Lessons
Class Introduction
05:10 2What Defines a Dramatic Portrait?
06:07 3Camera Settings
09:24 4Lighting Equipment & Styles
24:24 5Lighting For Dramatic Shots
09:04 6Shoot: With Light On-Axis
14:53 7Shoot: With Butterfly Lighting
06:20 8Shoot: With Beauty Dish
17:31Lesson Info
Shoot: Hard Light
Okay, this one is our last shot of the day. Here we're just going to go very hard and harsh for this look. Oh, sandbag. Take the sandbag off. There we go. They weight like 30 pounds. One of our producers here was curling them. Earlier, she was showing everybody up. Sara. Alright, here we go. So this is gonna be very hard light. I'll start with it out front and then I'll start moving off to the side and we'll see how that impacts the photo. Too much gear. One of the reasons not own a lotta gear, is it's a lot easier to move around the studio. Jeff and I were talking today. He has a smaller studio now. He's says, "Man, just trying to move around the studio "with all the equipment can be a bear." Okay, there we go. Now we have something, what we're gonna see. Actually, I just realized this isn't gonna work as well as I wanted it to work. A true beauty dish, the way a beauty dish works. Can you guys see this on camera? Yeah, right there. The way the beauty dish works, is it actually has a ...
reflector panel here. So the light comes out of the flash, reflects off the panel here, goes back into the dish, and then forward. So in this case, what's gonna happen? Well the light is actually going to shine right out of the flash head and it's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna be the right solution. That said, I think I can probably find a way around this. I'm gonna push the flash forward more. And I'm gonna see if I can fit in the diffusion dome. It's kind of a stop gap feature. Oh yeah, look at that. So a bunch of my classes here at CreativeLive are, a few of them are, DIY photography. I just can't get that stuff outta my head. I'm like always trying to improvise. Okay, we'll try that and see how that works. I've never shot in this scenario before. My idea, my concept, is to get a really harsh, intense, specular light onto his face. Kay? Hard man is what I'm gonna call ya now. Hard cider. And we'll start there. And then we'll move it more off to the side. Oh, I shut my camera off, I shouldn't have done that. Hopefully it reconnects very rapidly. If you are shooting tethered at home, you're watching along. When you do turn the camera off, a lot of times you lose your tether connection. Just shut down the tether toolbar and start the tethered session again. Once you are connected, just leave the camera on. I'm always thinking about conserving battery life, but that's my conservative nature coming out. Alright, you ready? No changes. Oh, I know what's gonna happen though. I do need to make a change. I'm at like half power. It's gonna blast him out to outer space. There's no sense in taking the shot until I reduce the power there. I'm gonna reduce it down to, ehh, let's start it at 16th. Cause now there's no diffusion and it's all silver. Here we go. (camera clicks) Still using my 24 to 70 also. I just have the feeling that this is not gonna look all that great. Uh! It's not bad! (laughs) Not bad at all. Huh, interesting. Didn't quite give me the look that I was anticipating in my mind. I thought it would be a lot starker and more contrasty. But we can get there by moving it off to the side like this. There we go. We'll do that. I like audience participation. Thank you for surprising me with your question and the answer. (camera clicks) Cool. Yeah, actually I like that first photo probably more than I'm gonna like this photo but we'll see. Oh, cool. It's actually a good look too. I like it a lot. Who knows, that may be the best photo of the day. Ya never know. And that's what photography is. Photography is all about experimentation and then once you kind of land on a look that you like well then you need to try and replicate that for the next client, the next subject. In fact you and I were actually talking about that today. He's got a lot of different looks and he's thinking about taping stuff out on the floor to know that this light goes here and that reflector goes there so that you can replicate it time and time again. I like that one there so much, that I'm going to remember this setting and remember that flash setup. So, cool. Well there's our sequence of photographs. So thank you, thank you very much. Grab a seat. What we're going to move onto now is doing some light room work.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
user-182390
Another great course learned a lot about flash and the different modifiers. Very informative and easy to understand looking forward to the next one.
a Creativelive Student
Student Work
Related Classes
Lighting