Lessons

Lesson Info

Shoot: Exposure, Lighting, Lightroom

now let's get into our photo shoot let's talk about these lights so well we're going to do right now is we're gonna do we're gonna add lights and as we add lights we're gonna talk about how that changes what we shoot and as we shoot we'll talk about the exposures that we're getting okay so the first thing that we want to dio I'm goingto look here hey ryan did you grab me my spider holster please so I don't have to keep setting us down all right this is totally tricky trying to do this because it's delayed but okay so thank you you hold this is my spider holster I feel a bit like like luke skywalker when I when I wear it and my brother makes fun of me because I look like school luke skywalker with no hair but the beauty of this little dude is that now I don't have toe have ryan hold my gear for me I can just hang it just like that um and and the thing is I hate straps for the longest time I was like my back was getting her and I was I was having to go to a massage therapist constantly t...

o like fix my back and and it's because I usually shoot with two things two cameras and so I have one here and I'll be shooting and I'll be like this and trying to hold that up and now I just hang him I have one over here and one over here and I can hang him to the side and that now all the weight's on my hips so these spider holsters are great and I think we're given one of them away a little bit later so um spider holsters are fantastic but um that's another thing don't break your back on a shoot so either hire assistants like ryan to carry all your gear on dh then get things like this that will save your back okay so we're going to take a look at this um situation here and we've got one light and that's all we've got okay so we're going to start with that so what do you do if you just have one light now this one has a soft box on it so it's a one big light if that we're just a small penlight or just a bare head it would be a very different quality of light than if you have a soft box and that's you know the sun is a very big thing right but to us it looks like a little pin light right and so the smaller the light sources the harsher the shadows that's why when the sunlight something the shadows were very harsh the nose hits it and the shadow over here is really hard okay but when you get a soft box because it's bigger in comparison to the subject I mean and his head is only that big and the soft boxes five ten times the size of his head it's big so we're going to get far less shadows is a result of that because the lights actually hitting him from here and from here so it's it's coming from here and it's coming from here and as we shift this further around it'll actually reach around his nose so we won't get a cz many shadows from a soft box so really quality of light is based in one thing and one thing alone and that's the size of the light in comparison to the subject okay and the size of light changes based on how close it gets to the subject so if the sun were to come in really close to us it would engulf and burn up the earth but if we could keep it from engulfing and burning the earth it would be very very large if we brought a closer to us ryan so this light if I moved it farther away if I moved it to the other side of the street it would also be small even though its size has not changed but in comparison to where he is it is and so if I want this light to become softer I need it to be closer to the subject and if I want it to be harder I move it further away because of the relative size is all that determines the quality of that light okay all right so let's just take a test shot here so that we know we're working with and right now I'm at one sixty eighth of a second f six point three which means I'm gonna have quite a bit of depth of field much more than I generally even care to have um and we're s a one twenty five I'm going to change that right now because I don't want that much depth of field and so when I go down say a stop on my f stop so I'm actually opening it up one by one stop that means I have to somehow change the lighting or the exposure a little bit so I can take the sow down a third of stop to one hundred or I could even take it down to low which is fifty and now I can actually get a stop in a third out of my aperture so I'm going to go down to f four that's a much better I like f form more but you see how I was able to keep the amount of light the same so the first rule in an efficient photoshoot is do as much as you can at the camera and not have to mess around with all that stuff so I already know from that that the light is from our first test shot that the light was okay and so I'm going to adjust all of my stuff here to try and get exactly what I want and not have to mess with this now one point I'll probably have to have some assistance go and change some lighting but I want to start without I want to do is a little of that is possible so let's take a test shot not a lean forward and go okay so that's going to come in here in just a second we're going to see it there we go that's what we have okay so that's our initial test I want you to notice something aboutthe history graham so if you look at the history graham here the history graham most of this his sure his shoes some of the chair all of that that's all piled up here on the left hand side of history graham that's all the darks and then your mid tones is his face and the shadow side of his face and the wall and then the highlights getting up here into that last quarter is this side of his face I like the shot I think it's pretty cool I liked the drama to it and he's not a a woman and he's not a bride so we're not trying to make him look like wrinkle free and beautiful and whatever we want him that I specifically chosen because I want texture and I want I want a rough person I want a character I want character in my photograph so so we're getting that because we have the sidelight but watch what happens can I get you to turn this to black so right now I've got a white board and all of this light was coming across his face bouncing off the board and coming back and so you can see that all of this extra light on this side of his face is coming back because of that whiteboard and if I take this same picture with a blackboard there it's going to change it a lot so is this one comes in you're going to see that his the shadow side of his face becomes really dark so one life is not a problem it's very easy to shoot an entire shoot with one light you can shoot with one light all day long but you're going to get that until turn this backto white then so as soon as we put a reflector of some sort and that could be you know those pop up westcott ones I've got one of those here on on set we have these so these kind of reflectors he's worked great pop him up hold some have someone hold it take a stand put it up there so reflector will get that across so my goal when I first come into a shoot is in this kind of a studio setting where I'm not finding like I'm creating it my first goal is just to get some light on the subject and if I can accomplish it was one one flash I want to do that because it's simple it's easy set it up set that up and I've got a really dramatic beautiful shot right now in our case um let's go back to the other photograph in our case this was pretty good except for one problem it's all a little bit dark and so in the end I would have ended up going into this photograph um to deal with the exposure and I would have brightened up the exposure probably to that well if I'm going to brighten up the exposure that much inside of light room and I still haven't even hit the whites now remember your history graham needs to look like the photo hissed a proper hissed a graham does not have stuff on the black stuff in the mid tones and stuff in the white's a proper hissed a gram has the same tones as what's in the photograph so if there's no pure white in the photograph there should be no pure white up here okay so when you're exposing your photograph when you're looking at your history graham you need to pay attention to that say ok what is it well if it's if it's a white backdrop white bride's dress you know caucasian girl with blond hair it's all gonna be piled up towards the right hand side of the history ram but in our case we don't have any real white in there and that's great so it should mostly pile up here a little bit here and then there should be like the whites of his eyes and a couple of the brighter spots on his skin you know that kind of stuff might pile up here into the whites a little bit and that's it but if I'm going to have to brighten up the exposure rather than doing that why don't I just do it at the camera right so let's take this shot again but this time I'm going to increase the exposure so let's let's bring up this white lightning um by a third to stop so what we're going to do is increase the power of the light by one third to stop which is about what I was pulling up here to get the the amount of brightness that we want and then we're going to shoot again blinked going again there we go okay so now when I look at this why don't we have a camera here and let's look at the history ram here so take a look at the back of the camera so when I'm looking at the camera I'm going to have the same hissed a gram here that I have up here so I can see that everything's piled up down at the bottom of the photograph and I can see that the highlights you can barely see that can you see that so the reds there's more red in this photograph than there is green and blue so you'll see a little bit more red popping up because that's in his skin and over here in this chair right and skin his skin is the brightest thing in the photograph and so that's going to be the red highlight in this history and there's going to be a lot of red up there okay so you can see that I'm looking at my history graham mohr than I'm looking at anything else in the photograph I want that history am and I like to do every camera has the ability to either have a history ram that's based in just the exposure so it's a gray one or you can separate it out toe rgb you always want to separate it out because an rgb hissed a gram will tell you more information about what is clipping if something's clipping and it's just one of the colors then you're okay because the other two colors will help toe wrangle in the exposure and you can still recover but if all three clip then you know you're not okay so like I said I can tell everything about the photo by the history I don't actually need the photograph if I could just have one big rgb hissed a gram right there that would be so cool because then I could just look at the history and say okay I know that red is clipping but green and blue aren't so I'm fine because I know I can recover that I wouldn't have to look at the photograph to see that okay so the first thing that we do then is we come and we get estimate what we're going to expose we have our one light and we're going to shoot and get a ah history ram on the camera and we're going to look at it and make sure it looks good and then now we can start playing and moving the light around okay now the main rule toe lighting is that once you set the distance of the light if you can maintain that distance the exposure will never change so the distance from him to the light is that so I can maintain this distance my exposure won't change if I cut the distance in half the light becomes twice as powerful so if I keep that in my mind then I don't have to keep testing my life so now if I want to take this light in and make it a softer photograph where I I'm getting mohr of a soft pleasing instead of like a dramatic photo if I bring it in halfway and I move it around towards the front a little bit I have just increased the power of the light by double so now I can take the power of the light and drop it down an entire stop and it should be pretty much equal so now I don't know I didn't have to do another test I already know based on distance so if I if I were to move that further away and have double the power of the light so I'm gonna come back and shoot again so this time we're going to get a more like coming over here on this side of his face directly from the flash see that I didn't quite cut it enough but I'm close I didn't blow out so now I can just say okay well this needs to come down another half a stop and then we're we're into shooting and that'll solve the highlight on his forehead here and it will bring it back down to our see that okay so now we've got a correctly exposed image so if you understand those principles of light those principles of half and double so if you move the light closer it doubles the power and if you move it further away like double the distance it halfs the power you can move a light all over the place and you'll know exactly how much you need to increase or decrease the light just based on moving it and send it if you're the only one shooting right and chances are you are right everybody in here is shooting on your own you don't have assistants and whatever okay so if you're the one shooting it then it's very easy for you to say okay well I want to move this light over here like this and it needs to be down a little bit because I moved it closer to him you did you could do all that at the same time and now you can shoot and then you can sail well I want it to be you know further away okay so let's take the light further away we double the distance I'm here already so I just increase it and now I'm ready to shoot because I know I brought it back double the distance or three quarters you know again or whatever and then you just it based on that understanding that when you double the distance the amount of light cuts in half and then you compensate for that okay so that one understanding will help you to to really work on your light without having to fuss with it because the one thing you don't want to happen is when you're on the photo shoot you don't want your client seeing that your yahoo you know how many have you ever done that you had a photo shoot and you're like ah this doesn't work and crap this isn't working and and as you're doing that you're telling your client don't hire me clearly I don't know what I'm doing and so even if you don't know what you're doing like you do because you really need your client have confidence in you in the way that you're working on the you know even if you don't know what you want to do with the light just come in and pretend you do and say hey we're going to do a really dramatic shop first so we're gonna pull this over to the side and we're going to really make this dramatic I'm actually going to spin this around what happens when I spend this around it gives me further reach on this side of his face because now the light is this wide and so it's hitting him from here right here but this side of the light is going around the nose right so it's actually giving me uh a nicer now I'm not going to get is much light down here but do I care no so I can start with this and say ok I wanna you know raise this up just a little bit and I want to bring this down this is this is what we call a rembrandt like because rembrandt always had the same window in the same spot so when he painted the light was always the same and so now we call it rembrandt lighting because it always makes that little triangle on this side of the face all right so so now I'm just gonna I so my client thinks so he knows what he's doing I just set that up and I'm going to come in and say ok give me a serious like no no smile just don't look at me look look just off to my right that was beautiful so we got it here he goes say so there's there's our shot and o doesn't really look all that good I'm not gonna tell him that right I'm not gonna fuss about it I'm going to say okay now we're gonna we're gonna move this out a little bit so that we get a little bit more drama to it and we're gonna pull this around just a little bit that looks great that's what I'm gonna tell the client that looks great let's let's shoot that way and I'll shoot or I'll say ryan why don't we pull in a uh a light from here just grab one of these einstein's and then put it off to that right so now we're going to start adding another light because now we're bored of just one life all right so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have ryan come around to the back side of this and we're going to set up an einstein light which is so I'm using I'm using einstein's and white lightning's which are all from that from policy buff and they're inexpensive lights they're easy to use they have enough power for most portrait's and things like that I even do a lot of commercial work even lighting up a room or whatever with it and so they're pretty good lights and this one has dropped in the wind ten fifteen times and the and the bulbs don't even break when they dropped like they've literally you know I thought they'll drop and I'm like no I'm done with that light no keeps going so pretty strong they're good little lights um so I'm I'm using that and then a nine sign over here so take that einstein up a little bit higher and uh and then we're going to use it toe back light his head so now we're adding a second light on that second lights purpose so the first lights purpose is just to give us light right okay the second lights purpose is to separate him from the background because if you look at this photograph we've got him lit but the backgrounds pretty bland right nothing all that special but what we want to do is we want to create like on this ear we want to separate that ear now there's a reason that we're lighting the the photograph from this side and then from that side in the back because we've got light on this side of his face and then shadow on that side of his face so any a good lighting scenario you want to see light dark light dark alternating okay so if you want to create a really beautiful deep photograph with a lot of interest you want toe alternate between shadow highlight shadow highlight shadow highlight shadow highlight and so in this photograph we've got highlight shadow and what that light that rim light's going to do is it's going to give us a highlight on this side of his face so there's our highlight and then we go back to kind of shadow over here okay so we'll have highlight shadow highlight shadow so we do this alternating thing and that's going to really push him out of the photograph it's going to make it more three dimensional in a way so turn that thing all the way down you guys ready okay so now I'm in a photograph him and here he is so we've got see a little bit light there we don't have enough and we're definitely so bring it up two stops and we want to make sure the one thing we don't want to happen is we don't want this light to spill onto our backdrop and so we're gonna point it further this way so turn it towards me more yeah okay so now we're going to just all it's gonna hit and it I don't know if you if we could get a camera back there so that we can show what's going on back there is the light is actually being blocked from my camera by this foam core and then it's coming across it's pointing right into the foam core and on ly a sliver of the light is actually facing him it's coming across this way but none of it could be directed at the background because it's not facing to the right if it was facing more to the to the left what would happen is you would have every every light has every light has um uh a reflector on it that's a cone and so everything like this is in the light what I'm doing is I'm wasting most of the light right now so I'm turning the light away so that most of lights being wasted and only a little sliver of it on this edge is going into the person's head can you take a photo from over there so we can see what how his position because you can't really see it from here yeah here let me see if I can I'm gonna okay so you'll see coming up here on the screen then what's going on in the photographs he see that light it's just it's a sliver of light most of the light is being directed right into this foam core on ly a sliver of it is coming around the phone corn hitting his head so now when we photograph him we're going to get that light hitting right here cnn now we've got that light on this side of his face so it got shot uh light shadow light so now we're getting we're separating him out from the darkness a little bit more okay okay so that's two lights were adding a light now what do we do if we want to add a third life so we've got all these you you keep adding lights for various purposes usually three lights is enough for any shoot most of the time I can get away with one light especially if I'm outdoor because the sun is the second light right so really in this case here let me let me go back to this photograph in this case this soft box represents the light that you would have on the subject flash on a soft box or maybe it's the northern sky that light represents the sun and we'll talk more a lot about this tomorrow when we talk about outdoor shooting with like smaller lights we use all cannon six hundred artie speed lights and what we'll do is we'll utilize the sun is this back light and then all of our artie six hundred flashes will become the light that's lighting up the subject itself okay so we get in the soft light from soft box but outside if you're shooting this all natural this would be the northern sky the soft box this big light and then the sun's behind him lighting up his lighting up this um the edge of his head teo teo have glasses because I just know you because I don't have to buy our that's got you so how in part of it is imperative is it to have a flash when you're working because if you don't have money to buy flashes then they're pretty expensive I mean one of these white lightning's is about four fifty or something like that and a and a cannon artie six hundred flashes six hundred something dollars so they're they're expensive little piece of equipment um and that's why we you know these these reflectors khun can accomplish the same thing so if you put your your son to the back of the subject and then you grab a reflector that becomes this soft box it grabs all the extra light from the sun and pounds it back at the at the person and that becomes the soft box so one light the sun then gets reflected remember when we first started this we had one light which could be a flash or it could be the sun or it could be the northern sky and that light was then reflecting off of some surface that was then lighting the other side of the subject right so you can accomplish all of this in the real world it's just you have to think a little harder about it in the real world because now you're depend on where the sun is we'll talk a lot about that tomorrow instead they don't have less is to go off right so if you're using available light inside as well that's when you have to be careful because most light inside where does it come from up there coming down which creates what raccoon eyes right you have these deep shadowy eyes and you look like skeletor or what I was doing remember that cartoon you remember skeletor so any way you look you look like this the walking dead or whatever and so you have to be careful about that light that's coming down and we can talk more tomorrow about solving issues like that so we'll do a whole segment on getting something from nothing tomorrow where we'll take really bad circumstances and find a way to get a really good exposure out of it so there are ways to accomplish all that so we'll talk a lot about that available issue tomorrow so in our studio lighting circumstance here than if we want to add another light to create more visual interest behind us then let's take one another one of these einstein's and put a grid spot on it now I told him to put a grid spot on it remember what the grid spot is the grid spots that thing that directs the light and won't let it go out in different angles so the grid spots purpose is to really direct it so it's a spotlight and what we're going to do yeah uh really narrow narrow as you can get it um so we're taking the smallest hunting comb on a grid spot so that that will create a very fine uh flashlight you know if you have a flashlight that changes from like wide too toe spotlight we're creating a spotlight version of a flashlight and what we're going to do is we're going to run that across the background here to make some kind of a splash of light just to give us some kind of visual interest in the background so that it's not just sail it's kind of boring back there light has the ability of creating that visual interest you don't have to have this amazing backdrop if you have an interesting light source toe throw on the backdrop that makes sense so so we're going to create some extra visual light source there in the meantime while they're setting that up let's talk a little bit more about exposures then so now that we're looking at this image in light room if I want to see if I have any shadows or highlights that air over exposed or under exposed I can hit the jakey and the j key will give me those exposure so if I hit j I can see that in there's there's blue down here in his shirt and there's no reds reds would mean overexposed highlights you also can get that same thing inside of your camera if you go to the menus and you go to the highlight alert and you enable it so on the mark three it's I've got it in my favorites menu but it's the highlight color and you just enable it once you've got that enabled if you were to overexpose something so let me just I'm just going to do a major overexposure really quickly you can see that it blinks see the blinking things they're obviously the soft boxes over exposing the background is over exposing his head is over exposing the windows air over exposing and they're just blinking at me so I always leave that on because I want to know if I pull up a nimitz and I see a blink I want toe I want to investigate that now at the camera and I want those things blinking at me however it's not really good for your client to see blinking because sometimes sometimes you'll shoot an image that you don't care if the skies over blown or the window or whatever and so you'll take this gorgeous shot and there'll be this blinking highlight on the window going and then if you want to show it to your client you can't because it's blinking so that's why I have it in my favorites menu so if you go to my menu I have it the very top thing in my favorites menu I can hit that and disable it and then I can show my client look how cool that is and they'll be like all that's awesome and then I'll go right back to the menu and enable my highlights and go and start shooting because I want those to blink at me so that I know and I can choose whether or not that highlight is important to keep but when I showed the client I really did need to show them it without the highlights blinking make sense so always take the highlight enablement and put it in your favorites menu I don't does I don't know if nikon has a favorites man you know I hope they do but if they don't they should I was just asking john john are there any questions that I need to know that there's a question about exposure arthur seabra had asked how do you determine the initial exposure and initial light power output and what what would you rather change first when you need teo that's a good question so so what's the order the packing order of exposure and I'm gonna turn this back to like something normal so it doesn't look like we're okay so when I first walk into a studio lighting situation and I put up a light I kind of know from experience that if I put it half power on this particular flash and I put it at one hundred s so I'm gonna be somewhere around you know f for two f six ish somewhere and so I just throw it on something and take a shot and just see if I'm correct and if I am correct great if not I'll dial it in and say okay well it needs toe either I need to increase the the flash a little bit or I need to change my settings on the camera maybe go down toe you know fifty I s o or maybe go up to two hundred s o or something like that but that just gets me in the initial ballpark and then I start thinking and that's where the real thinking comes in so obviously want the lowest I s so possible because you're going to get a cleaner more beautiful file out of that however I with the new cameras today I'm not afraid of eight hundred eyes so I can't tell you the last family portrait I took below eight hundred I shoot eight hundred sl like it was one hundred I don't really care it looks beautiful the grain structure in the image itself even eight hundred is beautiful and so I'm fine with it and it gives me so much mohr operating room in like low lighting and shade and stuff like that and and plus when I'm out on location with little battery operated flashes I don't have to use as much flash to get the same amount of effect because I'm I've got this high I s so so eight hundred is about normal for me so I most most my portrait's now around eight hundred so I assume not as critical to me the most critical thing to me obviously if you're using flash especially big flashes like this you have to be under whatever your sink speed is so in this case we're uh one one sixtieth I could go up to two hundred and if I were using the you know won t you know the more pro bodies I could go up to fifty but then the sink would start mess up so obviously you have to be at the right shutter speed but then once once you've got the shutter speed dealt with and that's always going to stay the same then the critical thing is my aperture I'm going to choose my aperture solely based on how much I want in focus I will always choose that first no matter what that will be the first thing I choose then I'll take the flash and move it up and down or in and out to get the amount of power I need out of that flash and if that I can't get enough power of the flash or there's some issue in the background I need more power on or something then I'll increase the I s o before I mess with that aperture so the aperture stays locked based on my artistic need for the shot that's the most critical thing in any photograph is that aperture and everything else surrounds that so it's a long answer but I think it was worth going something all right next question is from sam cox from loveland colorado with a gritted spot is the portion of the light that was spilled to the sides now directed to the centre resulting in a more intense light source than without the grid no you don't you don't end up getting the spilled light over here direct it doesn't take him and and it's not like a magnifying glass you don't burn ants with it you know I mean like I don't know peter will get me for that or whatever but you know it's it's not like a magnifying glass so it's not intensifying its just directing it straight so that you will get the same amount of total output from the flash but it'll all go straight and it won't spill this way so you won't end up with us terribly mohr bright flash itself you're just going to end up with a very straight form of light without any spill so it's not gonna end up bleeding off onto say your camera lens or something like that you'll see a slight increase because there is no wasted light but then there's also that grid in front of which is kind of it's it's blocking some of the light and so it's kind of a wash you end up with about the same power you just it just doesn't spell another technical question about the grid from fashion tv from singapore what is the level of your separation light with the honey comb is usually top down level to the subject or bottom up that depends in this case it's top down but only slightly because he's sitting it's just a little bit above and coming down because I want it to look like a son or ah you know something in the background it wouldn't if you came from the bottom up it would start to look ghoulish kind of like you wouldn't what light source comes from there s so it's either going to be right at the level of their head or above because I wanted to to feel like sunlight coming down and hitting them as opposed to you know some manmade light that's on the ground or something like that in fact that's all that's a good question though because lighting is tricky because every time you light something you you risk showing yourself as a photographer and ansel adams said that the photographer is only successful to the extent that he hides his hand because it's photographers we have far more power over people's minds and that's what's all about mind control right so we have far more power over people's minds if we can fool them into believing whatever we're doing is completely natural and so when we light something the goal is to make it look completely natural as though these things really exist so this this light source should not be considered a flash it should be a window I've parked him in front of a window and that window is in a place where there's a light kind of like a pin light or something that's supposed to be lighting up a piece of artwork is spilling across the back of his shoulder and creating a separation light I want all those things to look like they're just naturally occurring in the room or if I go outside I want it to feel like he's being lit by the northern sky and their son coming across his cheek those types of things I want them to feel natural I don't want them to feel unnatural because a soon as I should as soon as the audience sees that I'm actually doing something then I become less effective in the in trying to create a feeling or a mood because now they think oh it's just manufactured so always try and hide your hand in everything and so that's one of the reasons is all light all natural light generally comes from either write to their side or up above not from below some okay any other questions or move good okay so um are we ready on that okay so what we've done now is be behind the curtain here I'm gonna take a quick snap of it so I'm taking a shot from here so you can see what's going on peek around ryan so that we can see the operator okay so this this image coming up you'll see so from if you look around this white there there it is and you can see that it's obviously over exposed goes ryan's getting nailed with that flash and that's also that red stuff is still it's blinking on my cameras well I'm looking at him I see the same blinking lights here that I do on there but notice something let's get the camera in on this so let's do a cut back and forth between the screen and the back of this camera you'll see that on the camera I'm getting and I'm actually gonna give you the full thing so I'm getting the blinking lights but the blinking lights are the entire white board is blinking so there's farm or blinking going on on the back of my camera then is actually really over exposed on the actual raw image why do you suppose that is what yes that's right the assistance pipe in so it's j peg versus raw so on the back of your camera what's being shown to is a j peg the camera actually takes your raw image creates a j peg out of it and shows it to you but j pegs have no latitude remember that word latitude so that's why you shoot ron said of j p because j pegs have no latitude and so what happens as soon as it hits the j peg version on the screen it's clit stuff because there's no latitude in a j peg and it's to contrast e and so in raw what looked like it was totally over exposed up here on the top and bottom of this white uh board are actually in and we can recover it but on the j peg I can't because there's no latitude on the j peg so that's why you use history ma'am and that's why I'm looking at the history ram and also why I want the blinking lights because the beauty of having the blinking lights on and looking at a j peg even though you're gonna you're sending a raw is that it warns you before the clipping occurs because it's clipping on the j peg far longer before it clips on the raw the raw you've got another stop or two or sometimes three stops before it actually clips whereas the j peg it's clipping early so it's like a it's like a tsunami warning you know like instead of just getting hit with the tsunami you got like a least twenty minutes so you can try and run up hill right so that's what happened here it's it's a warning before the event occurs so the j pegs clipping and going on blowing out I'm blowing out but the raw hasn't blown out yet anyway but more more to the point when we show this this is so here's our this is our room light it's above our model's head this is the light with the grid spot see how it's not it's hardly even isn't over exposing it's still still a bright light but because that grid spot is on very little of the light is getting its way over to the camera because the grid spot is directing it away from the camera and so that grid spot is aimed at our backdrop and we'll see what it does now it's low and we can move it wherever we want we'll just see what happens we'll see what it does from where it is and then we'll move it based on what we want to do with it so here we go and we're gonna take a kind of angled shot here oh I'm still remember when I tried to purposely overexpose okay I got here we go so here comes the shot yeah it's like we're doing body painting okay now can you see this light starting to occur here so there's a little bit of light happening over here but it's not enough so I want you to turn that um grid spotted light up by four stops so I'm really intense fine likes I want to see a lot and I want you to move it is close to the wall is possible high and go down in a forty five every angle so what we want that light to do is kind of go and slash down this way so he's moving as close to those wall is possible and he's going to come down this way so it's going to cross across behind the model okay that's going to really intensify what's going on back there and we'll see what happens with it now generally speaking you wouldn't do this on a white wall way haven't interesting circumstance where we're using a white wall in here so usually you would do it on like a ah darker backdrop or something and it will create just a slash of light or a little spot of light you know just kind of make the backdrop not so bland and in the same all over the place way I wanted to slash from here across there yeah getting close close close to that wall you get when you when you put a light closer to a wall hug it against the wall and run it you get an oval shaped like a long oval shape and if you move that flash away from the wall it becomes more of a circle so we wanted to be like a little line or an oval shaped line of life that comes across when it'll glow because the light or the wallets hitting is going to be white and so it's gonna it's gonna reflect okay here we go okay that was too much turn it down us do it turning down that stopping a two thirds okay now you see what's going on there so now you got a light that's coming in and obviously it's over exposed but we don't care we just want a slash of light but now what what did we just do let me turn on oh now it's not over exposed it's perfect so now doesn't that look like it's the light source that lighting his head see now we look like we've created something natural is totally unnatural what we've done but now it looks like this light is what's lighting his head and so it's just a natural wall sconce light or something happens to be spilling across his head and it looks much more natural so now let's look at I'm just going to flag this one here and then we're going to go back to say this one here and then let's sort by flag oh not starred on the flag ones there we go and let's go to our survey mode and look at the two of these together do you like the gray one or the hold on uh you love the gray one that's awesome okay hold on that is your best side there we go hold on us there okay can you tell me which one looks more natural I mean let's pretend he's exactly the same pose but which one looks more natural the one on the right right but why because we we did something unnatural to create a natural occurring look so this one we can't figure out where this light is coming from all right well this is the window we know the window is lining his face but this light we can't see it we don't know where it's coming from so what we did is we created a light that looks like the spill of a sconce or something on the wall and that light happens to be what's lighting his face even though that's really not lighting his face at all why because there's a grid spot on it that won't allow it to light his face and yet it looks natural now now it just looks like he sat down in a room and we just took that shot that's a good shot I like that shot a lot okay but but it was done in an unnatural way to make it look natural but it was it was building and it it really doesn't take that long to do this remember so let's follow us through this photo shoot then we got to this chute we found a red chair and we found some wall doesn't really matter what the wall was but we just found it it was fine doesn't matter we're going to relight it anyway we set up this light and we put it mid power and we put up something to reflect the light here usually if I can't I have a car I don't have a van so I don't carry this around I carry one of these yeah thank you so I'm just carrying a white one of these put it on a stand and put it right there and that's gonna that's gonna do this okay so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna one light that gives me what I want for his face then I grab something and throw it on the back to give him some kind of a separation to the background like we did and then if if whatever is in the background now sometimes there will be an actual scott's on the wall there will actually be a light on the wall or there might be several lights on the wall and so then whatever it is you're doing is going to look real especially if you expose it so that the ambient light also comes through and we'll talk about that in a second um but if there's nothing on the wall and I can't make it look like the light is naturally occurring then I'll use another light to slash across the wall to make it look like there's a reason that there's light back they're coming forward now if you were in a situation where there was say sconces on the wall then you're the way you enter this photo shoot is a little bit different you come in first and you figure out what the exposure of the room is what do you what's shutter speed aperture and so do you need to use in order to get the light on the wall to look like it's glowing let's hold it at that and now you add your lights to match those and so then you have to come in usually you'll be like eight hundred s o to get that wall sconce to glow and at four and so if that's the case then you just you walk everything in it that and then you bring your light in and say okay because I'm in a hundred instead of fifty I'm gonna have to turn my flashed all the way down so that it just barely fills in and that's what's gonna fill in the side you still use the same reflecting technology of white something coming across and then you go and you grab the two back line or the one backlight because you got the wall sconce glowing grab the one backlight and shove it forward but remember that if you have incandescent bulbs in a wall sconce those air yellow what color is your flash blue so now if you want them to match you need to put a yellow um gel thank you I know why mitt and spacing on anyway yellow gel on this one are in orange gel they call it a cto but do like a quarter or an eighth just a little bit of warmth and then a little bit of warmth on that back one but generally I'll put mohr warmth on the back one coming forward because that light is really warm right the light coming from the scots would be super warm and so you'd want to actually actually put a couple of gels on there or a half ct or ah or a quarter so that's a little bit more intense yellow or orange coming forward and that's that would really make it look like it was totally coming from the sconce and then this one would just have a little bit of warmth on it to kind of match that the warmth of the entire overall shot makes sense okay so but as you can see though when we when we go to working on this image then because we've exposed it correctly we've paid attention to not blowing things out and to not having to deepa shadow see how this shadow is perfect it's not too deep I don't have to go in and dodge out that I how many of you have to do that you're like oh that's beautiful but that one dark eyes too dark now I got to go in a photo shop and dodge it out take just a little extra time and move that flasher around so that you get enough light on this eye so that then when I come in to work on this photo and this is the one we're going to keep I could click on this photo go into the develop module I have nothing necessarily that has to be done in exposure because it's right I'm just going to take the temperature up because by the way I had on auto white balance eh so I'm going to take the temperature up just a little bit so that it's warmer and I'm going to come down I want to emphasize his beard and stuff so I'm gonna actually take the clarity up just a little bit and then I'm going to come over too at this point that's all I had to do the shot because I was paying attention tio because I was paying attention to the actual shot when I did it and I made sure it was exposed correctly and I made sure it was you know lit well and the light was coming from the right place all I have to do now is come in and just choose myself some interesting hold on the maternal this navigator I can just choose an interesting film effect from one of my presets and just come in and say let's go with an aged you know film of some sort there and then I want all I have to do now is just a grady in't here let's go up to grab ingredient will do a one stop burn come down here and then see uh there you go that's a pretty cool dramatic photograph but I don't have to do anything in post why use a great it was a little hard to see from I just used the grady into make that because it this tone carries all the way up and if you use a grady into pull it back down your eye goes here instead of up here so that the whole wall is being lit by all these flashes and so the grady it just helps to draw your eye back down but think about that I had a total of you know five seconds on that photo to just come in adjust the color temperature at a little clarity put one preset on it and drag radiant now all that in the post presupposes that I did a good job in exposing it and that I'm being smart about the way I'm using my presets and stuff so that I just simply do what the basic little thing that needs to be done in post and then adjust with presets mostly because I don't have to sit there and fidget with a bunch of sliders because I've pre programmed the presets so that I could just click that's the look I want and I'm out okay any questions there's quite a few questions about your gear would you mind going back and shining the light way we're good for questions great so specifically people are wondering what light said if you have if you could describe that again and also if it's this set up if you take it outdoors with you okay so yeah that's great pull that out of the way the first thing that I have is the white lightning's those are the those are my power horses and there the x sixteen hundreds um they can go full power or re really low power so they I can really cut down the power so they're almost non existent to really high power on dh they're not as high powered as you know like a pro photo that you might get or something like that but or or the normans and stuff like that but you know any more with the speeds we haven't stuff that's there plenty so I have have two of these sixteen hundred white lightning's and then I have two of these einstein's which are the new uh the latest and greatest from policy buff there they go a little lower in power than the einstein's and it's interesting most people are like oh well I want the most powerful flash I don't I want the flash that khun go the lowest in power because it's it's kind of like her when I was when I was in college I went to a photo store and I wanted a lens and I went to the guy and they said I want I want you know whatever lands I don't remember what it was and he gave me one lens and he said this was like sixteen hundred dollars on this one six hundred dollars and I was like well what's the difference between him he goes oh well this one goes to you know f you know two point eight and this one only goes to f four I said but this one goes upto f thirty two and this one only goes to twenty two and he's like you just don't get it do you like I was totally clueless because I think that's my freshman year in college and I was totally clueless that the beauty of the lenses in the widest aperture not in help you because I thought I was going to ansel adams so I was like f sixty four of sixty four I need the smallest hole I can get I want everything needs to be in focus I didn't get and it's the same with your lighting equipment lighting equipment is great to be powerful but the most useful thing you can have in a piece of lighting gear is the ability to cut the light almost nothing because that's where you start getting subtleties that's where you can use things toe light like I'll do commercial projects where I'll shoot a room and there'll be a desk there that's just really dark under it and I need the light it so I could take a you know white lightning and put it under there and turn it all the way down so that's almost nothing and it just puts a glow under it instead of like you know light barreling out from it it's just a glow all right and that's what we want is just barely like something up and so I want the lowest power possible so these sixteen hundreds allow me to go really low on power so did the einstein's I'm oh okay yes thank you this this one is another sixteen hundred it's it's it's just not plugged in we haven't used it's just got a different um it's just got a uh octo bank on it so it's looks more round I just have both soft boxes and sometimes I might use two if I need to but generally one if I'm doing a big family portrait then I'll put this this octo bank right behind me and above me and to my right and then I'll put that one off to the right quite a ways and so I get that one becomes the light that creates the shape of the face is right because the light's coming from one source and this one is just filling in everybody's eyes and any you know shadows on the right side of the face but it's lower so that's the most that's the more powerful light this is the lead at least powerful light that's just right above me so that's just here it's not actually on in this circumstance so don't be fooled by that if you had to pick with if you had to go on it it was just one of them would you pick an einstein or white lightning why do you have two different sorts I have two different kinds because I bought these a long time ago and I just bought those you know this year so like either knew and so rather than by old sixteen hundreds I bought new do you prefer the linesman's I don't think I prefer it if these these I've never dropped one of these but I'm afraid tio these I dropped all the time and they just keep working I mean they're little they're strong little dudes and and by the way yes I take these out on location uh so here are we actually plugged into this right now so this one's not actually plugged into the wall it's plugged into this this is called a vagabond vagabond many and it's super light I mean what is this how many pounds is this so couple pounds too yeah I mean it's it's light and so it can power two hundred fifty flashes or more depending on what power you're at and it has to plug so you can run two flashes off of it at one time and you can just by new flash our new batteries and you could keep charlie you know I just soon as this one runs out stick another one on it and go so yeah you can take these on location without even power available and you can uh you can have all the flash you need but if you're on location bring sand bags because otherwise they will fall and they will either break themselves or break someone's head and uh so that's that's I'll take a sandbag what I do is I takes regular sandbags and I don't put sand in them I put buckshot in them okay so you go to the store and you buy a forty pound buckshot bag and then you go on by a kind of a mid level sized sandbag zip that thing open put all the buckshot twenty pounds in a in a plastic bag like a ziploc and then twenty pounds in the other one and then double ziploc and triple ziploc it so those beads aren't running everywhere and then shove them in the sand bag those air heavy sand bags but nothing moves that's like having your kids sit on the you know on the bottom of your of your stand because otherwise these air like big sales and they will just take it and and it'll fly so and that's why when I'm outdoors I very rarely take that big a soft box with me unless I have a couple assistance if it's a it's a commercial shoot most of the time they want to see a dog and pony show and so we bring the dog and pony show but if it's ah sr makes no sense to do that because you don't a senior portrait doesn't pay enough money for you to have an assistant with you so in that case what you need to do is you need to have lights that air small portable and that's what we talk about tomorrow we'll talk about that whole kit but um off camera speed light type system is what you want because then the wind can blow and it won't blow those over you don't need to carry sandbags and whatnot you can just you know be self contained with one person we'll talk about that tomorrow lotte yeah total self contained system you can walk around and light things to your heart's content and it's like literally thirteen pounds so okay jared I have a quote from you this is from a neil batra who says one of the best explanations of light I have ever heard inside the tricky vernacular great use of analogy is to make it easier to understand good trick even an ocular I love this