Lessons

Lesson Info

Set Up Action Editorial Shoot

Let's start moving into the shoot. What I want to do first is introduce you to some of the gear so, Brock, you can sit tight for a second while we get set up. I'm gonna do the set-up actually live, too, as far as the lighting. I brought all the gear out here, but I'll kind of introduce the gear to you and share my thoughts as far as why we're using it, why we're gonna place it, and I'm sure as every photo shoot does, because we haven't pre-shot it, there's gonna be things that happen where I have to change the way we're doing it. A few things'll be thrown in there that I didn't expect and who knows what'll happen, so, we'll just go with it. And we're gonna be shooting the whole thing tethered, so if we could switch onto my screen real quick, I'll kind of show you the tether set-up so we can get that set up and we won't have to mess with the computer much after that. So, we're back in capture one, this probably looks familiar from the last segment. But now we wanna start a new session f...

or a new photo shoot. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to File, and we're gonna start a new session. And up pops a menu Name, so we'll name this session, C-L, for Creative Live, and we'll name it Brock. And then you see down here, we have our sub-capture folder. That's where all the images will go. Select, any image we process out of select will go in there. Output'll be where I put high-res JPEGS. And then our Trash sub-folder, pretty obvious, that's trash. Lastly, we have our Capture Name. I like to name it the same as the folder, so it automatically goes to CL Brock, but then I put an underscore. Through the template I've set up for naming, it'll then have a four-digit number starting with 0001. Or whatever the number may be. And that'll be all the name, so that way when we go back to find these images later, we know what to search, and it keeps everything consistent. So, that's gonna save onto my desktop. I generally don't save everything to my desktop. Here we do, just 'cause of space. I normally save all shoots to external drives, and then that way, we can back 'em up with other externals, or put 'em in the Cloud, and it keeps my laptop running pretty quick, because I don't like to get it bogged down with tons of raw files, and the hard drive's only so big. For this instance, we're gonna save to desktop. Now that we've set up the new session, we have a blank slate. So we will start working from there. I'm gonna move the tether table over, because we're gonna be shooting along the windows here, and while there's this nice window light, we're actually gonna ignore that, and we're gonna use that more as a prop, and overpower it with our strobe. We're gonna work with the general ambience of the room, and I'm gonna start setting up some lights and tether my camera. First thing I'm gonna do, I like to work in layers. We're gonna set up our main light. For this, I'm picturing Brock either standing, kind of this heroic shot holding a basketball under the arm, or doing some dribbling. I'm a big basketball fan, and I've played a lot of basketball in my life, so I kind of know the nuances of how it all works, and what should look right, what should look authentic, and I feel like that's important with anything you're shooting. If you're gonna go out and do a photo shoot with a fly-fisherman, you should probably watch some YouTube videos if you have no idea, anything about fly-fishing, to get familiar with some terms so you can, I don't know anything about fly-fishing so maybe this is a bad example, but you can direct them by being familiar with what the equipment's called, how it should look. Maybe knowing, when you're planning your shoot, "Oh, I see arm movements," I would be like, "Here, oh they have this small net "for getting the fish," or all these things. It's just a matter of familiarizing yourself with the process so that way when you're working with the subject, you can give them direction that actually makes sense, feels authentic, and they won't look at you like a deer in the headlights, like, "Why would I ever bounce the basketball on my head," or something like that. So with that said, we'll set up some equipment. The thoughts in my head are that we're gonna have a fairly specular light source with a lot of light in the room, but it's gonna be very directional, creating a decent amount of shadow. So we're gonna start off with the beauty dish here. And that's gonna be our main light. I light everything in layers. We might end up using three lights, but I only set 'em up one at a time, and even shoot with 'em one at a time, so that way I know what each light's doing. Because every light not only lights up a portion of the frame, it also casts a shadow that you might need to fill in later, so we're gonna start with one light. My frame in general, when I'm thinking about that, let me get my camera. We're gonna start off, I start off almost every shoot with a 24 to 70. It's a good neutral lens. It gives me a little bit of range to kinda gauge the space. And if I need to zoom out, zoom in, anything like that, I have that, 'cause this is a zoom lens. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna move this light a little bit and I'm gonna make our initial frame. So we might not stick with this, but it's where I'm going at least in my head, so I'm gonna, a lot of times I like to shoot from a lower perspective or stand on things. I think images that, I'm five foot 10. If I took every picture from here, it'd be a little boring. I like to give a perspective that might not be what people see when they're just walking down the sidewalk. For this, I'm picturing a vertical shot to start, embracing some of these windows, and I love messing with composition. So I'm thinking, you'll see this when I actually start to shoot, but I'm just kind of framing out, so I know where the lights need to be, and where Brock will be standing. I have a little bit of idea of the frame. And now we can start setting up the light. So we'll start off with this beauty dish, and I'm gonna have, Brock, you can come over here now, and you can bring your ball. I'm gonna have you stand about right here. And the camera's gonna end up being about 10 feet in front of you, so you can just stand here and hold the ball, you really don't have to do anything yet. I'm gonna start setting up all of the lighting. Our first light's gonna be our main light. And we're actually gonna do this twice. We're gonna do it once from each side because I can't totally decide what side, decide which side I want to work from. Because it's a little hard to visualize with the windows being so bright, and knowing that the shot's gonna look a lot darker than it actually is. But I do like this as a general angle, so we're gonna put this light up pretty high. I'm gonna be shooting some full-length portraits of him. And knowing that light fall-off, how it all works, inverse square law and all that fun stuff. I want this light to be as far from him as possible, so that way we can light him fairly evenly from head to toe. I'm gonna put this guy up fairly high. And off to the side, because I'm picturing a more dramatically lit image, so I don't know why I keep carrying around this tether cord. We're gonna put this guy up high. Tilt it down a little bit, and we're definitely gonna light him from an angle. And the other thing is, I'm gonna throw a grid on it, because I don't want the beauty dish, all the light to spill on the window. It's already bright enough. We're gonna put a 25-degree grid on the beauty dish to really control the spill of the light. And that'll be our main light. Alright, so this guy'll go up, and I like shooting with beauty dishes kind of tilted downward. For one, I like the control of the light, and I just like how it looks. It's a little, for lack of a better word, toppy. So it's more of a top-light type of situation and we can fill in that with our umbrella, which will be our fill light momentarily. We're gonna get this guy up there pretty high. I'm gonna try and not pinch my fingers, which I almost did in the last class I taught. I was talking too much to the camera, and I released the wrong one here, and it almost caused some serious pain, but we didn't have it happen, so we're good. Alright, like I said, I want that to be as high as possible, I know the angle's already wrong, so we're gonna make one brief adjustment here. Go back up with that guy. We have our sandbag on there, so we have a little extra weight. I don't have the arm extended out too far, so we should be good as far as that goes. So rather than me move again, I'm gonna have you stand about right here, so he's gonna be right in this light. Any time you're working with a grid, if you can see through the grid to the back of the beauty dish and see white, that's where the light's gonna hit. As soon as you move too far and you can only see black, you are now in the shadow. Stand about right here, and you're gonna be looking towards where it's that little white sign on the ground. Alright, so that's our main light. And then I'm gonna have you either looking there or off, almost towards the chair way in the background that you guys at home can't see, but it's over there. So you're gonna be looking there. So our light, we're gonna be short-lighting him, so we're gonna get this dramatic light on his face. It's gonna be a lot of shadow right now. So the first shot you'll see, there's a picture in my head and we're slowly gonna get there. But this first one is not gonna be it. So when you're viewing at home, or here on my computer or the screen, don't be surprised if it doesn't look so awesome to start. As far as tethering goes, we have a little piece of gaff tape here, I put it there earlier. Tethering is a little tricky in that the tools of the trade are not perfected yet. So with the camera, we have our tether cable. It's bright orange, so I'm supposed to not trip over it, which I probably will anyways. We have this thing called a jerk-stopper. One of the biggest problems with tethering is the fact that this port for the USB cable for the tether is very shallow, so that's just due to the size of the port on the camera, you can see I've already taped it up earlier. We're gonna do it again. This is all that goes into the camera. And it goes into the side here. The problem with that is, you can see this is like a quarter inch long. So that's all the further. That is all it takes to remove the tether cord and become untethered. So with that said, we have this jerk-stopper here. It's a little $15 hunk of plastic goodness from Tether Tools, that prevents that from happening. What that does is, part of it goes under your camera strap, the other part goes onto the actual tether cable. And then that way, when you plug in, it takes the tension off of the actual port so if someone were to walk by and trip on my cable, it puts the tension on the strap, not on the cable. So you can see that comes out that easy. Another thing you can do with that is gaff tape it into your camera. And that's what we're gonna do right now. So I have a little hunk of gaff tape. We're gonna tape the front side of the tether cable, and we're going to tape the back side, and they make other tools that are a little more refined for doing this. But I prefer this method because then I can take it off and throw it away, it works, and the whole idea is that we won't come untethered 'cause it's kind of annoying. But that does happen, and when that happens, oh, one alternate you can do is for about $90, they make a tool called the Tether Block. It actually screws into the bottom tripod mount on your camera, and it looks like a tripod plate, but it's grooved, and the tether cord actually winds through those grooves and it takes all the tension off, and then it lets the tether cord go right up into your camera and it really works well, but again, it's $90, so you just have to decide if it's worth it for you or if you just wanna tape your cord to your camera. Lastly, if you do come untethered, and you don't realize it, and you keep shooting, and you don't have a card in your camera, those images are lost forever. So if you put a card in, and your cable comes out partway through, or you don't know it. All those images will still go to your card. You can ingest them later, apply the same settings you were doing previous through tethering. It'll look the exact same. Always put a card in. That way you have a little bit of a backup there in case you become unplugged. Alright, the next step is plugging in the other end of the tether cable to your computer. We'll just put that in the USB port. They make extensions for tether cords. If you want to connect two of them, they make little connection devices. All sorts of stuff. Pretty much everything I buy is from Tether Tools. They're in all sorts of different camera stores. It works pretty well. Again, I feel like in the next five years, this whole tethering thing is really gonna come together and I can just take a picture and, right now there are some, I have a small mirrorless camera that I use for fun for travel photos and I can just send those images straight to my phone. But for whatever reason, and maybe someone out there even, one of you guys can tell me, there's gotta be something that we can get to a point where we can take these giant 100 megabyte files, if I'm taking in five seconds, all of a sudden we have a gig, to send those over Bluetooth or Wifi, but I feel like we'll get there, and there's probably some other methods that some of the more technical people can tell me, but this is how I do it. This is how I've done it for a while. It works for me. It's probably not the best, but it works for me, and you'll see how I use it, and that's the main thing. You gotta find something that works for you that you can replicate, that you feel comfortable with, and that gives you the results you want.