Lessons

Lesson Info

Two and Three Light Setup

By going over what we're trying to talk about here with lighting and and all this kind of stuff. I'm sort of demystifying this whole lighting process for you. So what I've done here, I've already set my lights in a certain way so I can actually save time in the set up, and not move them around so much. So, the first thing you're gonna wanna do, I'm gonna move this light, I'm gonna get a reading on it, so we can get some sort of a look, and I'm getting F8. So I'm gonna go ahead and set this to F8. Victor, a quick question for you, I notice you're holding the meter, basically just, it doesn't look like you're being very precise on when you're holding it. Somebody was asking whether the nose, the chin, does it matter? So, if we take a look at her, I'm just metering towards the face, towards the, where the light is actually hitting, so it's right here, and I'm facing it towards the fixture. So I can very specific, if you want to know, if she's got a bright spot in here face, or whateve...

r it is, we can actually meter at that place and bring that exposure down. But I'm just getting a general reading right now, so I can show you guys the differences between one light and two light different looks. Okay, so when you take a look at one light guys, you're gonna want to make sure that you actually separate the persons face in half. So I wanna make sure that her one side of her face, is actually lit and the other side of her face has less light on it. So if we were to move this around, so I'm gonna move this V flat, and if we were to move this light around, to the other side, can you see how her face starts to darken? Okay, and all of a sudden we move over here, and that face starts to brighten out a little bit, so where you place your key light, will have a direct impact on where your fill light. So I'm gonna come over here, and I kind of messed this up so I'm gonna need to reposition this light, so give me a second. Xavier give me a hand. So what we're gonna do here is, I'm gonna turn off my key light, so you guys can see where my fill light's coming from, so my fill light should do the exact opposite of what my key light does. So my fill light should fill in the shadows, that my key light creates. Danielle is gonna looking forward, and I can feather it off a little bit if I want, okay so there it is. So now that I know where my lights are positioned, I can now take readings, and make sure I'm at the right exposures for these lights. Okay, so first things we're gonna do is, we're gonna meter for our key light. So I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna turn it off. I'm gonna go ahead and set my meter to, let's see here, 9, so I love it when I have that little light on her eye. Right there okay, and I move that box right over to it, see that little light on her cheekbone? That's a Rembrandt light right there. That's really really nice, I'm gonna turn this guy off now, I'm gonna turn that guy back on, and then I'm gonna go ahead and meter here. It's at 6.3, I'm at F8, I want a two to one ratio, I've got the light at 6.3, what do I need to dial the light down to, to get, what do I need this light to be? 5.6 5.6, so I want a two to one ratio, so I'm gonna go ahead and key light at F8 and my fill light at 5.6. Okay, so if I put my fill light at 5.6, I should be able to dial down, Xavier give me a hand. And hit that minus until I tell you to stop okay? So I'm at 5.6 pop it down, stop there. Oh bring it back up just a little bit, that's it okay, so let's go back to the camera view, so there's my fill light, and maybe, yeah it's gonna, okay let's pop up my other light, and I just have my two to one ratio contrast lighting pattern. Make sense? Okay, your key light, your fill light. Okay, let's go back to the computer slide. That computer slide now, let's say I want an 8 to 1 ratio, which now means I need my fill light to be at 2.8, let's see what 2.8 and 8 look like. Because I love that look, especially on someone like Danielle, she's gonna look beautiful with it, okay. So let's go ahead and go back to the camera view, Xavier go ahead and dial that light down, until I tell you to stop please, one second. Okay here we go, keep going, keep going, you're gonna feel that light come down a lot, it's gonna come down a lot, keep going. Alright stop there, okay, you can see here, if you look really closely, that her face is being very very lightly filled, and the minute I pop open that key light, okay she's gonna look really really good. Okay so let's go ahead and pull that, open it up just a little bit. Okay, shape that light and then we're gonna push this, okay, alright let's take a reading, we're still at nine, and see how I've just created a shadow on her face, I've created a highlight and we can now have some sort of style between a 2 to 1 and an 8 to ratio, and here's a thing, I can do 8 to 1, 4 to 1, 2 to 1, in this room, then go to her studio, go to her business, and do 4 to 1, 2 to1, 8 to 1, or whatever I want, and maintain the same look across her and everyone else. That's what's so cool about lighting. So that's one style of light, that's one style of two lights. So what we're gonna do now, is we're gonna take, turn off that fill light for me please. Take this light, and we're gonna push it from the side. And if we push it from the side, what you guys should see, is a complete shadow on her side, and then we take this fill light, turn it on, and then push it from this side as well. Now, theoretically what you want is, you want the intensity from this side, to match the intensity on the other side, what you're gonna do here, is I'll meter here, 10, 10, gonna set my camera to 10. Now watch this, go ahead and pull this light to behind her and Xavier moves his light behind her, we can start to do really dramatic stuff, just by moving the lights in tandem to each other. Okay, so it doesn't look good on her because she's beautiful and what is it, feminine features, but you see that type of lighting in athletes. Think Nike, think Adidas, alright, that kinda stuff. Now when we go to three lights, we can move this third light up higher to a paramount. Or, at this point, grabbing a reflector and fill in, let's see how it fills in. But ideally, what you want to do with a two light side light set up, is put the lights right at the edge of their nose, and shift it back and forth, until you find that right point, where she looks, You see, look how the shadows change, So, pull all the way back Xavier, so Xavier's gonna go first, stop until you get to the middle of her nose, keep going a little bit, keep going a little bit, okay now I'm gonna go. You guys see how that works? Isn't that cool, see. So when you take a look at lighting guys, slow down, you'll notice when I'm talking about other stuff, I'm hyper, I'm really crazy and I go, go, go, go, go, but when we get to lighting, and I become very deliberate, and I slow down, and I start to look at every little nuance of the light because, she's a beautiful girl, and I wanna make sure that she's beautiful when I capture her, okay? How we doing over here, any questions? Oh yes, we have questions. Sure. So a question that came up, basically the question is, can we just use a modeling light of a flash with a soft box, instead of an LED light? These are really coming from photographers, who already have the gear. Absolutely, so if you guys have a strobe, and your modeling light, let's say you have a 250 watt modeling light, a 250 watt modeling light through a softbox, that softbox is gonna probably cut down a stop. It's not enough power, that modeling light will be good to get you by, but you're gonna be struggling to get an apperture out of it, like right now I'm shooting at ISO640, and apperture is like 11 and 8, and that kind of stuff, and I typically wouldn't shoot at 640, but I want the ability to get to higher appertures, so I can show you guys lighting ratios easily, okay? But the thing is, if you're trying to use a modeling light from a strobe, you're going to come into a situation where you're not going to get enough power, you're gonna be shooting through a softbox, it's gonna cut your light even more, and remember what I said about 10%, that's a tungsten bulb inside of your strobe, it's 25 watts if light. A 250 watt light, equates to 25 watts of light power. Which is nothing. You need light to create an image, and using a modeling light is not enough. And from Rob Graffico, are there softboxes or diffusers that you can use with these LED panels? Absolutely, so we're gonna talk about that right now. Perfect. Okay, so there are softboxes that you can use, for one by one, there's also diffusion panels that you can use as well. But what I like to do, is I like to mess around with flags. Okay, when I have a flag, okay this is what a flag is. It's a diffusion scrim basically, I can actually put this in front of my light, and what it will do is soften that light out. Okay, I've got two of them, so what I can do here, is place one in front of my other light. Can I have another stand over this Xavier? Okay, great, and then we can do here is, place this guy, in this orientation, and diffuse her there okay. Now, obviously what happened, through diffusion from the lights, it cut the light significantly, so I've got to go ahead and re meter, gotta re meter, and I'm at 7. And here we are, so let's take a look here. Xavier let's go ahead and remove the diffusion, turn that nob and pull it up, okay now it's harder. Versus now, it's significantly softer right? So the thing is, we can use diffusion like this, in order to soften the image up just a little bit, and allow ourselves to shape and modify that light just a touch. Now, I used diffusion right now didn't I? This is diffusion, 'cos I can know, it's like a silky material, and there's also another thing called a net, and a net looks like this. A net will cut the light, but not soften the light. You guys understand what I'm saying by that? It will cut the light, meaning it will take that exposure down, and then allow me to still maintain the hardness of that light. So, back in the day, when people were using tungsten. Tungsten, as you decrease the power, changed it's color, right, it would change it's color. So what you ended up doing, is you were ending up using the light at full power, and you'd throw nets in front of it, to cut the light, to maintain the power and the color of that light. But you saw here, I was able to dim the light, to get the power down to get my exposure, that's what I did, okay cool. So I know I'm going really slow, and I'm doing it very deliberate and slow because I want us to really look at the, how we apply these sorts of lights, how we apply the lights, and how we can get similar, or different looks out of them. So, let's go ahead and go back into my key light, fill light scenario, where I'm at the 45 degree angles. So Xavier, let's get that light back over, let's take these scrims off, okay so let's go ahead and move this back, let's pop this back at the right orientation, what I wanna do, I wanna get the light up high and angle down, so 45 and 45, okay? I wanna get this guy over here at 45. Let's go ahead and do this. Okay, and let's look at this light with diffusion, so I'm gonna put this guy, go ahead and hit that light off for me Xavier. This light with diffusion. So, let's get a reading. And as you're going Victor, Dario 1 was asking about using LEDs that can't actually be dimmed up and down, is this diffusion panel basically what we're, you would do to? Well, LEDs can be dimmed up and down, most manufacturers of LEDs can be dimmed, so if you run into an LED that can't be dimmed, you shouldn't be buying that LED. Okay, it's not a good use of your money, don't buy LEDs you can't dim. If in the event that your borrowing a light from somebody, and they can't dim, you're gonna wanna shoot through diffusion of some kind okay. So, we take a look here, I got my lights, kind of in the place that I want it, I'm shooting through diffusion so it's softer light right? See how much softer that light looks? Versus how hard it looks now? Right, I've just softened that light out a bit, essentially what you're doing, you're shooting in diffusion is your making that light source bigger. You're improving that quality of light, now if you guys pull back and actually show the studio shot, how close is my light to my subject? Something I really wanna stress. Lights pretty close isn't it? Yeah, it's a couple of feet, three feet. I get my lights pretty close, because I wanna keep that quality of light and obviously you can tell, by looking at the footage on the camera, that it actually does look really nice, even when I don't have diffusion. And I think that light metered in at 7.1. Give me a second here, even with that diffusion, this light at 8.0 still looks really great okay? Makes sense? Alright, so let's go ahead and get this diffusion, Xavier can you put that light on again for me please. Let's go ahead and position that light correctly. You got it, one second, okay. Good, Alright, go ahead and lock that down. So, I'm at 7.0, Xaviers at 5.6, okay so keeping it down. Xavier could you please knock that light down for me please. Thank you. Turn it back on and dial it down please, hit the minus button down. Thank you. Okay keep going, keep going, okay keep going. Okay stop, alright so I'm gonna go ahead and kick this light back up, alright now it's at 3 lights, it's at 3 lights. So, what we are just doing right now, is I've just built you guys up from one light, to two lights to what we call a 3 point light set up. So, I'm gonna pull this frame out just a little bit so we can actually see the effect of a 3 point light set up. Lets go ahead and do that, that's gonna be here, let's bring it in, let's go ahead and focus in, Danielle's great, you just sit there, I told her to bring a book because she'd just be sitting there and not really doing much. So what I'll do here, is I'll go ahead and turn this light on. Now there's different types of LED panels, we have a daylight panel, a tungsten panel and we have what's called bi-color, and bi-color means that you can actually dial in color temperature, because it has the ability to shift color temperature from 2800 kelvin to 5600 kelvin, the benefit of a bi-color pen, I'm gonna dial this all the way down almost, so we can see the benefit here. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you this panel. So can you see how there's this string of lights that is not on right now? The string of lights that are not on is because it's a bi-color panel, if I were to shift the color temperature to somewhere like 4100, can you see how all the lights come on? So there's a really good benefit to this lighting panel 'cos it allows us to vary our color temperature, and go from outdoors to indoors, where there's tungsten light, however let's think about this. If I have the ability to dial color temperature, by changing the how many bulb I have on. What do you think it does to the intensity of the light? Knocks it directly in half. 'Cos I'm only using half the bulbs, so if I dial this thing to 5600, and then go ahead and dial it all the way up in intensity, I can know I'm exactly at half the power of that light if that light was at full power. So I like to carry with me, and you guys are actually seeing what I like to bring, when I'm actually using lighting for an interview. I'll use my sled, I'll use a full daylight 1 by 1 and then for my rim and accent light, I'll use a bi-color light, because I know if I turn half the bulbs off, I've got half power. And it allows me to, let's look at the screen here, so if you take a look at her hair, so let's turn that light off. You see that hair light? If I go ahead and dial in color temperature, look what happens, do you see what happens to her hair? How it changes in color? So I can actually start to do, maybe some stylistic stuff if I want to, add in some color, but generally speaking, we can add hair light in, very very easily, so I can do this. So what I'm gonna do here, and notice I didn't even meter that light did I? Because I know it's at half power converted to my other lights and so I can use this hair light, as kind of like an accent light, and what I'll do is probably get it up higher. Get it up higher, and what I'll do is turn it down. So as I keep turning it down, can you see how it starts to dissipate that hair a little bit? So there's all the way down, and now here's all the way up. So we can actually dial in very, very specific stuff, just by using that hair light. So let's do this, we're gonna turn off the key light, we're gonna turn off the fill light, we're gonna leave that hair light on. Okay, can you see where that hair lights falling? Isn't that neat? So now we can move it around, so if I move it around, I can show you where that accent's gonna be. So, I tend to like that. Okay, and I'm at, so I'll do this, I'll go ahead and turn up my key light, let's turn off that hair light if we can. So that's my key light, looks good, we're gonna go ahead and turn on my fill light, now we're gonna turn that hair light on. Gonna kick in right there, what do you guys think? Pretty simple right? Pretty simple, what did we do? We started with one light, we added a second light, and then we added a third light. And now, we're in business, we're cooking with gas. How are we doing with questions guys, do we have anything I need to worry about? Most definitely. - We do, we do. Cassandra's asking, or saying this kind of lighting, the subject can't seem to move around very much, so, you know, for photographers, you know I understand this is for interview, if you're doing a business interview or something like that. As far as video in general, and people are moving, can you talk to that? Alright so, look at how we, let's pull back and look at the scene a little bit, Danielle I'm gonna have you stand up. So this is for an interview right? I do three lights for interview, and if Danielle needed to be moving around, if I need to pull off my lights, I know that by the inverse square law, that if I pull my lights away from my subject, it's gonna get more contrasty, so I've gotta make that light source bigger by adding more lights at that point. So I've gotta make a bigger light from this guy, which means add more panels, I gotta make a bigger light out of this guy, which means add more fixtures. And a bigger light out of this guy, which means add more fixtures. Now if you guys take a look, and take a look at the lights that are in this studio, they're all really big fixtures, which allows me to move around. So we can learn a lot from the way that the Creative Live guys have actually set their lights up. Because it can help us to learn here, how we can expand this lighting setup, to allow for Danielle to move a little bit more in frame. So if I was to back this out to 70 millimeters, it's my light, I got my hair light, that's kind of still being annoying, 'cos I can see it in frame. But I'll back that off, just a touch, okay. Lets go ahead and bring this frame down a touch. So simply in this space, even though it looks like my lights are so close, I have the ability to go from 70 millimeters, all the way up to 200 millimeters, to create enough space for myself, for my subject to move in. Now here's a thing, Danielle, let's have you go ahead and sit on this. Sorry, oh I took away your apple box oops, sorry, you're like a small person like me, should have remembered, okay. So, the whole purpose of doing the three point light setup, is to make it usable for an interview. Is to make it usable for an interview. So, what I'm gonna show you right now, is I'm gonna kill this second fill light, or this fill light here. And we're gonna do a counter light, a counter light is two lights, but they're lighting against each other, so what I've got here is a light. Now, if I turn off that hair light, you guys should see that it's gonna disappear right? The way you use this light in counter light, okay as you turn it on and you move it till you start to see it break their face a touch, see that? Okay, so now, and you see that a lot again, in athletics, in sports, and it's still two lights, but it's countered, okay?