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BYOL! The 3-Light Setup That Only Requires One Light!

B y o l I can finally tell you what that means, and it stands for bring your one light that's, right, folks, the three lights set up that onley requires one light this's when basically you're shooting outdoors, we've shown you so many different techniques and now I want to take a moment just to analyze this scene and kind of talk about how scenes like this when we're shooting outdoors, we already have two different light sources. At a minimum, we have two different light sources already set up for us. All we need to do is just simply place our model and frame to utilize what's already there and then add our one light to be basically our third light in our scene. So this is really kind of ah, we have a shot here that looks like we use three different lights tto achieve when in reality we're just positioning the model. We're using the sun. We're using a phil. We're using our one light to create our final look. Okay, so how do we approach this scene now? This was right after we shot those...

images were basically showed you how to add to existing light, okay, so I already had my my bolt v b twenty two. There was two of them set up with a single battery pack on my boom stick my big boom stick and I had my pro photo or if I speed ring with my three foot octa already ready to go okay, so we use that for that last tutorial so I was already set now I also had the sigma one twenty to three hundred it's a telephoto lens that I had on loan from sigma and it's an absolutely incredible lenses massive though it's huge. So when I turn around from shooting that other tutorial basically when we turn out from shooting those other shots where we're adding two thie existing light I saw the sun was starting to take this approach behind the mountains where is basically lighting the backside of all these cactuses or captain? Captain, that sounds weird. Why does that sound so funny? Okay, so it was lighting the backside of all the cactuses or cactus I perhaps one of you can tell me which one is the correct term. I'm going to take act I though, because it sounds absolutely awesome. So when I saw that I was like, you know, within about half hour to an hour the son's going to get low enough where it's really going back line critic, beautiful scene and then I'm going to go and get it you vet changed, we're going to go into a red dress, I'm gonna place a write in that scene so I kind of had that in mind now when we finish up that shoot, we did just that we had a vet change into a red dress, we use kind of gold jewellery, so I thought it looked really cool have her stand out in the middle of the cacti and then I put the one twenty to three hundred millimeter lens onto my five mark three now you don't have to use that lens if you have a seventy two hundred like this one, this is the canon seven, two hundred or if you have a tamarin, seven, two hundred can use that zoom in a two hundred millimeters going give you a very similar effect, but why did I want to zoom in to two hundred millimeters or three hundred on that one? Well, my composition basically, if we go to composition, actually is the first thing that I wanted was to compress all of the cactus I in that scene up close to the model I want to pull that background in, or at least have that illusion of that effect remember that that kind of, you know, a telephoto kind of creates that look where the background is going to be closer to the model and it's, not actually a telephoto it's the distance that you are from the subject so the distance that you are from the seventeen you shoot the shot is what actually is creating that effect. But let's not get in the technical let's. Just say that a telephoto gives you a great compression effect on the background. So I'm standing really, really, really far away from our subject. I'm like fifty to one hundred feet, maybe from event zoomed in a three hundred millimeters. And I have this beautiful composition right here where I want her smack dab in the middle of the frame just commanding this scene. She's like my cactus I goddess, if you will. I like that word, that's. Even if there were a better word than capt I, it would be capped. I goddess that's a better word of captain or better freeze. Okay, so as far as my camera settings or the attributes that I need for this particular shot is, I wanted to stop down the after because zooming in a three hundred millimeters means that if I'm shooting an f two eight, which that lens can't shoot after it's ridiculously large in its front opening, but if I were to shoot, have to eight, normally we're going to smush the entire background into complete oblivion. It also is going to require me to have a high speed sink or a neutral density filter? I don't have a neutral density filter that would cover that large of lens opening that was massive and I was using the bolt maybe twenty twos on my pro photo or if I speed ring. So all I have is my pocket wizards that air triggering everything manually, right? So I don't have high speed sync, okay, so I used f seven because that got me to my sink speed. Now, looking back on the image after I got it into post, I should have gone to like eleven or f fourteen even to get more background. Does the backer was awesome is fantastic, and I like it with a little bit of blur to it, but I was fine that there's too much blood. I want to see maura that detail, but anyway, that's neither here nor there, we always look at things in hindsight. It's, hard to see, you know, in the back of your screen what the background actually looks like. And so it's always a good idea. You know, when you're shooting an image like this, shoot a couple different aperture settings so that when you get in the post, you can choose your favorite but that's just kind of one of those things that you realise in hindsight so a seven point one we get a great sharpness we get maura depth of field the background are synchronization is now okay because we're now one, two hundred a second and we're shooting at s o fifty by the way some again using my sodas to drop down to fifty so that way we can again just lower the ambiance is a little bit while keeping our sink speed of one, two hundred of second emulate exposure look great again I'm shooting kind of down on her just a little bit so that I'm not getting any of the sky behind her so I'm leaving the that ambient background just kind of nice and exposed for the highlight, so we're not blowing out into the highlights and we're letting the shadow's kind of be shadows so look great I'm wasn't, you know, exposing for any sky so I just kind of left it right there so look fantastic the existing light okay, so let's talk about the light in the direction ok, so how we end up choosing this shot? Well, I shot the first image so I'm always going to take a test shot, right? My test shot right here I shot the first image again f seven one, one hundred second so fifty ambient light only flash not fired I have are doing exactly what I wanted to do for this shot and this is this was actually taken back to back so this was actually taken first this was just popped right afterwards with the flash is turned off but we'll just say that this was my test shots I took another shot that was a test shot but she wasn't in the exact pose I thought it looked nicer with her and exact post so and I'm getting an image of her the background everything was exposed well I liked it all I like that center composition I liked everything about it what I noticed was that obviously number one she's dark right so she's not dark like complexion she's just dark as in exposure come on people okay so we need to add light tour to get her up to bring up her brightness and to make her the bright point in the kind of command the scene but how do we choose the light direction well let's go backwards let's start with a light quality okay for this particular shot we're going for a fashion type shot fashion beauty as type look for this scene so a large modifier that's going to soften the light is going to be ideal hence our pro photo horrify the three foot octa is going to be perfect it's already set up it's ready to go so that's going to give us the light quality that we want for her but what direction should we choose well, you notice how we have this beautiful rim kind of coming along there. We have a hair light we have, like, a little edge. Like on this side, we have a great outline on this side. So you see how that we don't really have that same outline on this sign, everybody, if I had a light from the opposite side, if our delight from left to right we're gonna kill this rim light right there basically it's going it's going, you're not going to really notice it because we're flashing directly over that side essentially. So the transition that edge there's not gonna be nearly as dramatic. In addition, I don't want to kill the hair light on this side either that that beautiful kind of edge light and we can see that there is an existing fill light so our second line the scene our first light is the obvious one, right is the sun. The second light is our fill the phyllis coming from the ground it's coming from the sky it's coming from whatever's in front of her that's lit up. That is the feel that we have and if there were a direction to that fill, it looks very flat overall, but if there was a direction to it, I'd say that it's slightly coming from right to left and the reason why is that shadow on her nose right there? You see that shadow nor knows you see our face dips in the shadow just a little more right here we have a shadow right in any pitch in there so boom right away I know okay I have an existing phil direction I just need to amplify that phil to make it my main light right? So then I bring the prophet or if I octo just rap to the right side we have it on her broomstick are big boom stick and we give it a big boom so with this kind of a shot we're going tow light from the right side the octus held just out of frame and what's beautiful about this is I can have that so close to the subject right? I could bring that light just directly and you're going to need at least two fifty up to five hundred watt seconds of light for a shot like this depending on so what we're saying is that you're gonna need at least one medium strobe upto two medium strobes to get enough light honor depending on one the modifier that's being used in on two do one once I modify being used and to the distance of that modify her to your subject okay, so we get this beautiful look we're shooting has six thousand degrees kelvin again I like that I generally like to start off warmer because it's typically the way that my style, my images like to go in post, so I start off at six thousand kelvin. It looks great. I don't need to do anything to it. Framing we put the model dead center because we want her to command that a tiresome want her draw attention and just make this dead and threatening desert scene just come alive and so that's kind of the whole concept of it. She's, my cap tai goddess, for goodness sake. So we got to put her in the middle because a goddess capt. I got us belongs in the middle of pictures. Okay, next analysed watch the shadows in the highlights and reflected light coming off of bright clothing and jewelry so you can see actually on both these shots. It's a little bit easier to see on the show on the left that the sun is actually bouncing off of her dress and providing like a red phil not providing because it's not something that I want but it's giving us a red feel on her arm right there, that's something we're going to fix in photo shop unless you can move her body into position where it still looks good and we don't have that on there, you can bring the hands up whatever but I like this pose I like the casualness of it and so I want to leave her arm there and slightly behind her body which is just going to give us that that red light there but just keep that in mind and just know that you'll have to fix stuff like that in photo shop you'll kind of do skin corrections and whatnot this is actually just the final image there's no photo job done to this image so you're looking at them directly out of camera just side by side comparison so again with to boldly b twenty twos we're shooting it around one half power if using the pro photo be to hear me shooting one over one power unless you have two of them stacked either way you're going to need roughly two, fifty two, five hundred watt seconds worth of juice to get her properly lit up okay so just analyze the shadows in the highlights closely move the face into the position that you want and from this scene now you can see that we have a three lights set up we have a back light which is basically give us our rim are hair light our background light we have everything there we have a phil that's filling in the shadows and we have a main light which is our of course main light on our subject there so three lights set up wife on ly bringing they say with free, like, set up with only bringing one light to our shoot. Now, in the next story, we're going to take a look this scene. And just look at how we can control the fill light to whatever extent that we want using shutter speed. Let's, go to that video now.