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Soft White Bounce

You want amazingly soft and beautifully diffused lights to create superbly flattering portrait that was so many little adjectives and they're kind of like that well it's time for soft white bounce let's get to it all right, so why surface modifiers going to create a much well, we talked about it a less speculative light more diffused light quality but in addition that it is going to kick back a little bit less like now these are a lot of situations where I love using a white balance rimmer there's no such thing as a right or wrong just decide on these modifiers based on the style and the look that you're going for let's start from the top with the gear that we're actually using for this sequence of shots so number one we have our white reflector okay? This is just the inside scrim of a westcott forty inch five and one so that it comes with its already so you don't need to buy lots of using by two or three just because I like to keep one scream always out this is how it normally is I ke...

ep one on the silver one just on the white house one backup basically if in case I need a gold that way I'm not having to unzip this guy and costly pull things out and so forth and there's also another trick I'm going to show you a little pro tip with my silver in just a second, we're also using a grid you can use this new you can use whatever you want, you can use the bounce, whatever just something to control light from hitting your subjects directly from the tip of the flash like we talked about in the last video and we're using we talked reflector you can also get the photo diode forty by sixties. They also have internal screams. Just whatever you guys want to use is totally fine with larger it, but general, the easier it is generally to kind of throw light into it and get it back. Okay, so primary tips now white is going to provide mohr diffuse light, but the cost, of course, is the overall light intensity with a mass surface, you're going get less light back. That means we're powering up the flash of it. Just remember that so let's go over these each of these different shots and the first one over here is actually not even with flash. This was with olivia back in the studio. When we're doing all of our different light setups, I show you this because I want to show you the the potential of what a white khun dio and kind of manipulating light the first shot on the top. This shot was with one hundred millimeter macro is that two point eight two point eight at one twenty five a second ago a hundred so you can see that we actually had this on a tripod. I think we're shooting with the led light on lee, ok? And you can see that this top image is pretty hard, like a ce faras the light that's hitting her, it has a pretty sharp edge to it. We have pretty defined a kind of shadow to edge shadow to highlight transitions and look att the speculator ity look at the highlights on her nose. Look at the highlights underneath the eyes over the chin on the forehead. This is just after olivia had applied makeup and you can still see highlights in those areas. Now, if someone with a little bit more oily, if they had a little more sweaty skin, whatever it is if they hadn't applied makeup perfectly. She's actually a makeup artist, so this is like flawless makeup and it's still brings out those highlights. If you didn't have that than a speculator light, a silver light is going to bring that out even more it's going to exaggerate sweat, it's going to exaggerate oil, it's going to do all those things that you don't want? In one of these flattering portrait yeah, you want it in a fitness portrait, but you don't want it right now and that's why a white is absolutely the right tool to use in this situation. So look at this when we bring in the white, this is a white diffuser. Plus we added a phil look at what it does to those highlight to shadow transitions. Now the highlights are so much softer there, more diffuse, we're not getting a lot of, like kicked back in the lens, which is what those highlight edges that you see over here those highlight kind of bright speculate areas, we have very soft and gradual transitions from areas of shadow in the highlight, the shadow underneath the chin has been opened up with that. Phil, everything looks so much more lettering and beautiful, we have a beautiful catch light there, so the whole point is, while we're not using flash here, we are able to demonstrate that a white does so much in creating a beautiful and flattering light and the only difference here look, this settings wise is we're still at a two point eight we went were still a hundred we just dropped the exposure to one thirteenth of a second, so we lost close to a stop of light basically when we modified all the light, so we just adjust the shutter speed a bit you are goingto lose light when you use my white and any type of opening up of lighting and softening and defusing, you're going to lose light intensity so just want to adjust for it, but they image quality that you get the lighting quality is so much better. Number two when you're bouncing outdoors in bright situations, you'll generally need to be pretty close to your subject if you're using a white once you get around the ten fifteen, twenty foot range, a white is just not going to kick back enough light to be noticed. Okay, so really the white is designed to be used between that five to ten mark range between the reflector and the subject closer the better number three this is my pro tip of the day well of the video or of the chapter maybe I don't know either way well, we've found if you guys look at a studio modify, we'll show you guys studio modifies later on you're going to find that oftentimes in a studio modifier let's say for a parabolic for example the inside of the parabolic is silver and then the outside is diffused with white what does that do? Well, the silver picks up tons and tons of light from that flash that firing inside of it and then the white diffuses it so it softens it up well diffuses in makes it less speculum right you could do the exact same thing poor doubly poor doubly on location is probably even a word I don't know but all you do is you take a white reflector and put it or just a white scrim and put it over the top of a silver so when you need more light but you want that I'd like to still be soft than white over silver is the name of the game and that's actually probably a technique that we use more often than not in a lot of these shots we go wide over silver because I want the most light possible but I still want that light to be a little more diffused a little bit you know have that softer kind of quality to it if you use just a scream by itself that's totally fine and at night time it works fantastically well but just remember that if you're using a scream by itself during the day a lot of the light that bounces into this from her flash is gonna pass straight through it and so that's why putting a silver behind that is great because whatever light hits this is going to hit the silver and come back through the white so you're losing less light than you would if you didn't have this over there so that's my pro tip of the day I always have off camera lights with me but you know what if I don't have to use them? I don't a lot of these techniques that I do these air my preferred techniques because they're simple, they're easy to do and this is my favorite right here. All I'm doing is I have my assistant with a wide over silver off to camera, right? I'm kneeling down let's look at the settings I'm on a fifty millimeter lens, the fifty millimeter, one point two l okay, again, any fifty mil is going to give you a very similar look I'm shooting at anyway to just to make sure that we have enough enough sharpness in the image we're one hundred a second half to and so fifty we're out of time of day were actually don't need a neutral density filter, I could drop the dice so fifty and while it does decrease dynamic range a bit it's okay, because I'm going for a more natural look into shot anyway, I don't need crazy dynamic range I'm letting the background blowout if you notice, so what do I do? I take that first shot no flash, I'm just exposing for the background I'm testing my background exposure, getting it where I want rimmer I want a more natural look to this shot, so I let it be a little bit brighter I'm letting the background blow out a little bit I want that look I don't want it to be super dramatic and stuff this is a nice and airy family portrait and if you wanted it to be even less dramatic than this this already looks really natural but if you want even less dramatic you could brighten up the back from one or two more stops and lower the flash power one or two more stops okay it's just that balance and you're going to decide that balance based on your own style, your taste and what you're going for with the image once I have that dialed in then all I do is I turn on my flash again I'm using the grid here not because I'm worried about background spill I'm worried about spill from this tip of the flash onto my subjects because my reflector is about like right here kind of in front okay so I'm bouncing into that reflector remember this is in the shadows so in the shadows I can actually do my same little test here I could turn it on and then do my little flash test to make sure my light is landing onto my subjects and let's take a look at this so whatever silver you can use tt lf you want to were fairly close it's fairly simple for detailed work but again I like a dial on my flash power setting so I get consistency between all of my images we're at around one half to around one quarter power for this specific shot right here, okay, so to get enough light in there with our eyes so set to fifty, we need to be a little bit higher power setting one quarter power that's about where I would think I'm pretty sure that one quarter power for this because it's one of those things I always look for it if I want to get expressions and I want to capture shots and move quickly from shot to shot, especially when we're dealing with kids and families one quarter power is about the slowest you want to go if you can keep it around one eighth power that's even every cycle time quicker shot over and over you won't miss any expressions at one quarter power if I'm firing four, five shots on the six or seven shot, then it will need to slow down a little bit just to recycle one of the tips that I have of these techniques white modifiers are fantastic when you want a more flattering and less edgy look to the images. Well, duh, but look what I mean why am I saying that again? Because you might think that it's always right to have a white modifier but let's say in the instance of some of my athletic portrait or the fitness portrait, sir, when we're going for that dramatic look if I have beads of sweat on a fitness person's body if I have them all I kind of worked out there ray radio and then I use a white diffuser it's gonna eat up all the speculator ity of the beads of sweat in that silver in the glisten and so forth I want to use a silver no instance because it's the right light for that type of situation so just remember that soft and diffused light isn't always the best but for flattering portrait sw oh yeah it works great okay so that's great and what kind of lighting and recreating here this first one by the way was what hopefully you all said hey that's a clamshell lighting setup because pies lighting from the top defusing it adding a fill in the bottom it's clamshell what is this one this is closer to probably loop and it's really gonna depend on on you know on the girl's face its loop lighting but on mom and on dad's face it's really closer to rembrandt and just based on their facial structure and so forth so it's kind of in between it's just off camera between loop and rembrandt lighting all right let's go the shot on the right now the shot on the right is part of our case studies which we're gonna discuss in detail later on I think this one might be too so I'm not gonna go too much into detail with this. This know that I'm under a bridge right now it's fairly dark I could shoot natural light if I wanted to it's not like pitch black but I don't need an indie filter that's for sure ok so I'm at one uh let's see one fifth of a second at one point six and two hundred and I'm on my eighty five at one point to help again eighty five is totally fine and camera is totally fine okay so for this I'm going for the actor in this shot asked for a more sinister looking shop because we're going to talk about later he played the part of scar in a recent lanqing production so as soon as he said that I said mmm mohr sinister that kind of equates to more dramatic I'm going to do either split lighting or rembrandt or maybe I'll do a bit of both so the flash is placed our sorrow the reflector is placed heavily off to his right okay so it's it's almost where his shoulder is off to this right side what I need I need a grid on my camera once again you know grandma my great on my flash because otherwise that flashes going to spill into him what if you guys are our model? My flash head is gonna pointed basically like this now if that grid was not on there and that flash would spill directly into you guys into him so I need to control that. So I have the grit on there to control that again. A tighter grid will give you a tighter spread. So on this one, I probably recommend using a one eighth grid. Just have a tighter spread in there. Okay, at that point, we take a shot for the background. I always started my background. I worry about my flash. Just decide what I want. Background look like I wanted to look dark. Wantto look dramatic. Why? Remember our little drama equation, right? Want more drama? You need more shadows were more drama, the background gets darker, the flash power goes up higher. So that's exactly what we have here. This shot is white over silver so were bouncing off the white over silver the assistance holding far to the right of him so that we get that heavily directional light or far to the right of the camera and to his left, actually. Okay, and then we're at if you're shooting a t t l find you're not listening to anything I'm saying, but I'm shooting many, uh and we're at one eight, two one sixteen power. Why? Because we're one point six I said two hundred so we're letting a lot of light in so we don't need to go to hyeon the flash power okay, and were generally if I'm using the grid not to worry about my zoom but if you if you are seeing spill you consume it and even further so you can zoom it and then put the grate over it. All right? So that's, how we get that look and you can see that we don't have any spell. Now if I want to control the amount of phil. So this is the fill light that I have on the other side of his face right here, right? We have little kicker coming from this light that we talked about our case study. We have a little bit of shot over here, and if I wanted more filling that side, what would I do on the way for us to answer? Okay, if you said slow down the shutter speed, you would be correct. We could slow down the shutter speed to allow mohr of the ambient light in which is not going to affect flash power. It won't affect the power of light this landing on the side of his face. What is going to affect is how much additional ambient light is being added, which would add a little bit of phil to brighten up this side of the face and it's also going to brighten up the side of the face that has flash on it because well, if you brighten up that side of the face with ambien and then you add flash to it, even though we didn't change the flash power, the amount of ambien like did increase, so it'll brighten up both sides, but it'll add a bit of filled on this side, not gonna just flash power accordingly. Just remember that if we're already at one fifty of this second, you might need to adjust so as well as your shutter speed to do that as well. So I might keep it at one fiftieth and just boost my eyes so up and then take my flash powered down a little bit, not give you basically the same flash exposure by taking the iso up to four hundred bring the flash powered down by one stop. Now I get double the amount of andean light and the same amount of flash power. So that's, how you kind of balance those two things out again. We're gonna reiterate this as we go through because I want to really hammer these points home as we're going through the course that's it for our video on soft white bounce. Hopefully you guys can see the different situations where it makes sense, where the right type of light is going to be a soft white and again, I started with the rhyme and I ended with arrived