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Overhead Bounce

overhead bounce. Now what is this that we are talking about? Now? I know you guys know overhead balance. I mean, it's one of the first silly things that you learn when you get a hot shoe flash and you're like, Hey, I can point this thing straight up now. It doesn't just go right at the lens. That's probably not what you guys did. That's really more like what I did. But anyway, we'll show you how to make good use of it, because up until this point, we're basically using balance where it's kind of off the left off, right. We're creating loop light, you know, split lighting, Rembrandt that type of stuff. Now we can show you techniques with overhead bounce and the first lease techniques we use for a sequence of basically fitness type shots. Because it's a fantastic lighting method for fitness, there are a few things to kind of keep in mind with overhead bounce number one. If you have a white ceiling fantastic, you don't need to do anything. You just basically bound throughout the white cei...

ling, and we'll talk about controlling in just a second. But if you have a red ceiling Please do not bounce off a red ceiling. You have an orange ceiling. Do not bounce off in orange ceiling unless you want all of your people in your shop to look like they're pooling bus. Hopefully, you guys got that. All right. Either way, if you don't have the adequate color of ceiling or if you just want to always be prepared, the V flat again is a perfect tool to create overhead bounce. All you gotta do is just basically get it up high and balance off of it. The great thing about using Avi flat as well is it gives you a little bit of extra control as far as where the light goes. Let me tell you why Avi Flat gives you a little more control. If I'm bouncing just off of a white ceiling and I have my subject standing here and 10 feet behind him is a wall I really can't control how much of that light is hitting the ceiling and splashing backwards towards that wall in the back. If I want to stop that light, it's gonna be difficult to do so with a B flat, though. The nice thing about it is, I can kind of angle the V flat down a little bit. So when it hits the V flat, it bounces back, and it doesn't allow the light to spill into the background. So be flats, actually a fantastic tool for overhead bounce. So here is our gear list. We have a grid or a snoot again, we kind of favor the grids that little bit easier to use and general not bouncing far enough to use a snoot. So I think for this sequence of shots, I don't know if I used this one. I tried to bury it up between the magma. Even though I use magnet for everything in my personal work, I want to show you guys that we could do the exact same thing with these little $20 bellows and everything else. So bouncing with a grid up into the V flat again have both the the ones that you buy from camera shops. I have those and also have Home Depot ones, too. I kind of prefer the camera store ones, but either way it's like bucks vs 30 bucks guys, that 15 bucks is an issue. I don't know what to tell you now this very first shop top left again. We wanted to show you what it looks like with just ambient light. So what is the annual white exposure with the video lighting? It's at 1 100 of a second F 28 So 3200 where 24 70 millimeter mark to lens. This lens that I have here and we're at 70 millimeters, so basically zooming it in. By the way, if you're using this lens for Portrait's, it's not really the best Portland's just make sure you're always zoomed in. Otherwise you're gonna get a lot of distortion lens distortion of me. Okay, so here's that shot. It's kind of very if he hears a shot with direct flash, and again it's like mug shot. But this time he's in a hoody. Not really that pleasant of a shot, but with direct flash were at T. T l. And this time we're at 1 200 a second to eight. So 200 obviously, we're getting tons more light now because we've dropped from hundreds. So 200 eso and we're doing direct flash cto. Okay, so those really both look kind of crap tastic. Let's go into the final shot. Final shot is 24 70 were using its same exact everything. 102nd F 28 Where I so 800 this time we're doing the V flat above head at t t l. While you can use it A teacher where basically shooting between 1/8 and 1/16 power. And this is what we get now? I don't know about you, but ours. Brandon would be like, Dude, that's frickin sick. Okay, so this is that overhead bounce, and we've controlled it so that we don't get any splash into the background. So we leave the background basically completely black, and we're exposing enough that the annual light really isn't affecting the shot. OK, so if it didn't at the flashing fire, we're not going to see much, if at all, any ambient light. And look at the light quality and the type of light that we're getting back. We're getting this beautiful light, and I think we might be using the Home Depot one up here because the home people has that that, like, shine on it. And so it gives me a slightly more speculative look than just a matte white. So the Home Depot white has that plasticky surface, which I think is a little bit better for this. It gives me a little more shine. A little more contrast, evil light, but with the light coming top down, one of the reasons why it's so great for fitness is because it creates shadow under muscle definition. So it really highlights the muscle definition because anything that's poking out gets a little bit of highlight. Anything that's in the shadow drops in the shadows and so everywhere It looks absolutely fantastic. One thing that we're doing through this entire sequence is I'm watching his facial placement. I'm making sure that he's not kind of looking up or doing anything. I wanted to his face to kind of be in shadow. If you have a little bit of light kind of hitting the face sometime, it's okay what I kind of want to avoid. Sometimes when he's looking straight up, that light might come down and kiss his nose and kind of just brighten up his nose on Lee or brighten up part of his face. And it's not gonna look that great with this top down lighting. Generally, I like them to be looking down unless I want their eyes in a deep shadow. So great, this technique worked fantastically here. And by the way, I think for this shot, I just had an assistant Hold this above. Brandon's head is actually Keith. That came along and he held it above his head. But you could use stands if you wanted to. You could attach it some way to the ceiling. You could do whatever you want. Your ceiling or your V flat height is gonna affect the amount of of spread and light that comes back dramatically. Meaning if the V flat or let's say the ceiling is vaulted. If it's 20 feet up, then even if I have a grid on here, even if I have zoomed all the way to 105 It's so far up that the lights gonna have a lot of time to spread out. Now spreading out means that it's gonna go everywhere. Okay, it's gonna hit the ceiling. It's gonna travel in the background, and on top of that, we're gonna get a lot less light back because it's spread out so much and it's become a lot more basically a large light source. We've lost power, right? If it's closer than, of course, you're gonna adjust accordingly. So based on the height of the ceiling, based on the color, that ceiling and so forth, it's gonna affect how much light comes back. Remember, some ceilings you might think are neutral tone are not. They're actually warm. There actually have a little bit of yellows in them, so the light that's gonna kick back is also going to be a little bit warm. So just keep that in mind. It might be beneficial to carry a V flat, so you always have something pure white and bounce off. Okay, next users junior grid to basically control the spread of the light. And if you have a V flat, then use the angle of the flat as well. To control that, too, and also the distance from the flash to the V flat Number three same rules of balance always apply. Already mentioned, make sure that you use a neutral colored surface and also depending on basically the reflective nature of that surface, whether it's Matt, whether it's reflective is going to affect the kind of like to get back whether it's gonna be speculator or defused, for example above us, we actually have this, like silver insulation right above us. So if I bounce off this, I'm gonna get essentially a silver bounce. I'm gonna get a speculator light back. Okay? The bottom sequences. This is of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is a boxer. And so I thought of the shot where he's basically holding onto the rig. And I thought it looked really cool inside this gym. This is at a local gym at the 12 movement, fantastic places where I love to work out, and Jeremiah's won the trainers. So what I do for the first I had him hold on to it. Just I can get, like, a test of lighting. I want to show what it would look like if we exposed for just ambient light and tried to get a little bit of a skin tone out of a two. And you can see that with just ambient. It's kind of blown out in the back or it's kind of bright in the back of this skin ist is still really dark. It doesn't look good. It would look absolutely terrible if we didn't do our own lighting in this hyper shot. Once again, let's look at the, by the way. The settings on this so bottom left was Ah, we're basically on the twin for 70 were shooting wider on this eso and he's right in the middle of frame. So I'm not worried about distortion. So 30 millimeters on the 24 70 and were at 1/30 of a second F 28 and I, so 3200 for the direct flash shot were at 1 of a second F 28 and I so 800. Okay, so we're getting a lot more light from the direct flash which lights him up. We're cutting down the background, but still, this looks terrible. This looks just not good. Like we've lost all the definition on his body. Any time. You're basically Rimmer, that flash coming off directly from your camera is what kind of light It's flat light. What is flat light do it fills wrinkles. It fills definition that fills all those things, which is great when you're taking a beauty shot. But when you want to show definition on our body flat light does not show definition. It kills definition. So that's exactly what happens here. We lose every bit of definition in his body. Okay. All right. So now we take that B flat, we put it up overhead. This go around because it's so high. We need to get it up pretty high. There's no way to really just hold it. Actually used to see stands. We used Matthew c stands, which by no means are these required for this course there. 130 bucks apiece. And they're fantastic stands which will take you well into your professional career. If you want to get some on there, you 100 bucks. Plus, you need to get sandbags just to weigh them down so they don't tip over. But they with those We boomed it up basically really high one on each side. We hung a B flat over it, angled it so that we don't get any splash in the background. And then we get this fantastic shop and this shot is at let's see 1 30 of a second F 28 and ice. 0 800 Where again gonna be between 1/8 to 1 Power depend on your after dependent everything that you're doing again. I like to keep it around that 1/4 to 18 That's really my sweet spot for recycled times. Plus with, you know, if we want to get a lot of depth of field, then fine. I really didn't want it. The feeling the shot because I didn't want to show things in the background so much. I wanted to be focused on him, and there's a lot of numbers and other things in the background that I want to be kind of out of. Focus a little bit, just toe. Bring the attention more to him. But look at the quality of light. Look at the definition that we get in his arms. Look, the definition is abs and in his core. And compare that to this shot and compare that to this shot. It's a night and day difference, but this is just that. Basically, I want to show you the exact same pose as the 1st 1 Even though I changed the post later on, this shot leaves his eyes in the dark, and I wanted to show that to you. When you're doing any overhead bounce it leaves the eyes in shadows means one of two things. You either need to position the head so that the head is facing down so that the basically the faces in the shadows and it's not the eyes on a concern. Or if the eyes are looking in the camera, you have to either be okay with this kind of super dark look, which kind of gives it a dramatic and kind of almost sinister look to it. Or you need to kick some light back into the shadows a little bit. Okay, so you need to have some sort of a fill light that will kick light back in. Now for me, we just adjust his head position. We'll show you some of those images now and we'll talk about them in more detail later on. I just want you to know that any overhead bounce is gonna do that. That's why at a wedding or an event, if you're doing overhead bounce, which I always recommend off walls first. But if you don't have walls, if you're doing overhead bounce, you need tohave that Fong dong the dome. You need to have the dome on your flash so that it pushes some light Ford to fill the eyes. Otherwise the light coming straight down is gonna leave the eyes in. Okay, so that's it for overhead bounce. Hopefully, I'll enjoy Let's go on to the next video now.