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More Power Without The Power

More power without the power when I know at this point you're probably thinking pie what's up with all these trick names I like trick names, electric titles and I like titles that rhyme it's just me all right, so in this tutorial we'll be showing you is basically this simple compositing techniques that's totally gonna change the way that you approach your chute in the way that you light because what this simple compositing allows you to do is it allows you to capture an image that would otherwise really not be possible because we're going to place the light in parts of the scene that we really can't reach unless we composite let's take a look because I know that's kind of confusing to hear so well I'm going for in this scene is I have my couple and I've placed them onto this rock and I want to give this beautiful reflection in this tide pool the other thing I want is I want a very deep depth of field I want everything this image to be sharp I want a lot of depth of field because we hav...

e a lot of these rocks and the tide pools in the background everything looks gorgeous so I want to shoot this at eleven okay now immediately I know that at eleven and shooting this wide as I am I'm going to have issues when it comes to adding light to the scene why because we know that aperture also controls are flash power just like it controls the ambient light right so we're cutting down and the light were also cutting down the flash power that means that we need to be firing basically at full power and have the flash is fairly close to the subject too real to get enough light onto the subject but we're shooting wide so how the heck did we get the flashes if we were to place the flashes out here even with two three four five flashes were not going to be getting enough light reaching them why because of the inverse square law our light is falling off because of the distance do from the flashlight or the light itself to the subject but then if we bring him closer than they're going to be in the frame so here's how we do this we place the camera onto a tripod and this is a component that well I'm not going to say that it's absolutely necessary but if you want this to be a simple composite if you want to save time if you want to make this basically a five minute composite job versus eh thirty minute composite job use the tripod yes you can do it hand held by taking two shots and so forth but it's going to require you to kind of a line layers and so were you understand what I mean in just a second now what we're doing, we have the camera placed on a tripod. We've selected our composition, we have our subjects in place, compositional attributes we used at eleven for depth of field and to chop down the ambient light. We want a more dramatic ambulance this scene because I want to just see the only thing I want to see in this scene is just the subject. I want to see the reflection of the subject in the water, the color of the sky and the water and that's it I want to kill, like kind of all the detail in the rocks and so forth, just cause I think artistically it looks interesting in this image sink. I know that at eleven and at the time of day that we're shooting at I mean, we're down to a shutter speed of one tenth of a second, okay, so we're far below a sink speed of one, two hundred second, our sink is a okay ambient light exposure. Well, we're at one where f eleven were at one tenth of a second is a one hundred and that's again for that more dramatic look and we actually took a test shot at one fifth of a second and I decided to pull down the annual liketo one tenth. So just so, you know, like we got to one tenth because with my test shot, I felt like it was too bright still, I wanted to subject to kind of pop out and just have everything drop down a little bit more with the light direction we place the light in a way that it kind of matched existing light in this scene. Now we had the option to put the light on the other side. The only thing was if I would have placed the light on the other side of the couple, most likely it would have flattened out the couple too much, and since we're shooting it from such a far distance, we can't really see the detail and either their faces that much, so I'm not too worried about leaving a little bit of shadow on the girl side, but you'll notice that the the angle to the subject is not sick stream as it was in previous shots where we're shooting from a much heavier angle because we weren't worried about the guy's face being the shadow here. I'm still a little bit concerned with that, so we just don't have the light coming from too much of a distance, ok, so we take our test shot. We decide to go to one tenth of a second white balance looks great naturally kind of warm we're at five point five k kelvin we don't need to do any gel you anything like that I like the way it looks although now looking at this scene I think it would actually look cooler if we gel this and we pulled everything down so is more blue but that's just an afterthought whatever. All right, so we have our subject in place now we pose we frame we shoot we've already done all the framing and everything that we do our pose and then we take the shot and everything is great. We analyzed to make sure our shadows and highlights are good we'll shoot a different variety of poses that once we have the exact look that we want, you'll notice here the top shot to get the lights with enough power we're using too vivid are twenty five h visa again use a loo in pro or a foe takes metro's or one of the other flashes that we recommend if you're using a manual flash and you're using to them stacked rather than using two pock wizards grab a splitter cable splitter cable a pug well pug pug into both of these would be an awesome word if it was a work hey will plug into both of your limit pros and you can use one single pocket was there too fire them both and stack both these flashes, but at the time, I didn't even have this splitter cable had I used what I had to park, whether that too vivid tars so we're just using that I'm having my lighting assistant actually hold one on a stick and hold one next to it and like side by side just so we could do this quickly. Ok, so obvious issue here. Well, here's, our final shot and, uh, our lady assistant is standing right there. Obviously that cannot be a final shot if you're lighting assistant is in the middle of shot, but whether you have your letting listen there, whether you just place the flash is there on stands, whatever you've done, all you gotta do is this you take one shot once you have the pose and everything you want set up, you get that shot right afterwards, you just turn the flashes off and remove the flashes from the scene, so you just get the assistant to take the flat is out and pop off the second shot. The couple doesn't need to be doing the same thing because you don't really you're not concerned about the couple right there all we're doing now, the only thing that we need to be concerned with is making sure that this shot and this shot were captured close together in terms of their time why? Because we're shooting at dusk and at dusk your light is changing every minute, so if we even allow thirty second between these shots without modifying our settings most likely this would be significantly darker than this one, so all we need to do is just make sure that we're taking the two shots quickly in succession like within you know, twenty to thirty seconds of the life doesn't change dramatically if the light does change, you need to balance them out in post production. So with these two shots we have a little example where all we do is we take them in the photo shop we stack them into layers and with a simple mask we just paint where are lighting assistant is to reveal the layer below so we just show this layer where are assistant wass ok, now the key there is that both the exposures of the same they have to be the same and that's why we always shoot manual it's why we recommend taking these within thirty seconds each other so that the exposure's don't change so if you want to get a couple different angles are sorry a couple different poses that the best thing to do is to pop a shot have the assistant come out, take the plate this is called the place shot for the scene, so we take the plate bring the light back in due another pose. Bring the light back out. Take another plate. That way your plates are matching the shots that have the basically the the exposure of the pose in it. So that way, it's less work on the post production side. Now can you do this if you're exposures air off? Yes, if it's not off by too much. Okay, what you'd end up doing is just adjusting exposure and light room with the images side by side making sure that they match and then layering them in photo shop and masking and painting out. Can you do this with the images handheld? Yes. Okay, again, this is more of an advanced photoshopped lightning. This this takes all of one to two minutes to photoshopped. Okay, if I were to do this hand held and I have been in situations where I don't have a tripod on me, so I'll do it hand held. I'll use all the techniques that we've taught in photography one on one and how to hold the camera and so forth we'll take the two shots to the best of our ability, keeping the compositions identical, we're taking the photo shop, we have to align the layers and manipulate a little bit to kind of get them to balance and everything, and then we do our masking so it's twenty to thirty minutes worth of work at times to get the same result as one to two minutes of work if you are on a tripod and if the exposure's match so what are we trying to teach? You were trying to teach you workflow were trying to teach you techniques that are very doable thatyou can do consistently and not spend forever from the computer fixing it. All right, so tips let's, go ahead. Okay, so we talked about how basically shoot and after the shot, we basically remove the lights and we capture the plate image shoot the lid shots and the play image within a short period time. We already talked about that tip number to prevent camera shake by using a cable release or the two second timer. So when you're on a tripod rather than using your finger to trigger both those shots, if you have a shutter release it's even better because you're not gonna get any shake it all otherwise used the two second timer I've gotten so used to doing this that I'll use my finger, so when you you know when you feel comfortable and confident with it, yeah, you can use a finger and if something a little bit off, you can fix it in a photo shop, but that's kind of the ideal technique is to use the cable release okay. In light, even now, the exposure that they don't match in photoshopped layer both the images and master paint back. Okay, so this is what we refer to as simple compositing. And this allows you to do whatever you want with your life. Right? Because you could essentially place the light source all the way right next to the subject. You could move it out to here. You can place it anywhere in the scene. Now, of course. Does this slow down the speed of a shoot? Yes. This will slow down the speed issue because to get a single shot, you might spend five to ten minutes on something like this. But it allows you to capture images that would otherwise be basically impossible, right? Because we, even if we put the lights out here, even if we had five lights, we'd have to snoot. Every single one of them would have tto make sure the lights are pinned directly to the couple. It very, very difficult and cumbersome to do this without this type of a technique. So use this technique and think about it and let it kind of expand your vision and open up your mind into what's possible. Okay, as long as you have a tripod as long to keep things steady and you keep the frame exact, you keep your explosion exact. You can place that light exactly. We want. Capture one image for the couple in the pose. Capture the second image for the plate, pop him in the photo, shopped at a simple mask and just paint out to remove your lighting year or your assistant. That's it for this tutorial ahead to the next one.