Lessons

Lesson Info

More Light Silver

Do you want more light? Well, silver is greater than white now, only that rhyme. I totally sound like a car salesperson. Right? Better. Okay, have another example situation for you in this time we're shooting in a super super bright area on I'd say it's even brighter than the last shot that we took. This was extremely bright out and we have our subject. Jill, jill is a crossfit and just fitness. Gotta she's amazing. What I have are doing is when we got to this beach, I saw this great rock that looked fantastic to kind of have her lean against and, well, how did lean against that? And then again, always look at the light. First we're gonna talk about kind of our case studies and analysing light later on. But I always put my subject into the scene and have them do what I want to do first and then I start manipulating light. When I had her lean back against that rock, I saw the sunlight kind of coming in. It creates a beautiful short light that came from the back side. It's really the mai...

n line this shot. I don't want to do too much modification this shot actually looks. Quite great and most people would probably take the shot and be like, oh, that looks fantastic! I don't need to do anything, I'll do the rest in post, but when I saw that, I thought there might be something I could do, I could use a little bit of light to fill in the shadows just so I had some highlights in there just I had a little bit of detail in there that I could work with a little better in post production, but the problem is that we're in such a bright seen that if I used white, I probably wouldn't really be able to see it much, and also because we're shooting this kind of, you know, high contrast, edgy, kind of beauty, slash fashion, slash fitness, a more contrast, the light, a silver light would actually kind of benefit the style and the look that we're going for anyway. So it's going to do two things for me is going to be more light and it's going to be the type of quality of light that would really benefit the shot as well. So let's go over the gear lis, how do we shoot this shot? Well, for this particular shot I used the photo dio the forty by sixty just because it's easier to throw light into it's a little bit larger. Get his thirty bucks I also used a grid now you could use a snoot for what I'm about to tell you but I used a grid let me tell you why I didn't worry about using the grid because well because I'm not worried about light hitting something behind the reflector and bouncing back into the scene I'm not worried about that at all based on my position tau where jill wass I'm going to give you an example this let's assume that you guys are my subject you guys right now are jill I had the reflector off towards the side almost of the same angle as jill is okay? So she the reflectors basically over there I need to throw my life over to that side needs to hit that and then go back to you the camera so if I angle my flash that way even if I zoom in at one o five when I fire this shot you guys are probably gonna end up seeing that flash right there's a major problem there I'm ending up getting direct flash onto you guys onto jill because I have to shoot it that angle and so opens up the flash head to my subjects I don't want that so what do I do is in this situation we put the grid on not because we're worried about spill onto the background because we're worried about spill onto our subject now from here I can fire with a flash of the same place. Okay, but this time you guys aren't going to see nearly as much of that light in camera and when I look at the two shots one shot the camera is completely that it lit up and the other shot the camera's dark so we're using the grid in this situation to control spill onto jill I want the light to be directional only not coming from the camera. You can also use a snoot okay? A snooty totally usable as well. I find it easier to carry a little bit less uh then a little bit more so I just stick to what works in this case just the grid and if you have the magma that's my preferred system is the magma. I'm also using our same five stop andy filter right over the front were on an eighty five mil lens, so I just have a step down ring that that just closes the filter size so I can put it right over that a decent budget nd filled her just to get you started. Okay, this is just to play around with these techniques is the tiffin three stop at thirty five bucks a decent mid level five stop neutral density filter that's good enough to start getting decent image quality out of it is the hoy eighty two millimeter at a hundred bucks and again aaliyah sing ray anything that you're investing a couple hundred bucks into make sure you read the reviews, but lee and singer and make fantastic, uh, any filters and they're going to around three hundred bucks. Okay, so let's, take a look at the camera settings. I want to show you the difference between the shots are camera settings were at one hundred second f two. So two hundred again, whenever you go into scene like this go happens first, decide on appetite for composition, purposes and for depth of field purposes. Then go to your center speed. I went to one, two hundred second cause I know that that's the fastest my sink speaking. Go on, I want to get the light down as much as possible. Then I dialed in my eyes. So based on well, the nd filter. So I had to actually bring this upto one, two hundred a second just because I had a five stop nd filter on and I didn't want to go to a three stop and go in between. I go up to her that's totally fine. We're bouncing off the silver at one to one. Okay? And again, we're losing a little bit of light because we have a grid on, so I could probably have bounced around one half to one quarter light if I wasn't using the grid but with the grid on with where I'm bouncing I needed the one one one over on power to get enough light so here's the shot this is the shot just as normal without any light whatsoever this is just without the flash same exact camera settings and so forth looks really nice I find really no problems with this shot except I would end up spending a lot of time in post adding and dodging and burning and kind of bring up these shadows and to kind of do all that kind of thing, but if I had to, I could but why not just get a writing camera so here's the same shot that exact same shot with our silver modify and you can see it basically being reflected into the glasses, which creates like a really cool catch light just overall in the glasses to it kind of brings the glass of life we get this beautiful fill light everywhere we're not overpowering notice that we're not overpowering the main light that sun is still basically the mainline the shot where is adding a fill light with the silver and it fills the very beautifully now jill like I said she's, a crossfit expert she's amazing she does competitions and so forth with anybody that does crossfit and competitions oftentimes they're going to have a little bit of skin bruising because they have, you know, workout, exercise, accident and so forth. So she had a little bruising on the leg, so the only thing I did with this is I wanted to do a little bit a touch up just to clean up just the skin a little bit. So I took this. This is probably only image in this entire series that I took in a photo shop was basically clean it up a little bit, so we had a little bit less of the bruising and whatnot, but look at this shot and compare that to this one. Now, this is this is that first shot right here, but what I did with this shot as I brighten it up in post, I brighten up in post so that we had a little bit brighter an image we had a little more fill in the shadows and so forth. Compare the quality of these two shots side by side pretty massive difference right on this side, we have this beautiful highlight and having the feel like they're allows me to do dodging and burning in photos have to create an even better kind of highlight along that edge of leg. It looks fantastic, it looks beautiful, looks natural, we get a nice catch light in the eyes and in the glasses we get beautiful feel everywhere we kind of soften the shadows over here we keep the background nice and rich as opposed to cover exposed on the right side overall it just looks like it's a better and more refined image has better production value and that's what we're trying to get to hear we're not overpowering light we're not doing anything we're just doing a subtle bit of fill light from our on camera flash into a silver bounce so hopefully this gives you a couple of new ideas as faras yeah, you can use your silver when you need a lot of light but it doesn't necessarily need to be a lot of light to overpower anything it could be a lot of like you just want a lot of phil for a scene that's extremely bright okay and it's going to give you a much nicer overall look now one key thing to remember that I want you to think about the way that I'm feeling light is directional and it goes into the shadow areas and it's coming from a similar direction as the sun which means that it kind of in practice it kind of looks like that rat light is just wrapping around her a little more if I would have bounced that phil often to the right side if I would have bounced off to the side it wouldn't have looked at it would have looked like it wasn't very natural would have looked like we added flash and just kind of opened up and end up losing that shadow definition because we had a feeling the shadows too much, so I'm following the direction of light, or at least getting close to the direction of light that's existing and bouncing phil from that, so we just get mohr of that light rap, we still retain the shadows, so my primary tips we're using the five stop any filter for six b because I don't wanna have to compromise image quality by raising on my s o and raising the shutter speed. I don't want to get a point where I have tio basically run into my shutter speed limitation I don't want to use high speed sync number two high speed scene can be used, but like I just said, you're gonna run into the iso and shutter speed limitation because where we are right now, we're too we're shooting this shot after two so two hundred that means if I were to take off the five stop, that would get me at four hundred shutter speed eight hundred that's two stops, sixteen hundred is three stops, thirty, two hundred is four stops, I will be around sixty four hundred I don't know if that's a shutter speed but one six thousandth of a second at this exposure so again I'm right at the limitation already of the shutter speed I have maybe a third stop left so I don't want to deal with that I'm just going to use an andy filter three snooze could be used to throw light longer distances but again they can also create tighter pattern than grids but it gets difficult guys you'll find that the techniques that were teaching here these air techniques that I use on professional shoots that I use on any type of shoot these have about bounced techniques I don't want to teach you things that are too difficult to put in practice that they're not they're not practical basically okay if you're throwing us new thirty feet into a reflector you might as well just haven't off camera flash where the reflector is and just do that because it's much much easier but throwing it five ten feet that's totally doable it's very practical and reasonable to do that quickly on a shoot number four place the light on what you want featured and basically that whole thing goes back to well what about a feature here want to chair the model the clothing the expression what do want to feature for this shot I kind of wanted to open up her legs her core and her her face so we kind of use that large reflector so we had a little more surface area we kind of came in over the entire body that's it for this video. Let's. Go on to the next one now.