Lessons

Lesson Info

Subtle Refinement = Massive Difference

Subtle refinement equals a massive difference in your final image and this is my first illustration of that now remember subtlety and refinement and these types of things this is an art it's an art that's learned over time and with practice so don't get frustrated yourself if you come back to a shooting, you realize that there's certain things you should have done better I do that every single shoot actually I come back and I'm like man, I wish I would have had these things better, but you know what? When you get to a certain point the images that you get are still going to be awesome we're all artists we're all going to always look back on our images with twenty twenty hindsight and be like I wish I would have done this or done that but the point is to come back with amazing images and refined them it is every time and to keep improving shoot after shoot after shoot so let's take a look at our desert scene now we have event in our lovely blue dress and you know what? I'm kind of frank...

ly tired of talking through the process in tips in this like order every single time someone's gonna talk this chapter is just for me and I'm just gonna talk the way I want to talk okay, so what is her composition actually funny no but seriously the process tips are in that order because generally, when I think through has seen it's kind of in that order anyway. So let's talk about this scene for just a second as far as what I want compositionally and what attributes I'm kind of going for now we are facing our subject almost into the light, right she's actually looking kind of toward the sun. The sun is just is not quite at her side, it's. More like just behind. And you could see that as we have these beautiful highlights and shadows in the dunes behind her. Now what I want in a scene is to have basically this beautiful kind of, you know, side view of the sun hitting these dunes so we have highlight and shadow on holiday. I do have a really great background here if I was gonna place her back to the sun. How boring with all these seems bey we're every single scene is just backlit by the sun the dunes are there just a highlight over the top and it's just shadows in front? Like I want you all to get out of these grooves that we all get stuck in. I want you all to choose and compose your image based on the strongest image possible, not based on what you know is going to work every single time and yes placing a subject's back to the sun and and lighting the front that's going to work every single time we know this there is no you know I'm not arguing that with you when I'm saying is is it's going to get boring so change it up so what I do I have open up look towards the direction of sun but the sun is still directly behind her so what do we get? We get this beautiful rim light right along her body right here where just highlights her edge what else do we get? We get a beautiful kind of back light that hits the edge of the dress and I have her lift up on the edge because I want to show the pull of the dress the thing is that she's not walking if you were walking I would just let the dress relax and kind of show the pull that way but I don't want her to walk because I don't want to mess up the sandhu so I have a walk around the back side of the dune come up the backside so it's not to leave any trails in what's going to be our foreground in our composition and then I have or simply take one step forward with one leg leaving the legs basically crossing over each other and then holding address up in the left hand so that we can see the pool on the dressing on this lovely little shape right there as the wind catches it and with that back later looks fantastic okay, so this is our scene we have a beautiful ripple effect across the sand right here and this is the close of the best scenes so here we're on the eighty five millimeter one point two we're shooting a little further back getting more of a wide scene here we're getting a little bit tighter with again the eighty five millimeter one point to the canon version the l series the luxury glad to know l stands for luxury it's luxurious on your skin lenses that air luxurious I don't know why they call it victory it's just with their fancy shmancy line okay these their profession in theory they call it luxury but again if you don't have the money for that the sigma eighty five is a fantastic in between her until the eighty five art comes out and that's gonna be the one to get please signal don't make me say it again come on with eighty five otherwise go for the eighty five one point eight okay the cannon or the night conversion whatever when you got there around four bucks and by the way I haven't mentioned this yet but buying lenses used as long as you can get them in good condition is absolutely fantastic you save money and lindsay's don't really you know there's not going they don't go out of fashion that's not what I'm trying to say they don't really get old essentially the lens that you about twenty years ago that has great images and has good image quality is still going to create great image quality twenty years from now. So and I actually love using vintage lenses. It's really fun? Okay, so what do we see here? Well, we have tio basically figure out what we want as far as depth of field and for this particular shot I want there to be, you know, a pretty shallot of the field and in the sense that we have good separation there, the background is relatively busy. I do want to show what it is I want to show that we're in the middle of a desert some going for around f to eight I believe yes have to wait. So yeah, we could have stopped it down in one point to but then what would be the point of coming out the desert? And we're just gonna smush the background into oblivion at one point two at two point and we can tell she's in the back in the desert you know, you could go anywhere with that if you want to go at f seven or ten or eleven whatever you want, you can totally choose your own death the field you're all adults at least I think most of your are adults maybe there's some teenagers out there watching this who knows anyway pick the depth of field that fits for your composition for me it's at two eight but that presents an issue with sink right there on the eighty five millimeter were at two point eight were at one one hundred a second and is a one hundred so clearly in bright midday light were going either need high speed sink or andy filter and of course we're going to need at least probably a three stop andy filter since we're on, we're shooting an f to a so three to five stop again, I always prefer going to end the route so I haven't five stop andy filter that I pop onto the lens at that point so we're shooting at one hundred fifty four hundred kelvin we get a good amount of light, I'm leaving it brighton area you'll notice that you'll notice that this is not shot to be dramatic. This is shot to be kind of mohr lifestyle fashion kind of look it's not shot for that super dramatic look where we darkened down everything I'm retaining just enough highlights to not blow out the sky but I'm leaving everything up nice and bright again choose your exposure based on what you want, but I want that more natural look so I'm leaving maur ambient light in now when it comes to my light direction and my quality of light, what my needing to do in these two shots, I need to draw attention to our dress, to our model, to her face. I just need to give him a little bit of a kick, and so what I'm going to do here is just bring a flash ofthe two camera, right? And again, we're using the for this shot, you know, that first shooting, midday sun and we want to, you know, have the frame this wide, and we're gonna light from over here, and we're gonna use a modifier, you know that we're not using pocket streams for the shot we're using the bull v b twenty two were using the profile toby to were using something larger to get the effect that we needed with, you know, any type of doctor box I think we're using the west con in this one yet the westcott rapid box we need at least around two hundred, two hundred fifty one seconds or the power, which means that we need a medium strobe, the bolt b b twenty two or a profile toby, too. Either one is going to do we have a single bowl baby twenty two in the westcott rabbit box I talked about earlier how putting the boldly be twenty two in the westcott rapid box is not the best modifier for this flash because it does get spill this is where we actually discovered that this is the first time we tried putting the bolt into the rapid box and we discovered that it was spilling so we had of using it a little bit for the shoot but we went back to the pro photo after just a little bit okay? So with the light quality we're going with an octa but again we're shooting pretty far from the camera I mean like ten to fifteen feet but that uh rabbit box often does give us a little bit more of a soft light compared to say, just bear building it will compare to bear bowling it's quite a bit softer, but we're shooting off camera and we're going to go around half to full power and what we're trying to do here we're trying to kiss our model's face and body with just some directional light that draws attention are we matching the direction of ambient light? Absolutely you should be not maybe not the direct sunlight we're not matching the direction that because that's coming from behind her face but we are matching the direction of the ambiance phil you can actually see the m e f il lighting her up brighter on this side and kind of darkening towards the shadow side so we're following that okay so we're giving her a nice kiss of light on that side now compare these shots we have this shop to this shop exact same exploded exact same everything said this when we out of that light this shot to this shot exact same exposure exact same everything but how much more refined oven images this then compared to the shot okay we have great white balance and color at fifty four hundred degrees kelvin I left it more in a neutral side because I love this clean kind of white neutral look just drawing attention in to that dress right there noticed the complementary colors notice that the colors kind of all match the talk of you one on one people remember this kind of stuff we talked about this a long while back in this scene we have colors that are harmonious look at her dress it matches to the sky it matches to the shadows in the dunes everything kind of comes together and we're using a harmonious type of color palette where everything kind of matches what's already existing in that scene. So what kind of color scheme is this called you guys remember this's an analogous color scheme you have complimentary which is opposite of the color wheel you have analogous which is basically if you're seen has certain things in the color we want here you're basically working with other tones next to it okay, so we get a really refined and great looking image here we want to do is make sure that after each of these shots we analyze those shadows, analyze everything make sure that our light is falling the way that we wanted to and I dig it I love the way that this looks I love the shadows I love the way that her back looks weaken do a couple different shots where we move the light back a little bit so we light up her back just a little bit more if we you know I have the time to do that, but overall I'm really digging it now tip after everything is set up, shoot different angles, make subtle variations, change out your lenses move get different shots because in this scene we got a lot of fantastic images with this one single set up. So once you've done the hard work of doing the setup utilizing, utilize it, work around the scene and get all of your fantastic images all right? So that's it for our first tutorial when it comes to subtle refinement and how just a little bit of light in the right place can make a giant enormous difference in your final image let's go to the next video now