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What About the Fill Light?

What about the feel light let's? Take a moment we're gonna analyze the image that we shot in that last tutorial and we're going to talk about a preferred methods of kind of controlling the fill light and how that control of phil affects the overall image. Now again, this is part of the process of diving deeper into these images and the whole reason why is because they want to teach you all to be efficient with your lighting when we're working inside the studio when I work inside the studio, we have the I don't know we have the time we have the leisure of of setting up a cz many lights is we want we can set up a cz many reflectors we're gonna do all that kind of stuff and we can shoot with it without anything being moved, anything being touched but when we're on set not only on not on set but out on location when we're on location, not only do we have to carry out more gear, setting up that gear requires time and then also you're dealing with, say, weather and wind and other things that...

are going to constantly shift and moved here around so we need to use sandbags and we need to place things we now have assistance, toehold stuff and that's fine and dandy we still do lots of location lighting with multiple light setups but before going into that, I like to just kind of keep things a little more efficient. And if I can control my fill and get the results that I want by using kind of efficient steps like shutter speed to control the phil, then I will absolutely do that before asking one of my people to set up another light. And also keep in mind that when it comes to fill an easier phil, when you're doing location based shoots is using a bounce like a reflector, you can use a westcott five the one you have a silver. You have a white, you have everything you need inside of that, you can use a westcott scrim, jim or california sun bounce. You can use a larger v flat, you can take whatever you want and use a bounce, and that will often times well every time. That is more simple basically than having to set up another flash. The only benefit of setting up another flash is that generally you instead of that flash and not have somebody stand next to it. Where is with a reflector? You typically need someone just to hold that, but either way again I tryto work efficiently, so let's, look at this image and let's just kind of. Talk through some of these tips that I have for you all and this is going to kind of just be a reminder on certain points were reviewing certain key points as well be talking about certain effects that phil is gonna have over the image or controlling filled with shutter speed. So what you can see here is we have the same image. This is the original image. Okay, that we took. This is on the sigma. One twenty three hundred at three millimeters f seven one, one hundred second in iso fifty. It was shot with the two bold v b twenty twos with our pro photo are five three foot octa with the diffuser at around one half toe one over one power again, you need anywhere between two fifty two, five hundred watt seconds to get enough light in this type of a scene on your subjects. So if I had the profile toby to house using just one of them, I'd probably at one of one power. If I had the bolt b b twenty two, I could use two and half power or one at full power. And again, it's going to depend on that light source distance to the subject. We know that we covered that in the last tutorial, so r shutter speed is at one, two hundred a second, right? We mentioned that if I were to step that down now what I've done here is I've basically simulated different shutter speeds, so we did this simulation and post just like give you guys a very controlled example of what it looks like if I were to step that down tto one fourth of a second waking up seeing is that the background and the shadows all deepen by one stop, right? They all deep in just a little bit but our highlights remained relatively the same the highlights and the light that's on her face and everything it's pretty darn similar to this first shot you'll notice that it's just a tiny tiny bit darker but the flash power didn't change why would it be a little bit darker it's because remember that the overall brightness of this area where the flash is hitting is not just your flash power it's actually equivalent to the ambient light plus plus the flash power so you're adding ambiance to the flash power that gives you the overall brightness. So if we cut ambien by one stop well, we get less phil but then this is going to go down just a little bit in that overall exposure as well okay, so it's going to be affected but not quite as much as the shadow areas of the image of the background here's the image now far to simulate one one hundred of a second for my shutter speeds so I'm basically going to stop brighter than this shot you can see how her shadows on the side of the face open up a little more right the shadows in the arm shadows everywhere that kind of open up we get more background the shadows in the background kind of opened up the cactus and everything and the area that has the flash hitting it also becomes just a little bit brighter why? Because once again we added a stop of phil underneath that flash the flash is laboring over that film so this is kind of the well the benefit and the drawback of using shutter speed to control fill the benefit is that it's very simple to do but the drawback is that it's not only controlling your background but it's also controlling the fille on the in the shadows and the kind of brightness over this area now if we want teo well what we could do is if if this brightness of this area that we're lighting gets too bright we could just stop down the flash power right? So that's easy to control the one thing we can't control though is the background the background is always going to match kind of that phil if you if you brian the filled by one stop it's going to brighten the background by one stop at least when we're using strictly shutter speed okay, so remember these tips going above one hundred second shutter speed is going to require andy filter and or hss, and either these options reduce effective flash power, right? If I throw a three stop neutral density filter, it reduces emulate and flash power because the flash is going to be three stops darker, too, when it hits the lens so I those are going to reduce, but when using ages es, if additional flash cars desired, you can, on certain flashes, used the iso in conjunction with raising the shutter speed. And what this means is let's say, I'm using a pocket strobe like a photo when I go into high speed sync generally between one one thousandth of a second one two thousands won four thousand one five eight thousand of a second, the flash power is all you know the same, ok, it's giving me a cz much light is it can at every one of those steps so it's all the same, regardless so if I'm using high speed sync and let's say that I want more flash power, but I want to keep the background the exact same exposure. This's a little review, by the way, on lighting one on one so hopefully you guys still remember this stuff? Well, if I stepped up my eyes oh, to say from one hundred, two hundred it's going to brighten the flash power by one stop but it's also going to brighton and beaten by one stop but guess what? We know that shutter speed doesn't control flash power and if we're in high speed sync we can step that shutter speed up to whatever one so if I bring the shutter speed up by one stop and the I s o n by one stop, well, the shutter speed neutralized the iso when it comes to the background, but the iso allows the flash to be one stop writer so we can keep making those adjustments up to one thousandth of a second but keeping in mind that every step up in iso is going to reduce dynamic range it's going to reduce image quality and it's gonna have those effects and also you're going to run into shutter speed limitations at one four thousand on entry level dslr or one eight thousandth of a second on a basically advanced dslr okay, so high speed sink or neutral density filter will again. We talked about this in detail in lighting one on one with high speed think you're going to be losing on a pocket strobe anywhere between four to five stops of power, but with a five stop neutral density filter you're still losing five stops of light power, so which do I prefer there not equal because I would always opt for the neutral density filter, and I prefer the tiffin ht lineup, the high transmission line up are absolutely impeccable optical quality make sure you get a good optical quality and the filter, otherwise you're reducing image quality so the tiffin hts, fantastic quality, fantastic price. Why do I go that route, though? Because certain flashes well, actually reduce even more power when you keep stepping up the shutter speed, for example, are pro photo btu's at one one thousandth of a second, they might be losing three to four stops of light at one two thousand second, they're losing five stops of light that's one four thousand second, they're losing six stops of light. They go up to seven to eight stops of light loss, depending on your shutter speed. So if you pop that neutral density filter on there, you can use any of these flashes at there, original, at their factory power settings, and know exactly how much power you're getting on your shot and not have to worry about burning out your batteries quickly. And I have to worry about all the other stuff. You know, how much light you're actually getting and so forth, so I always prefer the indie option, at least until the point where high speed sync gives me straight up my actual regular flat power so when I get full power with high speed sync and not a five stop light loss that's what I'm going to convert over to high speed sync dice they conferred comfort that's what I'm going to convert to high speed sync all right so let's go to point in before we can add ami life filled by slowing down the shutter speed or by increasing the shutter speed to reduce amyloid will remember we talked about that and what effect it's gonna have it will also affect the background remember also that when it comes to the exposure area being flashed your total exposure is equal to the phil plus flash not just the flash by itself now what this means is that if you are flashing over an area that has a decent amount of phil make sure that you are lighting with the same color temperature of light as the feel like why because you want to match that light otherwise you're gonna end up with a mixed lighting kind of effect which is going to mean that basically the light from this side of the face to this side of face is not going to match and it's going to look very strange is going to reduce your overall kind of image quality and well it's not a flattering effect either the timing that's most important is really just when the phil is actually present in the final shot if you're shooting with the flash power so high that it's knocking out all the phil light meaning that you have no fill those shadow areas, they're just complete shadows. This doesn't really matter, but what we're combining and mixing flash plus phil wayto balance those light sources so that they are equal in color temperature at least close to equal in color temperature. Okay, one last little tip here is to not add too much phil because adding too much phil to an image flattens the image out now for this shot, I'd probably say the shadows are a little bit too much for this shot. I'd probably say that had been flattened out a little too much. We're losing some of that dimension in the body and in the shape by losing too much shadow it's the same thing that if we went into photo shop we're dodging burn and we kind of dodge all the shadows and we burn all the highlights and we even everything out you end up with a very boring image because the shadows in the highlights match and you you need to have shadows and you need to have highlights to have a compelling image and that's why we shot it at this setting right here because that gave us a good balance between shadows and highlights we had a good amount of phil still where her face wasn't too dramatic like it isn't this shot and it looks great overall. So just remember that when it comes to that, phil, too much or too little is going to negatively affect the overall balance and the mood of the shots. You kind of get that right balance in your image, so hopefully all enjoy this. Alexis. I just kind of analyzing. What about the film, like, how can we control, filled via shutter speed? Remember that as we get into lighting three oh one, we are going to be using mohr. Advanced techniques were amusing. Reflectors off camera, additional flashes, like a second or third light source to give us feel light and so forth. But for now, this is going to give you tons of control over any scene with just a single light.