Lessons

Lesson Info

Shoot: Styled Engagement Shoot

so here we are and kudos to creative life for allowing us to shoot right next to the airport be always like the worst place to do a live show or any kind of video but they're working through it and they're awesome so we're gonna make the best of it and uh we have part of the trailer park set up here and this really cool little trailer and we're going to an engagement shoot or a typical of an engagement shoot in our couple actually is engaged and what we like to do what I like to do with engagement shoots is to again to come up with a story and it could be something that's particular to this couple and will assume that this couple likes to go hang out and go shoppin and go thrift store shopping or pete meandering through little shops together and that's part of what they do on their dates so we'll take that into consideration and make that into our shoot so we have this cool little corner of the trailer park here that we can use and so what I want to do is to kind of keep it light let t...

hem kind of meander through here we're going to do some shots of them shopping maybe we'll do some little portrait with just this is a backdrop to the whole thing and it kind of mix it up from just kind of candid feeling things to actually mohr portrait she but using the background as a proper is a story to the portrait and we also have ah overcast sky so we have a lot of daylight but it's not very directional so it's kind of flat uneven so we may add in a little bit just kind of gives him to this light if it was full sun we'd have a different situation but we don't have any so we'll probably use is we'll start off with the grid that would just kind of fall around the grid ah we shall have that grid and as the couple moves through the scene here we'll add a little backlight little hair light something to add some snap because it's otherwise just very very flat and boring here a ce faras the lighting's concerned not the stuff is concerned we also play with our five and one disc which we have somewhere around here right alicia that has a silver side whites side translucent if you wanted to block the sun uh we have this is our this is from photo flecks of five and one light disk I believe being h was giving one away as well a similar one to this one of their gifts uh this is a great tool to have in your camera bag if you're really super like taking lightweight location lighting to an extreme this would be the one thing that you would probably want to have before anything else some like this which could be used to fill or shoot a light through which is actually really kind of important too okay so we'll go ahead and cover that one back up get that ready to go the first thing we'll kind of bring are engaged couple on here monty and roxanne and they are really actually engaged and in love which I like it's enough to make them fake it now would be a real couple and so what we're gonna do you guys just let you guys kind of shop through I'll give you some ideas you know maybe it's like you're looking at the baggies and showing it to him so it's really just you guys interacting I'm not even here is far as you're concerned until I let you know that hey I'm gonna do a portrait what you guys look at me for something okay so I may tell you you know turn this way so that I could see your face or something but it doesn't mean look at me necessarily right and uh do we have like where's your little shopping bag and this one actually she's got another one to put that on your arm we should have like some flowers or something coming out of that yeah right like that's so props are really important when you're when you're putting together a story shot like this whether you're going to just create it from scratch if you're a uh porter photographer you're going out even doing engagement shoot think about your props a lot of photographers don't take the time to just think about adding a few little details to their shoot and often just a few little details a couple little props can make the difference between a rather un interesting portrait to something that really has a little bit of story going on and it's not that hard to cover the prop or two and even just like that see no she's going shopping before she's just standing around waiting for me to talk to her now she's going shopping and we know she's going shopping she's got a shopping bag the money's already got her some flowers because he's such a nice loving boyfriend he's on the ball and s o then they're going to go check it out so let's start off with this um kind of telling a little story about where they're starting off there in there checking out and I'm gonna try to shoot like the sign and some of this in the foreground but then sort of out of focus in the back so we're kind of setting the stage like if we're gonna shoot engagements session we want to say this is where we are then this is what they're doing and this is what happens there so done shopping that they'd just sit down in a chair and relax together and then we do a little portrait so that you know and then maybe they're trotting off into the sunset on their harley for hearts or whatever they got so we're gonna move this around little bit electric fence so like that so I could have a picture of the electric fence thing back so why don't you guys come on over here and you could be just checking it out and we're going to start with um you can just gonna be in front of me just cut since you're taller you stand behind her so she's she's checking out do dad you might turn over your shoulder and say what about this honey or something like that or you could be leading around and show me that you put a hat on her you have so you guys just hang over here so you can scoot a little bit closer to that man over there yeah and you can you can snuggle on her you could be kissing on her while she's shopping and paying no attention glasses you put the glasses on so I'm just gonna let them kind of goof around and I'm gonna set some scenes shooting through right over here bring bitsy shop get her into the scene there miss betsy and make sure computers hooked up right now we're just kind of telling we're gonna shoot it off two point eight so that I can uh blow out the background just a wee little bit and get our bitsy shop in there this little glasses that you put the glasses on and kind of turning peak towards and you could actually turn towards him completely you're a big smile sassy there you go sassy is good I like that so I put him on him now put him on him facing you yeah it's good pulling me closer you can feel free to put your hands on her waist pull around their clothes guy don't be shy there you go all right so let's take a look over got so far faras lighting wise you guys can't see it over there can you uh that's cute so I underexposed just a third of a stop to give myself a little bit of ah leeway with far as being able to apply my presets that bump things up later on lights pretty flat we don't do too much so now let's start too play with uh adding a little kicker light so we'll get our lovely lady over here we're gonna be on channel c to foresee one sorry and set to see half power soon teo I'm controlling the power here like that okay assumed it seventy yeah that's great I love it taking pictures get opposed down for monty yeah you're smooth wei go okay uh cute I love that okay let's see for getting anything out of that okay keep doing that and I might have just squeeze closer to her and take a picture you got you got to give her some serious posing action going on there that's perfect love it gorgeous that's great right there okay awesome sauce let's do uh let's load that camera little more I like that a lot that almost half of the speed light c one seventy yeah there you go a little more sass turning around yeah I love it it's cute where you're aiming that at alicia okay that's perfect there we go raise it up a little higher two months I can see that you guys that's good just like that love that nice good one there keep that going monty move your hand to the right just a bit yeah kiss her and in that camera that's perfect love it put your arms around him there roxanne wrote his way squeeze and yeah oh yeah I love that work it okay nice firm that was a great one super cute you guys are awesome this I know we do it in a little bit of sitting here see we're at half power you want more know we're in teal right should be yeah okay okay all right we're looking pretty good now you keep working on that I'm gonna move around a little bit over here shoot kind of down this aisle and what I'm doing uh is shooting through you'll notice on the shots shooting through the fence shooting through the things in the foreground to give this depth and to give it a sense of that I'm not really there and that's really important is that we want to make it feel natural and if it was too clean and nothing in the front then it feels like we just set it up beautiful stood a little closer to do with it do the same thing we're just closer and both you guys closer to the trailer back up to the trailer there you go and turn come towards me turn this way a little bit here roxanne there and you could look up here in the sky let him photograph you there you go perfect nice given some sassy I love that awesome okay serap cute okay super so now I want to move in to doom or of ah kind of a portrait is shot so let's say you get a couple of goodies off the shelf that you want to play with and check out and we're gonna have you have a seat you can have a seat and you're gonna sit across his lap and then play with whatever get it facing that way tv sets for awesome yeah books good little shopping bag just gonna have it around here somewhere so get it through your feet over that way I'm just gonna get kind of tight right here so you have to worry about squish him and looking we're gonna touch your hair right here okay like totally well the cowboy hat kind of did some weird stuff so I was gonna put that right there prop ege get a little book yeah that's cute you can show him that together so much you found and way have a couple question yeah sorry I forgot about ugo telling too much funny he doesn't have okay dumping is having to go there you go teo your pal no okay questions yes alright so one of the questions was did from little did you have any tips for where to aim the light at the couple so before why was it that you had alicia where you did yes the head of the shin kind of behind and she was aiming it at his head in the back of head and also reflecting a little bit off the trailer at a little sparkle in the trailer but it really is made to be just a little bit of an accent light against like that safety lighting where it doesn't go off we're okay it's not going to mess up our shot because theirs we want them to interact and play as much so we want to give them as much freedom without being and constricted to you have to look this way and turn that way for this set up so that's really just a little kicker and if it if it works if she misses his head or whatever it's okay so what we were aiming at however was on hit the back of his head and to try just add a little separation light little kicker light from the side there okay one one more question ah woman on the verge would like to know if you come up with the shoot ideas after getting to know your clients or do you put them into your into your vision's a little bit of both okay yeah I try to meet with the clients and get to know them and what they're into I always ask them you know what guys like to do what would your perfect day to be hanging out what do you do on the weekends and find out as much I can with personality and then something will say well what if we take that you love to do and we go down here and create a little scene from that occasionally they will say oh I don't know we don't really have anything we like to dio that it's like well how about this then let's do this okay thank you yeah okay okay you guys are awesome sauce keep working on that I'm gonna come back over here and alicia let's do let's put that aside and just play with this little bit see if we get any anything from this at all might get a little gold on her putting a little gold on her I'm gonna do a fairly tight head shot from here it's going to be like her reading him the book we're the trinkets in the background and alicia's gonna just try to kick a little bit of sparkle on her if you handle it just like that if it's a little a little bit of shine on her hair back there beautiful can you lower the book just a wee little bit roxanne there you go awesome beautiful hello that was good a lot of things really is the perfect day must say ok nice all right we're looking pretty good there for the natural light stuff so let's say we want to now create more of a portrait like one a dark in the background at a little kick so when we talked about yesterday my days airplane together using the natural light is your fill and then we kick in something else so this light is great when it's kind of flat and overcast so we'll let this be the fill light bring it down about a stop so there are exposure goes under exposed about a stops everything else gets a little bit darker a little more saturated and then we can turn this into our main light to light them up so this is our octa box with two speed lights attached channel a and b on that so what I'm gonna do is set this it says three channels a b and c three zones and I'm gonna set this to be a this to be lights need to be on t t il will set this to tt eh looks I'm gonna try to control it manually from my camera a t il uh I'm gonna zoom the heads to approximately is upside down so it's hard to see what this is here we go thirty five millimeters okay so they're wide enough to fill the box we got two heads together it's like I double the power this is on channel a this is on channel b correct see one and which means that for my a c three this controller I should be able to channel a here gentle be here control the power of each one of those flashes from right on the top here so you guys uh have you stand up we're going to change your pot's up a little bit okay and then right where you were we'll have your shopping bag in your hand again and just trashing our stuff uh andi would have you turn so you're facing that way way you go on in liver up I'm going to switch this to this arm over here yeah and come guys a little closer to the fence just a little bit right there all right so this one now is gonna be our kind of our main portrait light so first of all let me set a base exposure gonna go back to manual mode you guys step this way one big step yeah that's good so set abase exposure here I want to be underexposed and I want to shoot this at two point eight s o two hundred and I wantto under expose my background by about a stop so when I look in the camera after my flashes off right now uh one of about a stop under my shutter speed is twelve fifty twelve fifty so what does that guys tell you what does that tell you about our flash on underexposed stop my shutter speeds at twelve fifty now one twelve fiftieth of a second how is that going to affect our flash well it means that our speed lights are gonna have to go into high speed sync which means they may or may not have enough power to give me the output I want so we're going to see if they don't give me enough power it's one reason I double him up my solution is a neutral density filter right and that we talked about yesterday we're gonna start possible using it when it's overcast like this and dark uh it's not one hundred percent guarantee you're gonna need the filter but we'll try it and see if we get something out of that wave comes from right here so we're gonna bring that in pretty close leash yeah depression shoulders and feathered off towards me just a little bit right there okay that's it yeah okay beautiful so we're just gonna test to check our light and see what it did nice okay I want to crank it up maybe just a wee little bit the light looked pretty good as they're gonna go one stop up so if I want one stop mohr I got two flashes how much do I change each flash does it have stop on each to bring it toll of one stop higher for uh it was good it was a trick question but yes no way would do a stop on each flash because we want to double everything to give it one more stop right so what we already have to basically want double everything so I have to go stop on each one give me one stop total on my exposure makes sense okay beautiful makes it okay roxanne kind of looking over this look right up does that light let him kiss on your ear something like that beautiful okay nice okay let's say for even getting I think we're not getting too much from that high speed sink trying one more time that was good same old thing looking good beautiful yes there's like why of yeah high speed sync do you know what I think is that all on the last flash to try toe add power tio already existing light yeah I don't know yeah that's why we're using it by speed sync is flash manufacturers have a way to make their flashes actually synchronize with your camera above the optimum flash sink speed which is generally to fiftieth of a second two hundredths of a second and that's because because that's when the the shudder is actually fully open on the ccd so shutter works like this it goes across and then the second shutter closes and here's your ccd right so the shutter goes boom boom and anything less than two fiftieth of a second may go boom boom as we get closer to fifty goes boom boom and then to fifty goes boom so there's a split a split second when it's completely open after two fifty it actually goes like this boom move boom boom so the second shutter starts to move before the first ones even across so there's never a single time when the ccd is completely exposed which is why you'll see those dark lines in the bottom of your frame sometimes because one shutter is here and the other ones moving and then your flash go so this is all dark great make sense so high speed sync what they do is they tricked the flashes to instead of making one pop it'll pop repeatedly says that showed her go there goes pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop up and make five pops as the shutter scrolls across and then added up those five pops filling the frame and give you a complete exposure so each one of those pops is actually reduced strength of right okay because you can't you can't pop it full power within a split second and still get full power because you need the least three seconds recycle time right so what you gonna do so that's why you're like losing a ton of power when you use high speed scene because asked strobe so fast with a neutral density filter I can control my ambien the same way bring my shutter speed down to two fifty two hundred and then I get full power because I'm using that completely open shutter makes sense yeah okay cool so right now I'm not really getting enough out of this with the high speed sync if you guys can't see it but the home audience can see it okay so what I'm getting is really not enough not enough effect from that flash we have pretty nice natural light it looks great when she's looking up but I just need a little more kick in there and I'm not getting enough so I'm gonna try this with a neutral density filter instead to see if I can get more out of our flash okay so my neutral density filters are here and this is the singlet neutral density filter it's a seventy seven millimeter to fit on my largest lens talked about that the other day so I put on the front which if I have other filters I'll take those off so that they don't stack up and give me too much weird stuff going on and if you can see they're back at home here's your little variable thing there's a minimum which is two stops and as I start to twist it around it goes all the way down to almost complete dark it eight stops right there so it's perfect for just dialing exactly where you want it get it set and then just start shooting okay all right so now we can shut our shutter speed back down and I'll use my neutral density filter to now control my ambien exposure instead of my shutter speed makes sense so I'm gonna rotate this until I have about minus one which is where it was before and we got the flash in there and hopefully it's all triggered out make sure trigger now ok and go ahead and lean on it and look up just like you did before roxanne that was awesome fired right so a lot more light coming out they're good so let's have you turn what you did before was really cute you had you're you're kind of precedent does check out if you can see on the screen right there you're kind of pressing into him with your face off that way yeah weighing on in their ugo there that's perfect right there nice good good good all right so now we're getting some output from that flash and uh really adding a nice kick and shaping to her face there that we didn't have before cute ok so guys just work that a little bit more go ahead and uh you can face him you can turn you could play where's the little glasses just like those glasses the camera again those are cute would you put those on roxanne gonna peek over them at him huh you gotta pull up put your right hand up and pull the edge of those glasses down the other right there you go yeah come on you gotta lean into like you're gonna kiss are like oh you're so irresistible when you do that they're there it's perfect there that's it I like it like it like it eyes cute as a bug's ear