Lessons

Lesson Info

Shoot: Bride's Details

let me show you some things that I see here dot Get me really excited about photographing these brides. A typical bride room is gonna be messy. It's gonna be makeup everywhere. There's sorry. Makeup, clothing on the floor, makeup all over the tables. Things aren't ideal. Would we agree? But let's pretend I walk into the room. How do you Ready? Come on in. Listen, introduce our broad, Heidi. Everybody say I give around. Applause hiding. You look gorgeous. So I've asked Heidi not to put any of her jewelry on. This is typical. You say, like, Hey, I know you're getting dressed. Uh, just save the last part of your dress and last part of your details for me with the camera. I don't like to photograph you putting them on, but first I want to photograph her details in a separate spread By itself is a story. Tell into that. So let's look over here and girls, you could all come in. We're gonna have you sit and just enjoy as well, and they will bring in some shots. So have a seat here. Welcome, l...

ovelies. Looking gorgeous. Yes. Welcome. Welcome. All right. So enter the bride's room and indeed, the exact same thing. Let's pretend there's a wall here with the tire. Different hotel room. Now we've started photographing the guys. I take a few shots, get the energy up. Describe this day is gonna be great. I might say, Hey, guys, just let me get a few shots here, and then I'll meet you in the barn and bring the bridesmaids down later. And then we'll all toasted have champagne together. Cool. So enter the room. Hi, Heidi. You look gorgeous. Is so good to see you. Oh, my gosh. There should be that hugging, loving relationship. If you don't your job properly. We don't have to redo that one, Do? Yeah, at what I do. Is there already enjoying themselves that they're already almost ready? I see the details on the table, and I think Okay, we gotta tell stories now. I just shot six vertical images 544 to 6 vertical images of the groom's details on his body. But I have the luxury now of photographing the brides Well, her jewelry and elements separately. Not on the bride, which is a real luxury. And what we need to do is shoot it like I used to do in the commercial days. We're going to use the natural light to do it, though this time it's a lot of fun. So look at this beautiful stuff that you have. Do you know the designer? Yes. This is your friend Craig Cooper. Yes, but it's designed by Peter Marco. Beverly Hills. Yes. Come see this beautiful stuff. I'm gonna show you with my macro shooting in a second. But it's absolutely great. And thank you for for providing this jewelry as well for creative life. And you're wearing a dress by shikata shikata dress. Beautiful. Thank you. Okay, so let's take a look here. We have bracelets and necklace, a ring and two beautiful earrings. We have to celebrate them with our style. Okay, Right now they're sitting on glass. That's beautiful. But why not pick a different element? That could be the theme. That could be the theme of the entire spread. So the guy spreads against the brick with those details, His details. She's gonna have something that really enhances the beauty of this jewelery. So we have a bunch of things we could do here. We can use the fabric I often use leathers. My background. Okay. I will use Look at this chair. Fantastic. Look at the detail of that. Okay. I'm actually just so you can see that you could shoot jewelry against anything. I'm going to put it on multiple textures for you. Okay, this is a really easy shot. You need the 24. 70. So this is the 24 70 here, and you need a macro tube for that. So you get in real close. Yeah, I have it in here. It's in the out of pocket. Why? Everyone needs the BX to pro shooter bag. It's all here. All right, let's put that on. Remember the macro tube, By the way, this is the e f 12 macro tube by cannon. All right. All it does is take the focal planet. Pushes out a little bit, so I get real close, all right? And I'm gonna put that on. Let's grab her main piece, which is her ring? Absolutely gorgeous. This is real stuff. Really beautiful. And right there, it's already gorgeous. All right. What I would do is open the shades a little bit. Have light. Come in. Carried. You mind holding that snap a test shot. Remember, test shots. You don't even need Teoh. You know you need to be attempting. It's a supposed pretty well, by the way, guys, I'm a house shade. How's shade? Ah, white bounce color bounce. Right now it's got a little house. It looks like the shade. It's come shade balance setting. I leave my camera and how shade melt all day long every day. It's always I never change it out. I never use auto because you're gonna get back. You should all be shooting raw raw settings. You should be shooting rob, because that's 12 bit color. 12. It is so important because you have ability to just the colors later, and you have ability make pretty large exposure changes in light room, etcetera. So one thing I know is that if I have auto color bounds, that's gonna be all over the place. And so when we get to the studio to color corrector images, it's shifting. Left shifting right, you always air on that color slider. If you leave it at one place the entire day at one place the entire day that you know it's always gonna be a slide in one direction or the next for entire groups of images. Right now, if I was an auto, it would see the warm color on the stool here and set me off. It would set it to a cooler automatic setting, and then we have to shift that direction. You want your brain to go one direction, and I prefer starting at a warmer place because we're talking emotion here, right? Start warm and cool. It is necessary. You don't want to start cool and warm it because you'll miss it every time. There's a very important thing. That's why I mean how side all day long carry. You could speak to that. Can you carry? Does the color correcting? Tell me a little bit about that process for you. I was shooting here. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's very helpful tohave all of the all the photos of the day shot in how shade because it simplifies us, he said. I can, in one click batch, correct a group of photos instead of auto. If it's auto on individual clicks and it just takes way longer, way longer, Okay, so that that's just one texture style. I'm not liking the tone. It's not gonna be my background. Look, we have these other trays that just happened to sitting on the table. And we have leather too. Look at this one. Wow. Look at the texture that goes along with That would not be great for, like, white pearls. I don't know how I can give you a good side view of that so you could see the detail, But let me just shoot it real quick so you could see how it looks. When? When you backlighted OK, notice the depth of field there. So this trade too. This could be our theme as well. Look at the texture on this guy. Similar, but it's warm. Warmer. I bet you'll end up going this direction. Usually it's a two second job. We enter the room, we got what we shooting the theme against. Oh, that's so pretty. Okay, so there's the shot. I'm gonna open up. I'm going. 1234 clicks by sliding, sliding to the left. My by thumb position Four clicks on opening The exposure four klicks would be one stop and 1/3. So watch this. Perfect. Now we're in the zone. Okay? So now I like that it's warm. It could be the warm theme of the book we don't want. Start with cool themes. We'll start with warm thing. That could be this might set the tone for the entire story. Why don't I take a picture of this entire thing now? I've got the exposure right, and I could use it as a I could use it as the background of my entire book. How cool is that particular you? That image? Let's take a couple more from different angles on a Mac right now, so I can't get too close. Okay. We found the theme of our book. And I might ask the broad, Would you think of this for the background of your album? Gorgeous? She likes it. We're gonna go with Okay, let's shoot all the details against it now. It's OK if I take your earrings. Lovely. I used to shoot a lot of June. This is exactly why we do it with a commercial camera, of course. But macro photography the lighting is the same. Would be a soft box right here and off we go. Bad shot focusing here ago. Details, details to a couple of variations. Why? Because I want it to be in the book. Were choosing to do all these details in a vertical orientation, right? We want them next to each other. You kind of want them facing into even show. You make a decision when you design it, how it's gonna be. So you need variations. So when it's thrown in the book, that's gorgeous. Okay, set that, Assad. Two more items. Three or more items. I love it when there's, like, 10 items. So I'm gonna do this quick cause I want to photograph the bride's maid. I noticed we have another theme across the way there. You know, guys, this process should be the first thing you do. When you enter the room first thing into the room, you find your texture. You shoot the details against that texture. He also look for other themes. This wall right behind us here is going to be where I photographed the bridesmaids. The groomsmen were here. Bridesmaids. Get that wall. We have window light as well. It's going to be easy. Okay? I'm taking off my macro to because I'm shooting bracelets. Settings stay the same. And we are taking one click to the right for exposure. And there is our shot, A couple variations, notice the depth of field, and we're done. Easy. Set that, Assad. And last night, this gorgeous necklace, so I should be in care. Would be if she wasn't holding the window, handing them to the bride, and she could start putting them on. But I want to capture that. So let's do this real quick. And this Prepare the the next location to photograph against. That's just awesome. Beautiful jewelry. Yeah. I'm not gonna mess that too fat much because I want to keep moving on. But you get the idea, right? So again, you can use leather. You can use a chair. It doesn't have to be big to do this theme work. Okay. And off we go, we're gonna start with the bride putting on things, actually. Do you mind if we jump in and ask a couple questions circa fantastic as you're asking questions, we're gonna prepare this next spot, if that's OK, Ok, we have a handful of questions them about your focusing points. Um, let's see here, Brandon in Tennessee ass. I'm interested in knowing it's Jim. Is changing his focus points when shooting wide open or if he was just using CenterPoint and doing focus recompose and then to follow up with that. Also, someone was wondering if you ever shoot manual and manual focus If I ever shoot, Just focus. Manual focus. Oh, most definitely, Yeah, absolutely. And super low light were were mostly manual that 85 12 It has a really slow focusing on jeet eat. So I go man off. It's super dark, and I work it that way. My focusing points and this is this is fairly important. If you can get used to not leaving that thing in center center dot and then re composing for each image, you're gonna be a lot happier there. I have a custom because you're exposures will be better. You see it meters off that dot as well as focuses on off that dot So let's say you focus that center dot on Keira right now. Let me just prove it to you with a quick shot here. So if I have my exposure right on Kira, that's great. If are an aperture priority do aperture priority. So if I recomposed, it would expose way out in the window at which is super bright out there and you get a dark face. Notice this next image. Do you guys see my focus points on the image back here? Because I see it on my camera to I leave the focus point so that you could see where it was on the camera. Okay, so get used to rotating that dot around there's custom function that will do that for you. By the way, take a look at custom functions. You want to be able to I use the back wheel to do a big circle, and then I could put that dot right on the face to instantly. It's a really wonderful photo journalism custom function. So care we're gonna prepare the next location by opening the drapes there, and we're gonna use this wall with the vanity. Okay, so one thing that I had to ask Carol when she was standing over here because you know, these these are professionals that we're working with here. They're not all they're not all or some of our models. And so we I was wondering whether the techniques that you're using here are the same. That you actually use in real life. And she confirmed that, yes, that is how you actually will inspire people to act is just by getting them to be silly. And do you ever have people that you have to, like, push a little bit harder to get those reactions that you're looking for? You know, it seems to work on everybody. I use the same techniques, micro motion or emotion and movement motion posing. I don't ever really start with a big stylized moment. I use my voice and I laugh at myself. I pull personality out that I see. I make that the focus rather than me. All those techniques I talked to LAX last section of their universal, and they work. They always work. Yeah, and there's There's definitely some photographs of different cultures that I had to learn before I photographed. Certainly there's different traditions and things you that you need to know in certain times the day it's not appropriate to be playing around so much, you know, take the ceremony, for instance. But yeah, no, The truth is, it all always works. It always works if you know how toe energy ratchet eso as we're going into this next segment. If you could talk just a little bit about white balance, especially dealing with the dress, that's something that a lot of people were concerned about. Is getting the white balance of the dress correct? So if you could talk about that as you Yeah, I think people over and they think too much about white balance. And again, I like to leave. I like to leave the white balance and how shade and then and go from there. I just need to primarily concern myself with the exposure settings. And so in this these conditions, where it's a controlled light scenario, we have window lighter. I've taken off the overheads. It's now window life how shade is extremely useful. I just need to go be in manual because it's controlled setting. Nothing's going to change and make micro adjustments to my shutter speed. I need to always have I know that the rule of thumb is to have enough shutter speed that you're twice your longest focal length. So if I have a 200 millimeter on, I need 4/ of a second to be safe. That doesn't mean I I have it with with years of experience learned how to hold my muscles and just click. Uh, I go. I go down to about 60th of a second with a 200 millimeter and still get the shot. Especially with these things better lenses that have have image stabilized technology in them. You really can't get away with a lot, um, slower speeds.