increase the shutter speed to two hundred and that'll probably take care of most of it okay but that's not bad at all but it probably could use a little bit of help just to give it a little bit of ah catch lights in the eyes and feel a little bit better now it's being helped by the fact that we've got a light here that's lighting us all for the video but if we take one of these flashes why don't you take that one so I know all of the stroh so I know that this one we always put our a flash on on the soft box so that I always know that's the main light is always our main light so now I just turn on my communication device on the communication device there's a little wink button here that says see I was green now it was yellow before because it was trying to establish communication with the flashes but once it establishes communication it turns green so now I know all of my lights are are being communicated with so now zoom in here on this and I'm tell me if you can see this screen you see it all right okay so I have different channels so in order to do this you have to go in certain mode so you can do e t t l so all these flashes will just do whatever they think is best toe like the subject based on flashing their coming into the lens the camera tells it what it thinks ought to be done and then the tt l will take over and expose it for neutral gray and then you can determine by simply clicking the set button in the middle or I'm sorry the plus minus button right up here and then you khun down grade it toe like one stop under and then push the set button and now all the flashes will give a pre flash figure out what they want to do and then the camera will tell them to go down one stop get darker by one stop so that's a possibility but I don't prefer that kind of possibilities so we're going to take this back up to normal what we want to go is mode you could do him all in manual so if you only have one flash this is all you have to do is turn it to manual and click on the on the uh I never do manual there we go so you click click on the group push plus minus there and then you just downgrade it to all the way to one twenty fifth of it or one twenty eight was a power so one twenty eighth power and now all the flashes would on ly pop at one one one over one twenty eight of whatever their power is so there instead of full power is just a little pop and guaranteed that's mostly where we stay most of my flashes last forever I very rarely have to change batteries and flash even if I don't have the battery pack on it even if I just have four a's in it I can do an entire senior chute and I never have and then when I go to charge they're charged in minutes because I didn't use any power on the batteries because I'm usually at one twenty eight power one sixty fourth mostly one thirty second power so what we're going to do though because we're gonna work on a lot of flashes were going to go into the gr mode which is the group mode and now we're going to go in and we can actually determine groups a b c d and e I think I think he goes tea so I just click on the gr button group button and then I can toggle through the groups and noticed that the d n ear off so if I want see off I just click off on see off on b so now we are on ly operating on a these other flashes khun b on ready for me to use but I've turned them off here so no communication is being delivered to those and then I'm going to choose my power so in this case I'm gonna go again click on the gr the group and once I get to a clique set which takes it over to the power and then I take it from there and I dupes and I choose the power so I'm going to do one sixty fourth power so now let's see what it does so take that and let's put it right up here nice and high so get his high as we can get that stand let's go right like that and see how high we can get that to work okay so now if I photograph them last and we should be communicating all right there we go okay so do you see the difference then but be really careful with that cord so if you look at the image can you guys see that I know that that post is in the way but you look at the difference between that image and that image see that so now we've got the light that we want on them and it was just one flash now that's too much I think a little too bright remember I'm at one sixty fourth power so I could dial it down by one stop or I can move this twice a ce far away either way I lose the power but I'm going to actually dial it down because what do we learn yesterday about the light the quality of light is based on the size of the box the box is bigger if it's closer the boxes smaller if it's further away and so I would prefer for my button for batteries sake I would prefer to dial it down to one twenty eighth power because then I get more jump out of my flash I get more fires and it recycles faster simon again go back to this group mode and I'm gonna just dial it down to one twenty eighth power and now that's just increased that's decreased this by half so now when I shoot their next shot it's a smudge smaller flash and we'll get a lead less of a flash look on these guys and see how it just fills them in nicely very simple and that's that right there is how we created um that is how we created this shot here right right here that shot is created in that very weii just a matter of taking one light putting the sun off to their right or left just barely so that you get a little crest usually it would be nice if you could put the sun right behind him but often times then you get glare coming into your camera so usually I'll put it off to the right or to the left and then we'll add a little bit of light and you'll just get a little spill of light on their side and it'll look supernatural you first then you with a senior I think that's easy but with a couple usually I like them to interact look at each other and so then like if he's looking more towards her then you're definitely gonna have a lot of issues with the sun coming down on him snuggle in start talking teo that's beautiful okay now when you look at him don't turn if you're going to cock your head cock it towards me rather than to him so that I'm not looking up your nose okay and then you're out you're good just the way you are just looking down at her okay good all right so let's nice get in closer like stand up on your tippy toes there there you go nice just like that okay so we got another one coming in here and let's see what happened to it because it's a good questions good point so let's see what we've got so we're gonna go to our auto imported photos see father time there okay okay so that's okay we've got a little crest of white here right coming from the sun but their faces they're fine you got a crest the light up here that's okay and if we're worried about that then we can just simply increase our shutter speed because the shutter speed is what's controlling the son so I can take the shutter speed up another stop and then I just need now what do I need to do with my flash if I've decreased the total exposure the ami exposure by half I need to increase my flash so that it counteracts that so I'm going to hit the group button again so I go to the group click on group go to the power and dial it up one sixty fourth so now I'm twice his power of flash now upon your tippy toes and snuggle in so here comes the next damage seen so now we have more information here in his so if we go back and forth so let's turn on our shadow on hot develop shadow highlight warnings so we don't have much of a difference there that light is pretty powerful let's go one more so we go oh I you know what it didn't the reason there was no effective because this is a great error I just made an error so this is a teaching moment folks so see how I set that at four hundred wait for the camera see how I set that up for hundred so I've got four hundredth of a second I purposefully increase my shutter speed to decrease the sun right but when I push the button it turns back to two hundred why did it do that sync speed it knows that I don't have high speed sync going on and so it has to lock it down at the sink speed of the camera so now what I have to do is just click in these menu options here inside of the inside of the group area so inside of my little communicator I click into the menu and there's a sync button click on it and now I'm in high speed sync so now look at my four hundredth of a second and when I push the button it stays for hundreds of a second so now the flashes are doing it like a multiple pop situation so that it can get inside of the of the shutter so now I'm gonna take that same shot now you're going to see that the shudder when this comes up the shutter has actually so now we have all of that in but our our uh we need more flash but that's okay because we can just simply go into our menu grid and just click on our set button and increase the flash and fire get out there you go so here they come there we go so now we've lit up their faces and if if we feel like you know what I'm afraid that if I if I if I add too much flash here it's going to be too obvious so then what we can do is we can actually bring this around this way why did you bring me another flash there we're going to add this flash you bring me this flash by the way I would like to introduce this is father time on so he's in charge of changing our light today so our son will sometimes change into shade sometimes into like clouds and maybe under trees so he's in charge of that he is our weatherman so watch what happens then when I start adding additional lights to the situation so now this light is c so this is on the sea group I can control it completely independently of the other so I'm going to take my camera and now I'm actually going to go to the sea group so I click on my group's where's my camera there is I click on my group and I go down to the sea group and turn it on and now I can control that one independently by pushing on this select button and now I can I'm gonna turn that one way down hoops that's up I want that one way down it's adding a little bit of light but what's effectively happening here is now I'm adding two lights and the more lights I start adding around here it'll start to wrap the light so the strong lights going to be coming from the side to give them shape okay so if you're gonna increase light you want to move it away from your cameras so that it creates shape okay because if if light straight on it flattens things out right so you take your stronger light and move it to the side and then this one becomes phil toe overcome any weird shadows that might create okay and we can keep doing that all day long and if you took five flashes and just wrap them around like this around your subject and started this one of the lowest power and went up in power on each one successively you'd have a wrap of light that looked like you were using a soft box that was literally twelve or fifteen feet wide because you have this gradual decrease in light okay so now let's take another shot and watch how things change watch that see how that got softer so now because we've effectively created a soft box that's bigger by putting two lights next to each other and then I can increase or decrease those depending on how I want to do it now I think they need to both go up so I go into the group and I increase in both buy us one stop and I simply literally I'm just going into these groups a and and see and I'm increasing them by one stop and the and by the way the more flashes you add to this that every time you add a flash you're adding that much power again so if I'm in one twenty eighth power on flash a and I add flash b and it's one twenty eighth power I now have one sixty fourth power but both flashes are only operating at one twenty eight power have added them together so you're adding amounts of light that are flashing so the more flashes you have the less you have to use them for the same amount and you get more power out of him so I can just simply do this a couple times and had we not been talking about this had we just done it we would have been done a long time ago with the shot but you just simply say it now we've got the amount of light but we're getting a little bit of a shadow over there but we can just go to a different angle here and now we lose the shadow but you can see how this one is creating shadow coming across that wall but that's it so we're just adding these lights so my first instinct when I come into any given situation is to find the sun face them away from the sun so that they're in their own shadow and then throw a light on them if necessary now if you're lighting changes on you and you get something else so you may get a cloud or you may get you know you may go under a tree or I'm not sure what oh it looks like we went under a cloud so now we're under a cloud we get a much softer situation with light here and we have to we have to change quickly tow to manage that so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to increase our ambient exposure because we're obviously going to be too dark so I'll take miami and exposure back down to two hundred and at this point I don't need my high speed sync on anymore because it's the high speed sync is on ly necessary when you're above two hundred and it and it costs you in the amount of of battery using right and then the other thing that you can keep down for a second on then the other thing that I have to deal with is the flash because once I dropped down that andy exposure I'm probably gonna need is much flash it's going it's going over bear is going to be overbearing so in that case I'll go back into my my group menu and I'll dial down the power by quite a significant amount so maybe even two stops and now I'm in a fire so there's our cloud cover and so now we're going to get a very different shot and one that's even more pleasing I would prefer cloud cover too you guys there you guys live in the pacific northwest beautiful lighthouse here but see you can get the shot and we've filled it in but you still see how we still have this crest of light here on her hair and we still have a crest of light here on his head and on his shoulder but we filled in with a flash we filled in those those areas and if we want to then we can move him back we can increase him so now obviously we're not being super like artistic hear anything but the important thing is they understand the flashes on your settings so you're in manual mode and that are you know tio okay now if if I happened to be in e t t l u still a just up and down right so let's just pretend that I throw let's just let's say I don't want to be so in intense about what I'm doing here so I can go back into the mod's let's zoom in on this again and let's go to the mod and now we're in e t t l and I can control all of the flashes and at the same time and so I'm always going to lower the flash I very rarely will increase the flash to match something well usually I want to flash less than the power of the sun and so in this case this will be great I want you to go cloud no clout like let's have clouds moving by s so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have clouds moving by so I if I'm in a situation where clouds are constantly moving by and so it's like cloud no cloud cloud no cloud then manuals even a bad situation so sometimes you got to like move on the fly so in that case I'll actually turn my um exposure mode a v so that I get to choose the aperture and it's moving the shutter based on what's needed I'm also going to go in and make sure that my sync speed is at high speed sync at all times because I don't know when it's going to go back and forth I wanted to be able to go above two hundredth of a second okay then I have two issues that I have to deal with theirs to auto things happening the camera has auto going on so it's it's auto exposing and then the flash has auto exposure and both of those are independent of each other so what I'm going to do then is I just turned on my live you mowed um so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna first go here right below my s o rating on my camera is the um you gotta you gotta activate it and then this is your compensation dial so if you leave it at zero then the camera is always going to try and expose accurately for eighteen percent gray which sometimes the camera's fooled by that right so sometimes the camera will brighten things up too much of darkened things down to much in this case it's probably going to be about right and I'll see you on the first shot whether or not it's right and then I'll either increase the emmy exposure or decrease it okay so I will probably in this case I'll increase it because going to be fooled by little crests of light coming through um but because it will think that this is really bright here on his shoulder so it'll try and dark and down which means I'll lose the rest of them so the other thing you have to worry about then is thie the auto exposure on the flash and so in the flash I'm usually wanting the flash to be lower in power rather than more and so I'll just click on the plus minus and I'll decrease it by stop automatically anytime I use a flash I'm always going to try and go lower first and you khun do each one different like one could be one stop down one could be half stop down that's if you if you want to do that you have to go rather this is all details this like super dung down easy to use ok if you go into the group mode you can tell one to be manual one to b e t t l they could have different powers on e t t l like you can independently assigned different channels so let's let's let's go with that then if we want to be more complicated let's do that let's go teo the mod get it to group mode and then let's zoom in on this again and when we go into group aiken turn the one on the right I just hit the mode button which is the second button over and now it's on e t t l so then I go in and I dial that one down by one stop and then I'll go to this one right and I'm going to put this one into e t t l mode but this one I'm going to dial down by a stop in two thirds because I think that this one should be less than that right because they're gonna wrap okay so let's see what happens right so at this point I aim at them and it's sunlight hold on it's blinking at me oh I'm not somehow I got rid of my okay now I'm in high speed sync mode and it wants to expose it three twenty and it did a pretty good job let's see let's see what we get out there that did a decent job but now see how it's lowering the flashes so if I think okay you're being a little bit too fooled by that son thinks there's enough light oh and then the cloud came so let's fire and see what happens when the cloud comes so when the cloud comes it it's going to think that there is less light so now it's gonna beef up the exposure but still it's not giving me enough on the flash so it's just simply a matter of clicking on the uh the group mode again and then telling it okay let's let's just give you a lot of flash again we're going to make this one less than that one so we're going to go to our a mode and we're going to increase that one a little bit above because it's getting fooled by that crest of life is what's happening the flash things oh there's there's plenty of light and so we're going to try and and you know the other thing that's fulling it is that white wall and that happens a lot when you're outside in your shooting into the sky right you see the sky and the camera season and thinks oh there's plenty of light there and so it under powers your flash so in this case what's there we go thank you there see that so now we're a little bit more but look what's happening to his face right so let's take a third light but ryan would you just hold that light on that post what which group is that him it's a b okay so now ryan's going to go over there by father sky our father time is what I've been calling you write further I wanted to come through like that and high okay so he's going to actually be getting the light coming down onto his face and I'm just going to turn on I go into the group now go down to be because I know that that's what that flashes and I'm gonna hope I don't want to be manual hold on uh mode e t t l I'm going to go down and just add a little bit of light on there okay nice and high right now we were in like a tree under way to see that so we moved under a tree and so you'll see that parts of see how it parts of but it did a pretty good job but you did you see what happened here so if you go back and forth between these two shots by having ryan there oh I've got some nice whoever's operating that keep going so that's good so go back and forth between these two shots see that so go to the shadow okay see how he's got shadow on his face all I have to do the light up that shadows go to the next shot and now we've lived let him up pretty well and it looks great now had we been under the under the cloud of have been perfect and we have that tree come and somehow get over the top of us and so with the tree coming over the top we got a little bit of extra brightness there but I am going to say this there are times when you need to let go of your anal retentive nature and be okay with part of a crest of light that's because it's not all that bad to see across the light I'm not too thrilled with his forehead being that brian but I'm okay with a crest of light on the shoulder especially if I'm doing something different with it and I'm pretty sure I can recover that so let's let's let's do that cloud shot now nice and high so we'll bring that one in okay so that's let's go between those two but the uh the the first one with the real shadow and then the no the last one those two yeah you see that so now with the cloud there we have a perfect exposure on his forehead it's just a crest but it's still like the information is still there and then if you look it without this flash here we were getting a little bit too much shadow so now with three flashes we've really sculpted the light the way we want it to look so why did you put the third flash there instead of here to compensate that side of his face that's a good question so if I were to put it here it would have filled in nicely but it probably would have been um too flat by putting it over there it looks like it's actually the sun it looks like it's spill over from the sun so for instance um in let's go here let me let me take over here and go to some well you shoot one from over here just so we can compare it yeah absolutely let me show you this one here okay so in this shot here I have there's three lights in this shot there's the sun which is off behind her to the right and then there's one light here next to me kind of close and that's kind of just filling her in generally speaking but then I have another one that's over behind her coming back on this side because remember this the back side of her cheek here is going to be dark right there's going to be a crest of light and then there's going to be a shadow here because of this flash on so I put a light over behind her over to the left so that that light feels like it's just wrap around from the sun and the whatever's going on in that sky is kind of wrapping around and filling her in even though it's just a flash so I'm just I'm extending the size of the sun over to the other side of her a little bit and it doesn't call attention to itself it just fills in any shadows I might get from this light so why don't you come over here though and we'll give you give us that cloud again and let's go go back to the uh auto imported in the folders up there whoever my computer guys so there's there's the old one and then we should get a new one cut there was the new one okay so now well let's compare those to the last one in this one that is so it fills in if you look at it give us the full screen and if you give us if you look at this guy on this side see how nice and open and airy that noses so it looks really now looks natural but it looks beautiful and it looks like a huge soft boxes wrapped around them but if you go to this one here it looks more natural looks more riel because now we're just filling in from a different angle so it really depends on what you would like to accomplish with the shop if you want it to feel like you've got a huge soft box than bring the lights here and just wrap them around like this and you'll have this big huge soft box but if you if you wanted to feel more natural and feel like it's really outside then if you move him over there fills in the shadow but it doesn't really it doesn't pound the light on it and make it to um flat you get more volume when you don't have stuff coming straight forward so do we have questions out there of course more questions in here yeah do you guys have any questions start looks like way d'oh can you go over was thinks be days and going to review the last house okay sync speed sing speed is pretty simple issue um flashes cannot timing the flash to fit into the shutter is the issue and so if the shutter is open and the flash hits it the whole thing it gets exposed correctly but if the flash opens our mean that the shutter opens and then it starts to close before the flash fires half your frame is like half your frame is dark so that's why two hundredth of a second on most cameras or lower is the sink speed on less professional bodies on the real amateur bodies one twenty fifth is the sink speed I grew up was sixtieth as the sink speed on my k one thousand you know like the old pentax came one thousand was sixty eighth of a second and it's increased this time goes on in our pro body it's too fiftieth of a second and then on some bodies you can get a little bit more sometimes unlike leaf shutter you could get to like five hundredth of a second more but depending on what your camera is it has a different sync speed and you just have to be able to fit the flash into the into that time where it's fully open but if you I have a flash that has high speed seed spinks sink capability and a camera that has the same capability which in this case we do if we were using studio flashes we couldn't do that but I could go to an eight thousandth of a second on these guys so I can be outside and I can be at eight thousands of a second and I can still get a shot so in phoenix that's very important now these things will have to be power a lot of because they flashed did it did it did it like that they're flashing a lot of flashes in order to fit into that area so I'm wasting a lot of battery doing that so I will have to change out batteries if I'm dealing with that but most the time I'm not really out in the bright sunlight like this I'm usually um actually why don't we have you guys go lean up against that wall that's where I would usually be in a situation like that because I'm not going toe put them out in the bright bright sunlight generally usually I'm going to try and find some place where they'll be a little bit shaded or there's some ambient light kicking into like under under eaves or under trees or things like that so and you guys can hang out there because that's actually if you want to sit you can see it will be yeah wherever just hang out so I don't even know where I wass o okay so so I could be up to an eight thousands of a second so that's high speed sink these guys just pound a whole bunch of flashes so as the shutter opens and closes it's sure to get in there somehow right so that's high speed sync and what was your other aboutthe flash powers okay so you have full power on any flash now full power on this flash is much smaller than full power on my sixteen hundred ex uh white lightning flash okay so there's a huge difference between the two so if you need a lot of power then you have to bring a studio plugging into a battery on location and I've done that but you just need sandbags and assistance and things to get it out there and carry it and all that kind of stuff because I hate carrying heavy things so ryan carries heavy things because he's also a firefighter so that's what they do they carry heavy things and their men manly men um so this flashes less powerful than those a lot less powerful but it still has full power so whatever its power is its full power and then I can cut that power in half and cut that power and half again and again and again and again until I'm at literally one twenty eighth of that power so it's a very small amount of that power and that's what we've been operating it here so when you're eight hundred s so generally speaking josh has never need to go above like uh maybe a thirty second of power or sixteenth of the power that's usually where you're operating but sometimes if you are at a higher uh like if you're way out in the really bright sun and you got over power of the sun then sometimes you're a full power and if you can't get enough power full power on this guy is not enough to simply take the second one and stick it right next to it at full power and now you've got double power and if you and here's the here's the greatest trick and well actually try this in a minute but if you want to make a big soft box so something that's like you know this big all you need to do is take this flash and put another flash here and another flash here and another flash up there and now you've got a soft box that's that big but it's not a sale and so it's not going to blow over in the wind what you've done is you've just created a soft box by creating light coming from all sorts of different angles because a soft boxes simply when you look at the effect of softball has on somebody the reason the soft boxes softer is not because of this not because something's blocking it it's because there's light coming from here and from here so this soft boxes effectively giving you like from this corner that corner that corner that corner and the middle all the same time in the same amount and so when I face it light is coming here and hitting this side of my nose but this light is actually sneaking around that side of my nose so it's filling it in that's what a soft boxes doing now it's doing it from every point and that's why it's so soft but if you want to mimic that effect without a sail that's blowing around outside and it trust me it happens all the time I told you I have live I've dropped those sixteen hundreds a lot because I do a lot of work outside I don't have a studio I do a lot of work outside and so I've had those things blow over and hit the ground and I thought they were dead but they were still alive and so a sale like this is a dangerous thing so if I have an assistant I'll always have the assistant holding this on the mono pod and then I'll have all the other flashes on these on their own because they won't blow over in the wind and lesson said just a gale force wind right but if I take four flashes and I put one here one here one here and one here and then with no soft box but at the same distance I get the same effect of the soft box because I got light coming from all sorts of angles so if I put a light here here there and there I'm gonna have a really large soft box happening because I've got light coming from it all angles and I'll even do a better job if I have one in the middle if I put five flashes one in the middle and five on the rounds on the corners I've got a huge soft box without wind blowing it over and I get five times the power so I could be it you know a sixty fourth power and I still have a lot of power even though each flashes only providing a little bit so I'll show you really quickly so is this a sort of set up you use when you're on location or do you use more like the studio less yesterday on a portable pet so that's a family portrait that I'm doing or that I did that's great so I haven't actually worked on the images I've got one image that I've worked on where they're on the tractor and I'll show you that one but so they're going to be out in this field here kind of hunkering down with the dog and you know in this field with this big mountain behind him and I'm over here with a long lens with a seventy two two hundred and I'm facing that way and shooting this is my this is my soft box so I've got this one standing up here and that's the main light that's coming forward and filling it's up in and its has to run pretty powerful because it has to go through that soft box but then I've got these two over here and they look a little close together but they're actually you know maybe that far apart from each other and so effectively what I've got I've got I've got a soft box that's about this big so no soft box is that big unless you're shooting a car but effectively I've created a fairly large soft box because I've got light coming from both angles forward right so I've got a little soft box here and a a decent size soft box over here on the right hand side with the two flashes and then together they make kind of a pretty big soft box so then when you look at their light it's it's even across them even though the sun is coming from way over here and cross lighting them so that I have every one of these flashes at full power and you're just using the flesh is just these three flashes and my camera and that's it and the sun's cross lighting and then it does a pretty good job I'll show you one of the shots that I've I've actually done with it I see so this this is their christmas card but you see how the light and the sun is coming from the cross it's it's actually we I would have preferred to have something where the sun was behind them but if I turned that direction there's no cool mountains and so we kind of have to deal with the fact that we've got cross light so I've got that same situation that I just showed you where I've got three lights but they're all from straight on to the right and that's filling in these sides of their face and then the sun is giving in that and it's nice because now you've got volume on their face you see the sun gives them the highlight on that side but as it goes around the face they're not in deep shadow they've got they've got light on that side simply by using three can and flashes that I can excuse me I can carry I can't carry all three flash just like this two on this side and the soft box on that side camera on the hip I didn't have an assistant on this shoot me my son was there but he's nine he's he was there but he was mostly playing with the dog and running around doing things I don't even know where he was during the shoot he was playing on the farm you know probably like driving a tractor somewhere so but that's a pretty good shoot and that's a pretty difficult situation if you were there without flashes you would be hurting you would have liked this super bright light and if you've got that under control this would be shadowed and if you got this under control this would be blown out but three flashes and you're you're good and if I wanted I could have thrown two more up there if I needed more power but I was able to get it with three thie other two were just in the bag waiting

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Jared Platt Notes and Resources - Dec 2012.pdf
ShuttlePro2Set.zip
WacomIntuos5set.zip

bonus material with enrollment

MaterialsRelease_JaredPlatt.pdf
Jared Platt Free Resources.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Don't you just love it when Photographers, especially successful ones as Jared Platt, throw explanations out w/o any scientific backing to justify them? Jared's explanation of golden Setting Sun is dust and smog in the sky, when the real reason is scattering, the refraction of light by the molecules and objects in the atmosphere, not the smog and stuff much lower. He also defines latitude as a given amount, when it is actually the breadth of light individual camera sensors can record, normally about 5 or 6 stops. Made the rest of what he taught suspect at best. Glad I caught this for $25 rather than the huge first release price.

Deise De Oliveira
 

Jared is a great teacher! This course is much better than I imagined because it is not only about fotography, but also about passion. I loved it!

Anjani Millet
 

I was in the studio for this workshop and it was so, so much more than just about efficiency. Jared is a fantastic photographer and teacher, and makes everything so accesible. He covered Lightroom, presets, lighting equipment,software, music, artisic development, even, dare I say it, the soul of a photographer. I recommend this to anyone needing to spend a lot less time doing things you don't need to personally do, and/or anyone who needs to improve their artistry or technical skills. Do more. Waste less time. Share your work. Oh... and buy this course. :-)

Student Work

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