Lessons
Class Introduction
03:37 2What Defines a Beauty Shot?
05:41 3Cameras & Lighting Equipment
20:05 4Flash Settings
14:18 5Flash Modifiers
08:32 6Lighting Styles
05:05 7Shoot: Butterfly Lighting
18:13 8Shoot: Beauty Dish Lighting
04:40Lesson Info
Class Introduction
Welcome everybody. I'm very happy you're here today. As Jude said, I've done a few classes with Creative Live, I think too many to count, so I'm happy to be back. I love teaching with Creative Live and today is all about using your flash, using a single flash, to create beauty shots, beauty photos, beauty images. So we're going to talk a little about what beauty images are, talk about how to use a single flash. If you're new to flash photography, you're in the right spot. If you started flash photography a while ago and you kind of put it away in the box, in the shelf, and then you pull it out recently, like a few of you in the audience have already told me, then today's your day because we're going to talk about how to use that flash to create wonderful beautiful images. As Jude said, I've been in the photography world a long time. I don't want to spend too much time talking about me, but just so you know where I've been and what I've done. I've been a pro for about 20-ish years, 20 y...
ears and I do everything. I do portraits, I do landscapes, I write books, I run trips all around the world, I go to Africa and Galapagos and Iceland, all of these places. I love photography, I absolutely love it. And I love teaching photography, so today I'd love to interface with you all. If you're watching online, send in those questions. Here in the audience, feel free to ask questions at any point in time, and we'll always try to manage getting through the material and answering questions, but I think I do a good job of balancing those two things. So, today we're going to be spending the first section just talking about gear, cause everybody wants to talk about gear. You know, what do you need to create beautiful photos? What do you need in terms of cameras, what lenses are going to work best for this? And then of course what about the flashes, cause this is all about flash and learning flash. One point I want to make is that I'm not going to be spending a lot of time really talking about posing or model dynamics. We have a lot of classes at Creative Live that cover that. Today is really all about a little bit more on the technical side of things. The next section is, we're going to be talking about lighting styles for beauty shots. So you can see over here I've got tons of lighting equipment, mostly modifiers, and that looks intimidating and I mostly have this all on set because I know those of you in the classroom here and those watching at home, some of you may have an umbrella, some of you may have a soft box, some of you may have a beauty dish and I'm going to try and show you how to create these looks with the tools that you have and the tools that you already own. But everything will be done with one flash today. Everything, which is pretty cool. Then we get to shooting later in the session. We'll be actually shooting photos with a model, we'll call the model in in about 30, 40 minutes from now. And we'll create some fantastic beauty shots, bright, airy, vibrant. And then finally I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about post processing and the reason why is because when you are shooting with one flash, you're kind of at a little bit of a disadvantage. When you're shooting with multiple flashes, you can really sculpt the light. Now you can use multiple flashes on the backdrop, you can use multiple flashes on the subject, but when you're using one flash, well a lot of times we need to pull in some post processing work. So I'm going to be doing some work in Lightroom today, just to give you some easy quick steps for how to retouch a face, how to deal with that background, get that background nice bright white, all that good stuff.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Suzie
Practical, informative, affordable instruction that’s easy to understand and leaves you excited to jump into the studio with a single flash and whatever you have on hand .. soft boxes, umbrellas, v flats or even a bunch of cheap reflectors. Mike is a superb instructor. Highly recommend.
user-4cec79
Really good. Superb teacher. Bought it. Worth the money.
Anthonia
Loving this class so far! The instructor is amazing