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Crappy Lighting Conditions: Fluorescent and Mixed

Let's go into the for the really bad ones. Okay? The rial misery is fluorescent light, So fluorescent light. Okay. You know, fluorescent, it's green and ugly. And usually the directional light is not too good cause, usually fluorescence or directly overhead. So that's it's not good. And it doesn't have a lot of, like, good contrast. If it has contrast issues you bad? Not a lot of good before. So let's take a look how? Break it down. So tell them what we're talking about, where we shot this. So we wanted to find the ugliest, oldest fluorescent bulbs we could find. So we found a basement Y M C a somewhere in Brooklyn that the florist involves have probably been there for 50 60 years or something. Evidence. Incredible. So you can see the image on the left was just was just awful. And we had a model with red hair and fair skin and stuff. So I mean, she was pretty susceptible. All the nasty light cast we could count put on her. So that's the image on the left, and the image on the right is ...

basically a simple color correction using the great card. So we didn't change anything in the camera. This is now setting ourselves up for some postproduction eso that great card is a neutral 18% gray. And then when we go into photo saw, light room, aperture and stuff will show you on day three how you can then balance that on, save yourself this kind of agony. So if you're on the back of the camera here, you're like, Oh, my God, it's all green. Lindsay's gonna teach you how to fix that here in a couple of minutes and then on Day three will teach you how to use a reference like that to really kind of dial back in your white bounced where you have pleasing skin tones and this particular one is a last light. Yes, it's a last July collapsible. It's about this big, and it actually collapses up really tiny, like the reflectors. It's got, like, that kind of same kind of little snap and put it in a little pouch, and then you see the crosshairs on it. It helps you get focus. That's nice, because a lot of time in this dim fluorescent room, it's difficult to get focused. We kind of talked about how you know camera bodies alone can help you there. And, well, we have a section where we help you get focused in crappy light anyways. But one of the things your cameras looking for when it's trying to focus his contrast. And so if you have your focus point on the center of a spot, focus and it's unsettling. Great issued a paper, it goes searching. So that's why they add the crosshairs there. So that's that's one that I like versus just a solid piece of grey. I find a little bit hard to focus on one of those, All right, so the first thing you do at least get a great card in the scene. If you can't add a flash and you can't modify the light, at least get something so later on you can neutralize in post because it's really hard. If I look at this scene, I mean, maybe maybe in those the exercise equipment. If I didn't have that, that might be great, but they also might be a little bit blue, and then it will mess it up. If you tried, so get a great card in the scene, something that we both use and we're going to go over this in more depth in the next section is we both use this, which is a passport color checker will go in a little bit more detail. But this is a souped up version of ah, great card, cause it doesn't just neutralize the scene. It helps you create a color profile of the scene, which isn't. Is it actually the same thing? Because one is just neutralizing out the overhead color, the others actually defining the colors in the scene where they should actually look like So one of them basically telling you what real white should look like, what your skin tones look like, what that white shirt or should look like. The other one is kind of defining, like the intensity and the vibrance of like the blues and the greens and the colors, because a lot of times will get like, a little bit of a shift. When I do a lot of catalog work and stuff like Nia, tell her story. Neons come out really, really weird sometimes. So all photograph e commerce stuff. You go on a website and you're like, OK, I want to buy this shirt. You see the photos of the model wearing the shirt, everything on a white background. Well, I had a client who was a good client of mine and loved me. So they forgive me for this one. Oops, but we were shooting and they had bright neon tank tops like neon pink and neon orange, which were difficult to see regardless. But when I photographed him, I got everything done. I didn't think to make a custom profile, and I exported before I did that. And they delivered in all the files of all the colors and all the clothes look great, except, like in an email there like Wait a minute, Do we shoot the wrong way? Should racks and racks of clothing is a day like 60 70 looks? It's mind numbing. She's like, Did we pull the wrong shirts? I thought we photographed the neon pink ones. We sent me some Orange files is from the other day like we had a mix up like Oh my God, let's find those files. I go back and realized I hadn't applied my color profile to ensure that all of the colors were true. blue, true pink or whatever, and they had shifted somehow at least appeared to shift on her monitor from like orange to pink. So it was like it was a big mix up. I was able to go back in. We'll talk about how to do this in light room. And Photoshopped basically just verifies that the blue is really blue when you take the photo from the shirt to the print to the computer and keep it all along the way. Because there's more than just orange and green and blue in a color shift. There's actual true fidelity to these colors. So if you don't color critical work, something like this is a must have. So this is what you're going to see. You're gonna see us in. The first thing that you want to do when you walk into a fluorescent room is try to neutralize the scene. Could be a custom white balance we shall talk about, or at least maybe trying your fluorescent presets, something to get it so it doesn't look green. But the problem that we still have and you see in this picture is look at the quality of light on her face. There's no contrast. There's no illumination. There's, I mean, there's no direction of light. It's just flat, low contrast to not flattering. So my instinct would be okay. Get the color right and then lets out a flash when you add a flash. However, since you fixed the green, your flash will look the wrong color. And so here's Here's how I describe this when you are in a fluorescent lit room and you apply your fluorescent preset. The opposite of green on that scale is magenta, So basically what it does is it adds magenta to that green to make it look gray. OK, but you have your white flash. So now when you enter your white flash because it's adding magenta, everything your flash looks magenta cause it's just adding magenta to neutralize things. So what you have to do is you have to actually mess up your flash by making it green, which will look right now because it will add the magenta to the green. It will neutralize everything out, so what you need to do is you need to gel your flash. So Gotti's yes, so road makes a really good gel kit. Uh, They just actually came out with these through a lot of professionals complaining like, Hey, we want something that just has corrective gels in it. So they hooked up with this, and if you see there on the screen, it actually says, You know what? How it goes from, you know, a warmer to a cooler. In this case, the green adds just the perfect amount, so you should cover most of your fluorescent needs. So, like Oh, here you go. So like, Lindsey said, basically we want to neutralize the color. So if we just have Ambien, the room we want to go ahead, neutralize all of that cause it's the same color by setting the white balance. But the messes up our flash. So we want all of the light in the scene are flash and the ambient light to all be the same ugly color green. So when we do our white balance, whether it be through a preset or a great card, anything else it's Everyone's on the same page talking the same language. So this is basically a really scientific dialed in guide to making your perfectly balanced white flash looking ugly off color. But then it looks good anyway, So we're gonna we'll take another look at this. We'll get to see us using in action. But again, the this particular kit is rogue by expert imaging. It's a color correction kit, and it has rubber bands to test your flash. You can just buy gels, but this is made specifically for color correction. And yeah, you guys most the time. We get so excited when we get our first speed. Like we take out the speed light, go hunt for some batteries and throw the rest of the closet. Never look again. Most your flashes have a basic correction kit. So go ahead, look in the box again. You probably have a starter kit. So one or two jails, maybe one orange and one green. So if you're like Oh my goodness, I have to go shooting a vendor. I really want to try to apply. When you guys were saying because everyone looks green or orange in my photos, Look back in the box, you've probably got some starter ones. The benefit to this is you have different variations of them. You have multiple of them. They're a little easier to attach to go on multiple different kinds of speed lights, your big ones, Small ones off brand, whatever. So little more versatile and definitely more in depth. All right, so we've neutralized the scene by applying. You will talk about either custom white balance or are fluorescent preset, so it neutralizes the same. We've added a gel tour flash so that that matches. But we also don't want to just do flash on Cameron. Who's gonna talk about that later? Flashing cameras usually not so flattering. So the picture we ended up with in this scene, actually, Eric took this picture is in the bottom, right? Is he bounced the flash off the ceiling with the green jell, so it basically gave you nice, beautiful, illuminating bounce off the ceiling. So this is a huge difference between the top left and the bottom, right for direction and color and all. Almost like we added another fluorescent bank. Just what we wanted it in front of her on the machine. So this is the first picture, and that's where we ended up. So this would be the same thing for the fluorescent lit volleyball games of the 50th wedding anniversary and all of that. Everything in those wonderful high holes with crop. So this is where you would want to start as a side note. If you guys have ever had a situation where you're taking pictures with fluorescent light and you see banding, you see like shadows and highlights that will only happen in the oldest of fluorescent lights. Like really, really, really old. You're actually catching the light flickering Doesn't happen with these Now, the modern If Larsons were much better, But in case you ever had that which I hadn't, he couldn't believe because he'd never seen that. I've been shooting forever. You here. It's like one of those myths in the photo, so I don't really have it. It happened. Someone on the Internet back me up that it exists. Okay. Oh, it does. Yeah, but uh, I was photographing for my friend at the reception, and it was in, like, a V f W Hall or something like that. And my sense is it was like green overhead light, and it was flickering. The solution to that, just so you know, is you'd have to shoot at slower than 1/60 of a second because then it flickers multiple times and you catch the whole thing instead of your catching mid flicker so you shoot slower than 1/60 of a second. The problem you run into is if you've got your 200 shooting at 200 you're supposed to be shooting at 1 200 of a second or faster to avoid camera shake. So you just kind of have this little game. But just so you know, if you're not, if I'm not the only person out there who's ever had that problem, that's your solution to get around. All right, Um, we're gonna talk about this later. Just letting you know this is coming up. It's an expert diskettes for custom. White balance is we'll talk about custom white bounce in general. I'll show you how to set on Canon. Okay? In case anyone ever wanted to know that will be just thing that later makes light really comes into play. Yeah, So this is going to be key for this section. A little later this afternoon, we're gonna be on a mixed lighting environment. There's gonna be a lot of lamplight and tungsten, light and window light on and It's difficult because if you saw the great card, the great card basically is a flat plane. So it's grateful for a fluorescent room because there's only like one kind of light coming and hitting it well. If I have tungsten light coming from here and blue window light coming from here, the great cards difficult to get a good reading off. So the expo disk is something that basically has raised little die odes in there that gather light from multiple directions and then act is like a great card in front of your camera, but mashing everything together. So from mixed lighting like this, it's ah, it's extremely, extremely helpful. So the problem is your color casts and vary in color temperatures. Eso think warm lamplight and really, really cool window light and the solutions basically are to turn off or control the mixed light. This is really, really Here's what we're talking about. Mixed light. First off, guys. So window to the right super tan, super not tan. It's like we caught her at like two different seasons and just kind of superimposed them together. Not really what we were looking for, So this is a cool record store in Brooklyn. Um, the first thing to do, though, is awesome. This is kind of like the whole were directing the scene thing. You're not always at the mercy of the environment. If you walk into a room, there's a bunch of lamps on, and there's a bright window light Pick and choose your battles. You might be like I am loving this window light. Let's turn off all the lamps. It's a simple is that so you can take control of the environment that way we couldn't do it cause people were shopping in the record store. Yeah, so they weren't really cool with us turning everything off and shutting down their store for a little while. But that's quick and easiest way to do it, okay? Or you can shut the blinds. Say you want a really cool movie photo. There you go. Welcome over by the lamp. Shut the blinds and then set your white balance for that lamp. The next thing you can do, though, is move your subject out of the mix light. So basically here we moved or towards the front of the camera store, so we have all of the beautiful window like coming in, and we set our white balance for that. So our model is lit by all that beautiful window light, and then you can see how everything goes, a little orange in for the background. And sometimes I mean, this is the fashion photographer, but sometimes that warmth is okay. I mean, especially like if it's a reception and they have beautiful, warm tungsten late in the background candles and things like that. It's supposed to be that warm mood. You don't always have to eliminate it and make it all the same. The big problem is when it's mixed lights on that person's face, that's where the that that's not what you want it again. This would be a simple is like you're saying. If you don't need to balance out, you might have them turn to a light. So rather than having her face split like that, just have turned towards the window. Simple. Is that, of course, this half is gonna be warm, but you're getting Oliver facing one even tone, and then you can white balance for that so she doesn't look sickly, and you're trying to really pick the battles that are most important to you because if there's your you're looking at it and we'll talk about a couple other solutions. But really, you've got to get that shot right then you don't have anything else. Just at least make sure her face is all one color. The backgrounds Not gonna be great, but it's a lot better. Prioritize the face, so if you have Teoh, make sure the faces evenly lit or one even color. But that's your priority, generally, to keep both eyes in the face consistent. And I've seen him do this a ton and a lot of his work because he'll be shooting on location at a restaurant is a client, and he's supposed to create an ambience. And so he wants the the beautiful, warm light in the background and the subject. But it's hitting them. And so I mean, I see balancing it all the time. Yeah, we didn't cool off a street shop the other night to where Lindsay actually jumped in as a model, and we'll cover that in a little bit. But same kind of thing. We wanted that environment on the streets, and then we wanted her just like looking like a badass on the We'll see the pictures. Really? I feel honored for you. Take my picture. We actually sent the model home and Lindsay hopped in. It was It was really weird. Okay, Okay. So here we go. Basically, we're just moving our subject out of the mix light. Okay, So where you taking advantage of our beautiful window like here? The other thing we can do is really embrace it. So we got deep into the store here. You see the picture on the left, and we basically that is all of our warm, like, Okay. And I wanted the warm light. We're not in a hospital room where it's sterile. White light were in old beat up record stores. I want a little more environment color to it. So we embraced that. But remember, our quality of lightest. Oh, crap. Now we have overhead tungsten lights instead of overhead fluorescent lights. So we basically took a speed, light or acute flash or any kind of small flash, and we jelled it. So rather than putting the green on there, there's ah, cto, which is color temperature orange, and it's different intensities of this. So this is basically designed to take that nice white light that you have at your speed light and warm it up to the intensity of a tungsten involved. You would find overhead or in a lamp. I see the difference in one of them is more clear. So this is a full cut or a full stop. This is half. And then you saw a little bit earlier on this piece of paper here that this comes with the kit, how it really takes it down from a certain value to another value. So I mean, you could do this by the numbers. If you're a numbers guy, you go after guide number. You could get an exact Kelvin value. I might nerd out on this kind of stuff later, like a sort of orange flavor in there, a little worms. It's whatever your approach, but it's all it's all to taste. So in this instance, we wanted environment. We kept it warm, so we made our flash warm. And then we use that flash to sculpt their models face because she was a cute girl with good cheeks and we wanted to show that off, hide her like we're in the ring very good movie. Well, it was very artsy black and white, because that way I like that. Um que flash right here they rock. They make, like, Q flashes, trios, all kinds of stuff. They're basically big boy speed lights, so a speed like here might have about 50 watt seconds of light. I'm gonna talk about this in the flash primer. That's kind of how you measure the intensity or how much this is ableto throw down range or how much juice it has. The Q flashes are cool cause they're about the same size as one of these. Maybe a little bit bigger. And they run off of a separate battery pack and they are 345 times more powerful. So I keep one of those in my bag at all times and a bunch of speed lights. So if I need a little more juice are not gonna be shooting all day, I'll go to something like this. It's a great solution to give me more power and more longevity out of it, and that's for a lot of people to your asking the questions. Well, how do I overpower the sun? And I asked a couple of that. We don't have that this presentation. But a lot of times people end up having to double up their speed lights to get enough power output to overpower the sun. A lot of times you can do it just with Q Flash, very. And I think we might throw in some of our more commercial work and stuff outside of the scope of this class where I mean, I'll use 3456 speed lights, multiple que flashes. Lindsay will use nice studio strobes just to get a kind of look like if you have to go outside of this so you'll get a peek at that. But the Q flashes nice because it gives you a little more power and almost the same size package.