Lessons

Lesson Info

Cutting Light, Grids and GOBOs

It's time don't wake up that I scare you well, seriously, this is like video number fifteen in this chapter fifteen videos, including the intro video that sixteen videos but this is going to be awesome because what are we doing this video? We are cutting light, we're adding grids and using go boz now essentially what we're doing now is we're building into that final technique that we want to present to you before we get into all the other videos and chapters five and six where we basically go through and show you how much a scene can change with light modification and how to refine that light. So this is the perfect video or the perfect tutorial toe lead into that because you're going to see just how much this image changes from shot to shot from start to finish using these techniques so oftentimes photography isn't really so much about adding light but it's more about taking it away it's about taking it away and then selectively adding it back as needed. You'll find that we dive into ...

things like product photography and other genres of photography we're gonna actually be subtracting light just a cz much as we are adding it, but for this shot I want to show you just how dramatic a change that we're gonna have we're shooting a fine art boudoir type image in this city and this scene and essentially, what I want to do is create this beautiful kind of moody nighttime look where it looks like there's light just coming through like blinds and so forth. So what am I thinking? Well, number one, as far as the composition the athletes go, we're going to shoot this at f one four, two f two that's kind of our starting point. We're in the sigma fifty million art were shooting it and were intending, why do you want that kind of depth of field? Will? I wanted to be focused on her, I want to be focused just on our our model, I wanted to have soft skin, I want the background to fall away. I want to know where she is that, but I don't really want anything that background it to track from her and so that's why we're choosing a very shallow depth of field to kind of start things out, so I believe in our test shot we start around f, too, and then in the final shot, I went down to f one point four just to even further kind of smash out the background and soften the skin and detail. Now a sink were in a lowlife scene, we're shooting in a hotel room right now, so we have complete control we're running a shutter speed of let's see here one, two hundred second this's slower that's the test shot one, two hundred. We're running at one hundred second, mainly control the amount of light coming the room so wanted. Basically cut away light. Okay. And you can see this from this shot right here. This is the fifty millimeters. Same everything, same angle, same everything pose and all that. This is that one one hundred a second at f one point for s o four hundred. Just so you can see what the ambient light this is mohr close to what it looks like just in person with the ambulance. So we stopped it up just so you guys can kind of see that look now with its stopped down to one, two hundred second f one point four. Fifty all the ambient light in the scene just gets cut away. Okay, so we're left with this kind of deep dark background. We're left with just all the shadow, the image and that's all gone. So what are we doing now? Are emulate exposure one, one hundred seconds. Four hundred! You saw that side? We're cutting that exposure down. Tto one, two hundred second eventually down toe so fifty we take another test shot just to test out the light and the gobo okay what are we using for our gobo well it's this guy we essentially cut out just at a piece of form court we cut out these lines in it now if you want this to be a little more pretty do a better job of it I had one of my assistants awhile back do this and of course it's a little bit messy not exactly straight edges and so forth and so our lines of course aren't exactly perfectly straight but if you spend a lot more time on it you can get it even better all right so this is our gobo so what does that mean a gobo simply is a go between object gobo for short so what we do with the light direction is we're placing a bearable flash okay so I have my phone text mitro is placed upon a stand I'm using my mag mod why? Because it's simple it's easy to use I just pop my grid right on there and the grid is going to prevent that light from spilling out all around the gobo so I'm gonna place that flash up on the stand and then I'm going to use the gobo as my go between object and guess what I'm going to use can you guys guess which side I'm going to use black or white hopefully you guessed black why do you want to use the black side as opposed to the white side well, the white side, if we fire into it, yes, it's going to be a global objects don't let that light through, but it's also going to refract a lot of this light around the scene, and I don't want that. I just wanted to hit the black. I want the black to absorb that light, not bounce things back, and then for tow, let the light through through those slats in there. Now, there's a few key components that is kind of getting your head when you're shooting and using go boz number one is the positioning and the placement of the go between object itself, so when this object is closer to the subject, is going to create a more defined and smaller pattern, then when you pull it away from the subject, right, because when it's pulled away from the subject, that light has a chance toe open up more, it opens up and it gets broader. But when it's brought close to the subject, that light gets more tight, and you end up getting a stronger pattern and had more defined pattern over the subject. The second thing is the distance from the flash to the global unit, it operates the exact same way that I just described on the other side, so the further this has pulled away from the it operates is actually, but in reverse I guess okay, so it doesn't operate the same way. So the further this is from our go between object, the more tightly defined that light is going to be. Why? Because again it's a it's, a smaller light source from out here, right? So it's going to be a harder light which is going to create more defined lines, versus when I bring it up close, it becomes a softer light, and you get more light rap or less definition. So for your subject the closer you bring this to them, the more defined the line's going to be the further out the mohr soft the line's going to be for the light in relation of this it's exactly the opposite the further this is from that go between object, the more sharp the line's going to be. And the closer you bring it, the more soft those lines are going to be. So you want to tweak that kind of distance and just play around with it until you get the right distance for the look that you're going for. But just remember how the global actually works. So with our test shot were basically using the flash just to see what it's gonna look like and to see that look so I had to just turn away from me and just give me an example of what it's going to be on her skin. And I really thought it looked kind of cool, and it gave me an idea of what my ambulance exposure was going to be in so forth in the scene. And then I simply ended up cutting down a little more of the ambulance by. We went down to stops the iso, but then we opened up with one stop the after so it's one stop darker than this at that point, basically, just had a change into the outfit that she's going to be wearing for this scene while I finished kind of setting everything up. Okay, so let's, go ahead and go on the white balance in the light color. So based on our tech shop, I don't really need to do much to the white balance. I cooled it down a little bit. So this is a six thousand degrees kelvin. I took it down to forty, eight hundred degrees kelvin, just to give it a little more of that blue and kind of nighttime type. Look to the image, but to be honest, if you left it warm versus night, it's really completely up to you stylistically, I wanted to look more like night time. When she came out change, I had her sit back on the the the bed I remove the light that lamp from the background why because it wasn't necessarily adding anything to the image and if something's not adding to the image than most likely it's going to be taking away from the image side has had him removed that that light out of there we pose and we shoot so that that light lands right on her and it just kind of grazes across the eyelash and we see it right there on the I want to see that definition in the eyelash but how the heck do we do that when well when these guys don't have modeling lights built into them right this doesn't have a model I built into it so what the heck do we do other than just taking shots over and over and over again until we get the light in the right position well that's where again we talked about in lighting one on one to use that flash test button which on your fighting mark three it's right here just look up wherever that button is on your camera and what that's going to do is it's going to fire off your strobe in a kind of just a quick succession so basically just fires off about a half a second to a second worth of of quick rapid strokes that allows you to see where the light is falling so I essentially used that flash test button as my modeling life so I'll adjust my model's position if I need to all adjust my flash position all adjust my goa position and everything to get everything in the right place and I have pretty much a built in modern light it only last for a second or two well maybe like a half second or second every single time impressive but it still works and it gets me to what I need alright, so once everything was set up we pose we framed to get this shot and howto I poser I posed her in a way that obviously told her like imagine if you were to get up in the middle of the night and to sit on the side of the bed what would you be doing? So she kind of had that pose I brought the arm across the body had a rest one hand there just like she was about to stand up essentially and then keep the eyes close because again I'm not trying to draw attention to the eyes. I want this to be really more about the scene we shoot our images and from there we analyze every shot closely because we're shooting with hard light we're shooting with go boz, we need to make sure our shadows are highlights are in the right places and then we'll make micro adjustments in the post that's the easiest way to ten of make adjustments in that time I've seen. Once you have that go beyond the light source in the right place, just make your micro adjustments with your model. Use your test button just to make sure that it's in the right place, and then keep firing away. Okay, so just watch him closely and shoot, and what you get is look at this just plane shot that we have up here on the left side and there's, nothing wrong with again shooting natural light in getting this kind of things. But the whole point of this is to show just what light khun doing what has the power to do, and we're going to step into the next chapter and go even further and helping to analyze how much has seen khun dramatically changed by at have your own life, just like it has in this one. We're down in this video, let's, head on to the next chapter. We got a lot of that.