Lessons

Lesson Info

Ambient Lighting

Let's just go over really quickly. The camera settings. Okay, so I'm back into my camera menu. I'm gonna come over here. Let's just go ahead. And before you shoot ever guys, you gotta check your camera settings. So the first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna check my picture style, which is wrong, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and set my picture style to neutral. I'm gonna go ahead and take down the sharpness, take my contrast down to negative to take my saturation down to negative two, and then I'll bounce back out, and then I'll go over to my next set of settings. Okay? I'm at the right frame rate and resolution, and I mean the low compression all I setting and then up. My sound recording is on auto. I wanna change that. Right. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to manual on, uh, you know, let's always pretend we're gonna be recording sound. So you wanna get a good level here, So I'm gonna go ahead and just decrease my level, so I'm actually at negative 12. Check, Check, check, Check. Ch...

eck. Hey, look at that. Okay, Right there. Okay. I'm gonna go ahead to my next set of settings. Um, there is one here that I got to make sure, And it's for the screen, because the screen sometimes is on the LCD brightness is on auto. Okay, you don't want it on auto, because what will happen is based upon what the camera thinks is too dark. It'll brighten and darken your LCD, and that'll kind of mess with your head a little bit. So you got to make sure that the LCD is on brightness, and then you know it. You can't really trust the LCD, so I mean, I keep it at four. And just kind of trust my meter. I use this. I use the LCD for framing reasons I don't use for exposure. Okay, before we go on, any questions, any questions at all? Okay, so then you want to come out, So why don't you step up right here for me, and let's go ahead and get your reading. Okay? So where she is? Okay, So what I'll do is I'll check my framing here, and I'll check my focus, so I'll go ahead and use that in camera tool. Check my focus. See you see it? Exactly Exactly how that that that use of the camera tool for magnification can help you check. Focus. I'm on a tripod, guys. I'm in the studio. Said, Let's pretend here that I'm just gonna interview her. That allows me just to make sure that I'm I'm in focus. OK, go ahead and pop back out now, before I even do anything. I mean, we have a beautiful image here, right? We'll talk about this image of why I think it's gorgeous here in a second. Before I even do anything, I'm gonna go ahead and have Danielle hold this target right in front of her face. All right, So go ahead, and I'm gonna zoom in and dig. Hey, second. And then you'll want you do me a favor, please, And take a step forward and just look at the frame and get it nice and big. Okay? Come on. Getting up. Coming up. Okay. And pull it down on. There you go. Just like that. Okay, So what I'm gonna do here, guys, is I'm gonna get a quick little reading that's full of the light falling on this target. Set my camera that take a still image. Get a custom white balance. All right, so at this point, what I'm gonna do is measure. Okay. I'm gonna go ahead and switch to still. I'm gonna move my aperture to F 10 take a picture, and then come back into my menu. Come over here to custom white balance. Select the image that's compatible. Said it. Okay, now I just gotta set my custom white balance my white balance to custom in the camera. So let's go ahead to video. So you guys can watch me do that. Okay? I'm gonna white balance, and then I'm just gonna move to custom white balance. All right, so here's the thing, guys. Go ahead and let's have you step back to your mark. Okay? Watch this, guys. Here's white balance differences here is the actual white balance that I just custom. Okay, there is a difference in Kelvin. Here's the difference. An auto white balance. Can you guys see that? How the difference in auto white balance is versus versus my custom white balance. She looks alive as opposed to so blue. Right? So that's why you custom white balance? Because right now I know I'm I'm spot on. Now. All the stuff that we've done prior to how long did take me to set that custom white balance Half a second Given. Given the target, you take a picture. If I wasn't even talking about it, I just do. Boom. Done. Okay, So the reason we're starting off like this right now with the specific lighting. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and get a reading, so I'm gonna measure for her. So I put the meter under her chin, and it's coming out at 6.3. Okay, so I'm gonna take my aperture and open up just 6.3. Okay? So the first question I want to ask you is, how does that lighting feel to you? So I feel good. Look good to me. It looks a little speculator little spiking because you're looking at a screen, right? So the quit, the media comes. Well, it looks a little hot. It looks a little It looks a little bright. It looks a little over exposed. Right. So if you if you were trusting the monitor on the back of your camera, you could be incorrect. Because how bright is that monitor? How dark is that monitor you don't really know, do you? Okay, so when you take a look at a reading, maybe I'll get to different readings. I got 6.3. I got 6.3. I've got 6.3 all over the place here, So I know that this meter I'm trusting this meter to be right. I know that when I trust my meter, I'm always right. I cannot trust this screen because this screen well look different than the screen on that I've got on. My camera will look different than the screen that you're gonna probably look at. E think about the thousands of screens or hopefully the tens of thousands of screens that people are watching on at home. And are they are the color managed? Are is it What? What? What percentage of s RGB or Adobe Adobe RGB does? Does that Does that display, you know, represent? There's so many variables there that you can't control the one variable you can control is this right? So now that we know to trust this, let's talk about how this lighting looks to you, right? How does this lighting look to you and the lighting to me is flat. However, there's a purpose for flatlining, and we'll talk about that in just a second. But do you agree? It looks all right. It's all right. Yeah. OK, so, um, we'll do this. We'll do a little bit of a change later. But the reason I prefer flat lighting some of the time, okay, is because if I'm going to be capturing, um, a female, someone who's elderly, someone who has a lot of blemishes on their face, flat lighting is the way to go. You have to light them flat because you don't want any shadows cast on their face that will accentuate any imperfections in their skin. Okay, because think about how long it takes you toe edit a new image in Photoshop to remove blemishes and think about how difficult that would be for moving picture like or for a motion capturing motion. So we have to be very specific and very, very careful with how we like people because the post aspect of it it's so entirely different. And, yeah, they're plug ins. You can use that will that will work and soften people skin and yada, yada, yada. But that's always at an op that's always at a cost of something, right? It looks fake. It looks plasticky. You lose sharpness. Yada, yada, yada. Okay, So the reason I like to start with flat light and explain flat light is because, more often than not, it will be a type of lighting that you will use extensively. Because if you're capturing interviews of elderly people or females who have, you know, issues with with blemishes or they're older and they have wrinkles, these are all really important things. Okay, good. So what I'm gonna do is not gonna turn Danielle in this light, so I'm gonna turn her slightly this way. Okay? I'm gonna turn your head back to the screen. Okay? See, this light is so broad, these windows air so broad that it's actually wrapping all the way around her face. It's wrapping, always under faces. No matter how much I actually turn her head, she's still gonna be really beautifully let. So if I was doing an interview of someone who was elderly and someone who was having, you know, needed that flat lighting, if I was working in this room, I'd be so happy because I could literally place them in any direction and allow them and capture them from any direction in this light. Okay, what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna pull down your back. Keep back until you actually fall off the light just a little bit, okay? Just look at the floor, okay? All right. Do you hear is point the camera to her. Okay? I moved throughout of light. Right, guys? So what was my reading here? Was that 50th at 6.3 here. My reading is gonna be It's gonna be a lot less. So can I meet her up? Okay, four point out. Okay. So much. Four. No, it's like a little over a stop difference. Okay, let's go ahead and focus on her. But you can start to see here as you pull her back and you start to see there's more of a shadow on the side. Now where, as opposed to when I pushed her all the way up there, it was just nice and flat all the way around. So what we just learned there. We just learned that when we have a large wall full of windows, when you keep when you look at the lighting pattern and you pull them off of that lighting pattern a little bit. You can create contrast without a second light without any kind of modifier here. All right. If I pushed her towards this window and pushed her into the light, it would start to wrap around, okay? Wrap around a lot more. You could do the exact same thing I did here. I can't do it over there because I've got all that production stuff over there for Creative Live. But if I were to move her all the way over to the to the edge of this window and do they have the exact same thing happened, I would actually get a harder shadow on her face, just like that. Okay, that makes sense. What's up? Question? I know, like in photography, way like to short light somebody is that. Does that work interviews or would you rather go board lighting? Is it? Does the I appeal to it one way or another? Okay, so there's two types of there's a short lighting and broad lighting, right? Short light and broad lighting actually look differently on different people. Okay. So you wouldn't short like my face because I have enough angles in my face. You broad light my face because I got a round face and round features. Right and typically rule of thumb. Women are broad lit and men are short lit, but I kind of go against that. Now. We'll take a look later when we do lighting, because it's a lot easier to explain. Short light first, broad light When we have, um, lighting that we can control in terms of ambient light. You just want to do what looks good. Okay, that's your that's your go to. Does it look good? Does the client look good? That's what's important. Does the client look good? That's all I care about if you get in your head space about short light verse. Broad light again. Remember first day we talked about left brain versus right brain? If I'm starting to think short light, broad light, I am no longer caring about my client. I'm no longer caring about how that person looks on screen. Ask yourself first. Daniel, Look at the camera for me. Do I like the way that she looks? Absolutely. Is she gonna like the way that she looks absolutely right. Because she looks great on screen. We've litter properly. We've actually kind of metered properly. We've placed during the light properly. And we did all of it properly because we stopped for a hot minute, looked at the room and read the light in the room. Not just for just for giggles. Okay? We're gonna put it up against the wall just to see what that light looks like. Okay, We're gonna put that light, put it up against the wall here, go ahead and meet her hearing. Okay? Okay. All right. Second, and it's not fair because Daniel looks really good all the time. Okay, But you can see here how it just the lighting, just dead. It just falls off and it's just dies. There isn't if something that's missing out of her face and out of the skin tone and how the way she looks, right, versus when we just took her and moved her up. Just a few paces here, right. You need light to create an image. And if you take someone and stick him in a shadow when you have a room full of beautiful light, you've not done yourself any favors. because now let's make believe I could actually make an image here. That was pleasing. Where can I move her? Where can I move her? I can't move her anywhere. Right? She's against the wall. Guys, I can't move anywhere. I can't. I can't even turn her to to and to make it look pleasing. So let's go her and turn her, okay? I could turn it this way. I can turn it that way. But then my options are so limited. And what if I need to use a reflector, which is what we're gonna talk about next? I can't use a reflector here. Okay, so I moved back. Daniel, back over here, okay? And we're at 6.3 there, so let's go ahead and move it back to 6.3. Okay? Okay. All right. Can you guys see how much I'm actually always zooming in and rocking that zoom to make sure that I'm in focus, right? You always have to do it. It's like second nature at this point. All right, So Danielle has wonderfully beautiful blocks. Unfortunately, they're falling off into the background. You can't see them in the background, can you? There is no separation if I were to stand behind her. Can you see where her hair can you see where her hair all of a sudden starts to pop out? Right. So let's go ahead and bring out a reflector and do what's called a rim light. All right? Now, when we talk about reflectors, guys, I'll talk about it more when we change can position. But if you go ahead here and just light her up, just a touch. You can see how it starts to affect her hair just a bit. Okay? We could go ahead and move it back and forth, and if we take it away, come on. Here we take it away, it starts to go away. So what we want to do is when we take a reflector and we use it as a rim light, we wanna make sure it comes high and want to hit them and get just a little bit of separation and highlight on the back of their head. Okay, It really pays to have an assistant to kinda help you out. I've got half year here. He's awesome in it. So I'm really excited. So what I'm gonna do is gonna move my camera, and I'm gonna turn Daniel 90 degrees. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead. Uh huh. All right. So, guys, first thing we're gonna dio is just talk about this lighting, but I'm gonna go ahead and just give a reading real quickly, okay? All right. So if we take a look at what's going on in this scenario here, I've got Daniel turned 90 degrees. So already you should see that there's a key light and then now no light. And when I say key light, key light is the largest source, the brightest source. So we're gonna use that term a lot. So the key light is always gonna be the light source. That is the brightest casting on your subject. Fill light is the other type of light. Okay, now, before even pop over to the camera, anything like that. Let's just take a look and see if we were to turn her. Can you see how the light starts to change its direction on her face? And now she's gotten darker, and now we're back to being flat, and she's backlit, isn't she? Okay, so if I'm going to use this type of light. I can use this entire window as a gigantic soft box so I can move her in this light and all we need to do guys is look at the floor. So I took the floor. Where is the light? The brightest in the floor here, isn't it? What's over here all of a sudden? When you move her here, you can see all there's a definitive shadow. So let me just pop into the camera I think we may be having. Here we go. So you folks at home benefit because, unfortunately, our studio audience is looking at a backlit monitor, So it's gonna be very hard for them to tell the fact that there is a definitive line of contrast and her face between the left and the right. So to give you guys an idea, my lips side 6.3 and then over here I'm at 2.2. Okay, that's huge. 5.642 point That's over three stops. It's like eight. It's a little to 1 that's like 8 to 1. Roughly if I round it all out, however, she looks great. She's got these beautiful features that that contrast ratio just makes her face absolutely sane. However, there's a little bit of drama. That's attitude, right? So we have to understand what we want if we are so So there's there's always things that I will say to do. And then there's always that one instance that it won't really actually apply unless you stop for a second and think about what you need. So the question waas Well, Victor, you said to meet her for the source of the light. If I'm listening to you about metering towards the source of the light and she is backlit, and that's the only light source in the room. Theoretically, wouldn't I just meet her here and get a reading of 56 and set my camera 56? Not really. Because what I'll do is we're actually going to do that. So come back here. Give me some some room here. All right. I'm gonna move my camera, and hopefully you won't lose my feed. So how the year could just make sure that cables get kicked? Okay, great. Okay. So I'm gonna set my meter to 70 All right, So what did I do if I'm meeting for the light source. In this scenario, I'm gonna centimeter for Okay, that's 7.1. What happened? She darkened the heck down, didn't she? So we have to know that in this situation we are backlit, so that rule of meeting towards light source goes completely out the window Because I need to make sure I could make an image of not the window but of her. But did you notice what happened to the window? It kind of dark and downright everything darkened down. So if I want to make an image of her, that's your first question is, what do you make an image of? I wanna make an image of her. Well, in my backlit. Yeah, I'm backlit. So if I meet her for that backlight, she's not gonna be exposed properly. So I need to expose for her. And if I want to expose for her, I'm gonna get 32 on her face and watch this magic. All of a sudden, she's lit up again. Now, in a backlit situation, What you're gonna find, Give me a second. Don't move, honey. It's okay. All right. So the backward situation You can use that backlight to effect, can't you? What does that look like? Looks very dreamy. Looks very dreamy. And if I am backlit, let me grab enough reflector. Really quickly, please. So if I'm backlit and I come in with a reflector, can you see how that affects the image a little bit? Okay, now, if I use a reflector in this scenario, we'll talk about this in a bit, and I put it right under her face. Okay? That's like Alfred Hitchcock, right? Okay, so how you do me a favor and just move it up and high? So you just move it up and he's gonna say, Can you see how the light change in her face? Seal that, like changing her face. We haven't even used the light yet. We're just looking at how light falls. We're just looking at how reflector can affect an image. And we went from We went from here and all we did was move it up and higher. And can you see how that started to affect your face? Now here's the thing. Okay. So I'm gonna leave Javier there now. I'm gonna read Why? Why am I reading because I wanna make a picture of her. I wanna forget about this light source because it's backlight and I wanna measure the light falling on her face because that's what I want an image of. What's my key light? What's the source hitting her? The reflectors. A key light. So where do I point the meter towards? Reflector towards reflector 3.6. Let's do 3.5. Boom! I got myself in Image will take the reflector off less compelling. Put it back up. More compelling, right? So we just turned a situation where we were backlit. So let's take that reflector off. We're back lit the meters, said, Hey, Victor, that's your reading because we measured for that back light, which we shouldn't have done. We should have looked at this and said, Oh, she's backlit. I need to measure my exposure for the subject. We should have measured here to get a reference to get ah, reference exposure so we can see what's happening. And then we toss in that reflector and we don't toss it in low so we don't toss it in low because it makes her look like a like a character from Ah, horror movie, right? We move it to the side and we lifted up high. Okay, you get that reading Because And we pointed to the light source, it tells us 4. and we've got ourselves an image, and I know the question. Well, Victor, initially before you measured, it was like 3.2. Why did you measure it again? And it's a 4.5. Isn't the Reflector the same thing? Well, yeah, it's the same thing, but this reflectors flimsy, isn't it? It's all loosey goosey. So he's gonna move it. It's gonna fluctuate. So if he were toe back up, if he were to back up, can you see how that light starts to fall off her face? Now, if he brings it in closer, bringing a nice and close real close real close. Okay, now we've got that shadow back. Now we have that shadow back. The quality of light will improve as you get it bigger or bring it closer to your subject. That's the inverse square law. You live and die by that law. If you want good lighting, you make the light source bigger or you bring it closer to her. She looks beautiful there. I've got a beautiful shadow right here. I've got a nice highlight here with this shadow. Now, I could do stuff. I can make her look like something. Okay, You don't light for highlights. You light for shadows. And that's what makes good lighting. And you do all of that with ambient light. We didn't. You even break out a light at this point, okay? I'm really passionate about letting Can you guys tell?