Lessons

Lesson Info

Reviewing Yesterday's Images

we're gonna get you guys off your butts today a little bit more off the couch and we'll start shooting so I just wantto kind of say gosh thanks for an awesome day yesterday I was exhausted at the end of day but it was so much fun working with you guys and they're awesome crew here and thank you to the creative live crew even the ones that were not here but were there in spirit thank you but everybody's been so awesome toa work with it's just blowing me away um so this morning we're going to pick up with more lighting I wanted to also address a lot of the questions that came up yesterday about need a ring and how do you decide where to set your flash or how to set your flash I know that's a big question for a lot of people some of you a lot of people out there in the audience as well and you know we've been discussing this with alicia and other people and like for me and we talked about this a lot of the the measuring light is intuitive and a lot of that comes from years and years of ex...

perience and just knowing if I set my flash to about half power I'm going to get about f six when it's in this type of modifier at this distance and I'm usually you know within a half stop or stop of what I thought and that does come from experience but the other part of it is that I think a lot of people are just afraid to go out there and just try and maybe make a mistake and it's okay to make mistakes in fact I think sometimes I'm our best creative ideas come from mistakes I know mine do remember we talked about the pregnancy portrait in the pool where I planned all this stuff and they end up shooting with the flashlight because I had no idea I mean literally that could have been a mistake liketo have a flashlight that I'm just seeing it like oh that works make a little modification boom we're good to go a lot of times I'm setting up lighting and I'll set up a light and it's like wade brighter than I thought it was gonna be like totally mis calculated the power setting or something and before you jump to conclusion like oh bring that bring that way down like wait a minute I like that it's kind of like it looks like flare from the sun coming through you know let's go with that instead so I thought getting over the fear of being wrong is really important especially for a beginner photographers it's okay to screw up it's ok to be off with your lighting because leave the door open maybe that's going to be your next cool creative lighting scenario is something that was a total mistake to begin with so really be open to that and I'm gonna get you guys up in helping me set lights today so you can see and played to yourself and say let's try this if it's not right we'll change it if it's right on we'll shoot it okay but it really doesn't take much and I go back and forth between well should we bring out a meter and we talk about using a meter and how to use a meter and all that and as much as technically that is the correct way to do it realistically I don't think it's any faster to take a meter out and take a reading and then get your lights balance okay bring it down to stop take another reading bring it down we have to stop take another reading bring that you know and then you do that then you go the camera to take a shot and then you're like that's not quite right we still need to bring that one down another stop you're gonna probably make an adjustment for me I would always make another adjustment even after meeting anyway to suit my flavor that I wanted and uh unless you know if I meet her at this it's going to give me the exact look I want that takes a lot more experience in my opinion to say I want that back light to be f eight when my exposure's f to a front to get the flare that I want if you don't know that you don't even know what you're meeting for that makes sense you're still kind of guessing at it so why not just see it on camera and go visual so that's why I'm a real proponent of lighting by feeling rather than by numbers on a meter but meter's air valuable especially at the very least you could use a meter to check your initial exposure make sure you're within a stop or so and then you go to the camera and fine tune from there and again this is my personal style and everything that I'm talking about today is not like the word of light it's just this is what I do you know and this is what work and this is after many years of teaching what's really really worked all right so you guys ready at your hands dirty in the light today a little bit okay uh I also want to say thank you to you guys and we have a little gift for you far lighting notebook for those of you don't already have it but I've got this is my latest book and our lighting package special on a website is our book and the sticky filters which you guys saw me using a lot yesterday we're using him all day next couple days and well he's got a lot of deals on a website almost software's up to fifty percent off on our site for those of you out there in the internet world who want to check it out so this is for you guys if you already have one just pretend you don't you can auction it off on ebay or whatever I didn't sign him yet we just got these in for you guys thank you signed only creative live version for you guys all right so the book is a great reference if you haven't looked at it yet it's got really a lot of what we're doing here compacted into one hundred one different set up different scenes and with all the lighting diagrams and all this such of course you can't get your hands in there when you're in a book but it's the next best thing to being here I think so uh thank you guys again so let's talk about ruby lake before you start shooting this morning I wanted to look at the images from yesterday uh look at my screen here and do brief review of the images we shot yesterday and I tweaked a few of them or enhanced a few of them with you guys here in the studio and right when we're done I just finished off the rest of them and I wanted just to kind of review what we did and how we built up our our lighting process so we'll start off here the first thing we did was just natural light through the window over there by that wall and then we add in a little reflector for the hair light remember that we wanted a little sparkle a little little dimension in color and sparkle to harris we put that reflector behind her head to tweak a lout twinkle twinkle out twinkle her hair kenny twinkle hair I don't know we tinkled on her hair I don't know what we do okay so that was a real simple using natural light finding the natural light and just enhancing it a little bit but if you look a tte the main thing with the natural light the catch light we got that beautiful window still got a sparkly catch light in her eye and we have nice short lighting remember short lighting for the lighting is hitting the short side of her face and putting the wider side of her face into shadow hey there's another variation of that where we now added a little bit of mohr phil to soften and even out that light around here these images here where processed with you can see our history steps here creme de la creme which is a preset in light room from our many art collection and the creme de la creme there's the original image and the creme de la creme you can kind of see what it does skin tones it kind of makes him creamy really had a nice contrast of punch and almost a slight cross process kind of feel and one click and that's what I love about this is one of my faves too then we brought out our little octo box with the video light we're scot robert video light I haven't our doctor doom and that's a great light when you have a low lit situation I don't need a ton of light when you're indoors it's great to use on led light in a knocked a dome or something because you can see what you're getting there's no guesswork whatsoever so this is a great lightweight lighting tool when you're in a room that allows for relatively low light and so we used the window light here to give us a nice flare make it feel kind of light and airy and light her hair and then the octo which you can see the reflection and eyes to light this side of her face and balance that out using this as a kicker on her face here and highlight owner here works really nice this I used sixty five fast back it was a pre set so there's our original and with sixty five fast back okay so original and noticed with this this particular presets sixty five fast back this is more vintage delish collection a lot of the dark lines on the face tend to disappear without me having to even retouch it you know just kind of smooth and creamy is out the skin so this is a great one if you want a quick beautiful look great for seniors portrait's where you want little funky fashion field to the colors and contrast without having to go through and retouch shadows on the face uh it's like a one click deal let me play with a little further away and using the window again blowing out the window to make that kind of fun and uh we use the octo domas well here the light her face up they're coming across on exposed for her face and let the window blowout which gives that nice airy feel that we wanted this one uses chocolate pudding preset with sixty five mustang on top of that original was there and then a chocolate pudding which actually adds like a warm chocolatey flavor to the shadows of the image to give that really rich kind of feels specially the red of the leather and the red the browns in her hair that chocolate pudding really brings that out and then I topped that with sixty five mustang to give the creamy skin tones another variation on that again having her the light following her nose and we talked about that follow her nose when you follow her nose the shadows and everything are just beautiful shaping of the jaw line you have a little bit of a butterfly light under the nose butterfly lighting means there's a little shadow just under the nose which is really nice keeps the light in the eyes and just a gentle shot on the nose this one used sir reality preset and the original is there on the serie ality this reality again tweaks the color palette is kind of subtle most of vintage feel and then adds a slight vigna on the edges to give it more impact when he shot up against the wall and here we were using the octa dome on the side just to the side of a vase to balance out the existing so you can see we had natural light coming in through a window on the side of her face and we balanced it out with the octa dome on the side you can see the reflection here just balance that light okay back here and next image just a little variation of that with her turning into the light these were enhanced with photo shop and this particular one I took into photo shop and we did creme de la creme on this one in four shot next action there were two use the edge blur and photoshopped to get that soft edges on that and this is where we use the flashlights member is just a flashlight on our face it's crazy how much I'm getting all these tweets and text mentions what was that flashlight used yesterday it's like everyone to know and I posted at the end of the workshop yesterday it's also my blog's I reposted it last night on my blog's so the the model number of the flashlight where to buy it is thirteen dollars is awesome if you weren't here yesterday it's pull it out real quick so they used to practice like nine last same fifteen ninety nine dollars more old e got russian I'm like hey we get it raise this up s o this flashlight if you were here yesterday is just a great powerful zoom's the head so we can go from a nice spot it's also even which is what I look for in flashlights and it's also guts three power levels in addition to disco dance mood so it's ah some little light for fifteen dollars instead of thirteen dollars so that was a flashlight on her face we had another flashlight behind her to put a little glow on the wall to make it more like a ball halo behind her on dh then we had another hair light flashlight remember yeah yeah want more flash light for a little edge light on the back of her so we had three flashlights going on here and that was processed again in photo shop but the edge blur modified to soften the edges give it kind of dreamy field we moved over here to this curtain area and use just the existing lamp ahead toe light from the top onto her face but we needed something to brighten up and make it feel more like a stage we put a speed light on the ground with a warm jail on it shooting straight into back and flaring into the lens and I use the lens baby edge eighty to get that focus totally thrown out in the bottom and a slice of focus and what's interesting is if you look at her eyes everything's perfectly in focus but even the back walls and focus because plane of focus is now horizontal rather than vertical you know so that's what the tilt len does it shifts my plane of focus from here to there so the focus goes from here straight back to that wall and this goes completely out of focus so this would be like you're furthest distance if you were the regular lens because you're really great control over where you want the viewer's attention to go then we set up a shot using natural light from the window as a filler and an octa dome with a speed lighted it as our main light and one speed light on her hair with a grid spot in a warm jail and then just using the ambient light in the background to add color and depth and texture without revealing too much of what's actually back there and pulled in a little closer in a great portrait lighting setup very simple if you have any sort of existing natural light you can do this just about anywhere because the lateral light is your filler that's a really important concept understand is that the natural light can be flat and blah it doesn't matter you just need to have something and that becomes your filler then you're you're really your primary light source is the box that you're using here or the octa dome or whatever it is we used to have a quick box will use today as well so you can use just about any natural light that you confined in any sort of conditions as a filler and create a beautiful portrait okay we put her down switched out models put it on the floor and this is their giant light panel the the four by six ish foot panel with a speed light firing through it which works for fooling sitting on the floor just about anywhere it's a nice versatile soft ing it directional light and we process this one with a hipster preset which kind of gives a cool faded color so there is the original and hipster kind of gives you a vintage e faded color palette looks really nice on her skin tone to shoot such beautiful skin tone let me throw it down on the floor what we did actually throw her down we asked her to lay on the floor in a very nice way I use my hand pretty voice and kick your heels up and again we're using the chairs and stuff in the background uh really is just fillers texture I want it to be more like a painting in the background I don't even really care what's back there as long as it has the right shadows and colors because we're shooting these so close toe wide open for example this here was shot at f one point six instead of f one point four opened up a little bit to make sure I had room to make sure her eyes were sharp and uh that just makes everything the background not really matter it becomes just abstract and that's what I love about shooting is close toe wide open as possible it's a little variation of that expression she had there this was using uh uh I think you sixty five mustang anderson I forgot to write it down and then we had did a fooling with the same lighting setup this that same panel now sh we could go from the floor lying on the floor to fooling standing without changing anything in our life so that's why this lighting is so versatile it's a beautiful light for a full length portrait and I said well you know we don't have time to clear out the background let's make it look like it's on set fashion kind of a thing which I think is kind of more interesting to see what's going on in the background we have beautiful light on her you can actually see the edge light it hits her hair carving around and casting that shadow for which is one thing that I really like to see I love to see the floor behind someone illuminating their cast shadow coming up just has a really dramatic field so uh we're gonna kind of play with that little bit more today when we do our bride and groom as well like a first dance romantic e thing and a little similar variation on that going into a warmer feel this is with my black and white rosie pre set it just sort of a slight rose essence aroma to the black and white shadow tones still keeping the skin beautiful and clean this was shot at half one four to really blow the background with a twenty four millimeter lens and this is a great lens to check out if you love white angle portraiture uh one of the things you have to battle with is that either you're going to see everything in the background or you need to kind of blur it out and the only way to do that with the white angles to shoot with the really fast aperture like in f one point for a two eight wide angle really almost doesn't work because it to wait it's still going to be too much and focus in the background so if you want something like that where the background is truly almost out of focus you have to shoot a one poor so it's somethingto worth checking out if that's your stuff he liked that really wide angle portraiture type of look and finally put the two girls together let them with one light feather to cross so they'd be evenly lit so are aiming the light at her from over here okay so we instead of pointing it right straight at we feathered it so it looks like she's not going to get as much but if aiming towards her far right left shoulder my right her left and if you're lighting groups which we're going to play with a little bit with a small group today one of the things that the group is to feather your light towards the furthest away person so that the center of your lights aiming at the furthest person then it feathers across the group nicely and relatively evenly you may have to play with it a little bit but generally that's a good rule of thumb a made it the furthest person so that one light skims across and we had one grid spot behind there giving them a nice little glow to their hair and that that's that background hair light edge like we talked about that a lot you see a lot in my images I think is a really easy way teo kick the quality of your images up and even if you're shooting natural light which we talked about you can light it completely natural and just throw a little spotlight in the back and if it doesn't go off no big deal but if it doesn't go off like woo pretty you know tweak li I'm so happy and then then you get a much more elevated portrait all right any questions all we did yesterday before we jump into today he has one of you have any questions you might throw in from anything that that was just talking about what oh sorry go ahead can oh yeah there are a couple of questions in the queues tab here um one question from our john is how do you set the white balance when using multiple types of life when they're different colors and different colors you want to set the white balance generally of course for the main light on the on the person and for example this portrait here we had the existing light from this room which has come from the windows was the filler and are light in the box was the main light so we knew we had daylight colored filler so the box was daylight colored as well now if I'm using the if we didn't have the daylight this was in the evening we're shooting here were using these lights the ambient tungsten zzzz filler I would have jelled my main light with its sticky filter to make it tungsten and then that way would blend with the filler light and then set the camera tungsten so really depends and then in this case I wanted the background really really warm so I didn't bother to correct anything and that's the effect I want was warm so it feels like a warm candlelit background so we let that tongue stone be tungsten you question from disney toy is would you ever use a grid over the flashlight or since you can focus it is that the same effect and disney toy says thanks I ordered the flashlight last night okay that's why I went up to fifteen dollars that's right uh no you don't need a greater the flashlight because exactly what disney toy said is that the focusing feature that flashlight means you don't need a grid because that's what a great does basically focus it for you