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Manually Triggered RCS + Shutter Drag

Manually triggered rear curtains think plus shutter drags I should have said that this is a part too because we actually had a part one of this earlier with a one second shutter drag and now we're going to do at twenty second shutter greg I think I said thirty seconds earlier forgive me I thought it was thirty but it's actually twenty but it could be thirty if you'd like it to be okay, so for the shot we have event we're back in our desert scene we're hanging out we're having a good time I'm with trevor I'm with our entire production crew and we're like let's go get some nighttime shot really funny really cool but it is absolutely pitch black now hopefully most of you have traveled a bit you've been to the great outdoors and you know that once you get away from the city then you eliminate light pollution that means that when it gets dark it gets dark like you can't see nothing but the benefit of that is that you can see the stars you see the stars, you see the moon and everything else ...

you know if you have a brighton of sky can actually end of lighting your landscaping looks absolutely incredible okay, so we're out on that kind of scene we want to shoot to reveal the stars so as faras composition natalie's my main thought here is I'm going to need you along but shutter drag of at least twenty seconds maybe thirty seconds with a wide open aperture at like so sixteen hundred to be able to get enough light to have our stars be bright in the image okay? I want to have bright stars I wanted to look, I want to look like daytime but with stars in it exactly just like that okay, so I'm shooting on my sigma thirty five millimeter art this guy could go down a one point four, but I have a hard time focusing him at one point for so I left it at one point six and my main attributes my main competition laugh treats for my camera settings is a long shutter, a twenty second shutter, a thirty second shutter, whatever it is that I end up needing here so I know it's going to be at least fifteen seconds, okay, so I kind of run it to fifteen seconds to take a test shot and get the twenty seconds how my eyes so sixteen hundred those of the main things that I need for this shot. Okay, well, we know that sink is not going to be an issue we're shooting at twenty seconds long, so obviously we're below one, two hundred second we don't need no high speed sync and putting andy phil theron would be just ridiculous well how would you do that in this kind of thing we need like not cut it away if you guys thought that I would use an indian filter here then please go back and start this entire course over I'm just getting nothing but with the amulet exposure we get to about the right exposure at sixteen hundred so we're right here so six hundred eyes so we're twenty second shutter f one point six and we're using three thousand degrees kelvin or twenty eight hundred kelvin as our white balance just so we have a really nice crisp and blue seen what does that mean that means that we're going to need to probably gel are flash okay so just keep that in mind if you're going to go that cool of white balance you either need a gel your flash or you need to be cool with it being very very blue so we just popped a little gel over this now it wasn't like it was jelled to any you know I mean this is ah bulbous thinking right here so I think I just grabbed a jelen like stuck it over the I had a little modifier that has opened up a little bit stuck um gel over that doesn't even cover it completely but at least he was better than being fifty five hundred three's company okay, so what do you do for the shot? Well, the first thing is that if we're going to run a twenty second exposure is gonna run a one second exposure. We need to be on a tripod, right? So we have the cameras set up on a tripod. How the heck am I gonna trigger recurrence? Sing? Because let's, get back to that sync issue. Obviously, we're not gonna have shutter speed issues as far as that goes. But what about rear curtains? Think versus first curtains stink in this kind of a scene. If the flash pops right at the beginning of the shot than any motion afterwards is going to basically burn in over the flash, you're going to end up with an image that looks very ghost e it's not gonna be sharp. Our subject here is not going to be sharp. So the way that we pull this off in the way that we do this in camera, this is done in camera. This is not done in photo job. The way that we do this in camera is by popping were curtains think manually if I would've had my foe takes metro. So I think we did have the photo is out there, but we just so happen to have the bolt the b twenty two set up already on a soft box that trevor brought he bought hey brought this is called the sm devi speed box sixty it's actually a perfect fit for the bullet we had that set up and I had my pocket is it on the camera so we just walked out there I wasn't thinking I wasn't thinking I was going to do I don't know I should have been thinking because then I would have popped the photo exes on we've been good night time scenes like this you don't need that kind of wattage we're running this thing it like one thirty second one sixty fourth power we don't need that we just need a pocket strobe that's why I wrote over here your pocket strobe careless because we don't know anything that big but I had this so I'm going to make it work and that's you know honestly for the sake of this tutorial it's kind of better that way anyway so I can show you what to do in these kind of situations when your gear is not necessarily what you want it to be so how do we fire this ryker and sing well just like before when we shot that couples photography session right when we're in downtown and we did a one second shutter drag we just popped that radio trigger in that case we're using the new hours but this case we have a pocket wizard so we just pop it off and then I'm going to do in this case in the last tutorial you know we we're running a one second shutter, so we didn't really need to do much in terms of, like estimation because they're just pop on fire pot on the fire this time. It's going to be hard for me to count twenty seconds and to get this accurate. So what do I do? I bust out my phone. You have an iphone. Whatever. Phone, android phone. All you do is bring up your timer, okay? You just go to your timing right here and it's. Kind of funny the way we were doing this, but, uh, anyway, okay, so I go to stopwatch, and then all I do is when I fire the shutter, I just press start. Okay. So as soon as I press the shutter, I press start and then has let this count up. Now in a twenty second long shutter, make sure that this isn't pointing anywhere towards the scene because if it is it's going to actually bleed into the scene and you will notice that over twenty seconds. So once this gets up high enough, like eighteen, I start counting down nineteen pop, and then we fire the pocket wizard at nineteen seconds, okay? Or nineteen and a half or however, however risk you want to take it up to twenty seconds. But generally that's going to give you a good enough manual recurrent sink to get your subject shark now you're gonna have to do it a few times I'll be honest, you will have to do it a few times and be aware that any bit of light that is coming off of you know any objects whether the phones or whatever is going to affect the scene it was funny we were shooting another scene that was similar to this one we have another shot where that was closer to the camera she was walking up to and we have this bit of red in the scene and we're like what the heck is causing that red? And we found out that it was trevor's I think it was his camera was having was blinking a red the auto focus thing or whatever was it was like a timer that was blinking red it was ever so small is this biggest and led that was this big but over twenty seconds it actually cause the scene to be pretty red so it becomes very, very noticeable there's fly than hear what the heck? All right, so now that our flies or our nets have left us let's get back to this so with the light, direction and quality we have it inside that speed box which is very, very similar to a westcott rapid box only thing is that it's a little more ideal for, say, a bolt that bearable because you can fit it all the way inside of there and that's why we're using it when we're using this guy, but other than that, we just placed the light direction off, too, the left side of the frame and you know what? It's it's doesn't even have to be like, like we're shooting so far and it's kind of a shot that I'm not really worried about, like, quality. I just need something to freeze her in place. That's it I have standing at the top of this hill because I thought this might be kind of like a fun like artistic shot where she has her hands up and it's kind of like pointing up to the sky and just kind of looking at the sky it's really? Just more of a shot about this guy in this in this kind of an image, but we did this, and we also did amore close up version, where we had a couple different lights, which might show you in lighting three oh one, because we actually set up back lights on that, but anyway, so lights off to camera left and you can see a little bit of that bleed, they're hitting. The ground ok, so you can do two things you can feather up, or you can take one shot with the light and one shot without the light we had to do that. Anyway, for the purpose of the tutorial, I want to show you the difference between the two shots, so all I didn't post was I just layered the two images in photo shop, and I just removed basically, I just put this background over this one very simple just mastered out and replace it so that we didn't have any light bleed over that, and we just had her kind of lit up in the background look nice. Another thing you could do in photo shop is, like, kind of add the shape back the dress, the dress was hanging, like very flat and very you can add that shape back by a little bit of liquefying and whatnot, ifyou'd like photo shop, but otherwise, I mean, this is straight out of camera, and what you want to do with these types of shots is make sure that you are slowing things down, not I mean, obviously, you're slowing the shutter down, not time of the shutter speed, but slowing your shooting down to really zoom in and analyzed because you might need to do a couple of the shots before. You get the results that you want, it takes a little bit of practice to get this kind of a shot and you need to tell your subject that during this time during that duration I want youto hold flawlessly still hold your breath and count down so that your subject knows that you know when to start and when to stop obviously if you're like ok, go ahead and then she's holding her breath and then you get the shot and you're like looking back you can't really like so also my shots so cool this is fantastic oh my gosh, that looks amazing and you forgot to tell her to relax and then also you hear this because she just passed out because she's been holding your breath for a minute and you forgot to tell her okay? So that's an exaggeration but seriously letme know when you're starting and when you're stopping one you want them to be able to hold flawlessly still while the shutter is open and two you want to let them relax between shots because it's not that easy to hold that perfectly still okay, so that's it for manually triggered rear curtain sync plus shutter drags so one of the key tips here remember number one get the camera up onto a tripod we had army photo globetrotter that we stuck this on and then number two when it comes to focusing use your live view and zoom in its very simple what I'll do is I'll use my live you all zoom in all manly, just my focus and then lock the focus to manual so it's not going to change whenever I press down the shutter button. Okay, next, take the flash or take the radio off of the camera, and what you're going to do is when you press so number three is when you press the shutter release, you're going also press the timer on your phone, so start that timer and then follow the timers on number four. When the timer reaches the end of the shutter, you're going to manually trigger your pocket. Wizard five make sure that you look at the image. Zoom in close, make sure that everything is good, make sure you've told your subject to hold perfectly still and look for ghosting look to make sure that your light direction you're like quality matches your seeing that you have any weird shadows, weird highlights and so forth six if you do have those things on repeat steps one through five hopefully enjoy this tutorial its head on the next video now.