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Lesson Info

Creative Lighting Examples

So if you think way back to the very first image that I showed everyone where I said remember you're going to find out why my hands are coming through the back drop well this is the actual setting this was a project we were doing for nike and what we needed the photograph was this the problem was we had these big windows back here so throughout the day we've talked about adding light okay this is not adding any light we actually shot it available light but we needed to control the light so what we did is we took this black backdrop we just rolled it out cut a hole through it and stuck the camera through now there's nothing to reflect I have eliminated all the reflections the second hole was actually so I could hold the camera really didn't need two holes in it but anyway so that's the final picture that came out of it on it was very important that we saw thes leds that they put in so we basically unlit this picture so back to our scientists this's a professor at m I t again and she sai...

d to me you know rick every time you come you photographed me at my bench wearing a t shirt and jeans and so once you get dressed up we'll do a nice portrait so this is her and her robotic flower that woman's name is cynthia brazil on dh this's three lights okay so we took a medium shamir a soft books now at this point we were with our diner lights which are going to be joining us in a moment so we've got a big soft blocks here that's giving us this nice soft light we were using a grid set here before we've been using road grids here we're using a dinos set of grits and then we took another grid and put it on the robotic flower know why you need a robotic laura I don't know but it's a mighty and they think this stuff so this we already looked at the picture of viana in a couple of minutes we're actually going to recreate this photograph for you but if we take a look in it a little bigger look at the highlights and he on his hair okay look at this pattern that's the pattern that keiko created out of taking the city for a lot of lighting kit cutting the pattern in it so when we shot a while ago this is henry louis gates on professor gates ironically I actually photographed him last week at harvard commencement with oprah and if you pick up a copy of this week's usmagazine there's a photograph of him and oprah in the magazine walking by the john harvard statue this put this picture goes back a while and this is professor gates against the white wall and how we made the white wall change colors well, we let the professor where the grid he wanted to be photographed with the two boys statue so we moved the statue a little bit away from the wall remember? We're bottom lighting things and throwing shadows up. Well, here it is. We threw the shadow up called the wall a little bit yellow. What happens if we take our piece of sini foil and instead of completely wrapping a strobe head in it on this one we only rap part of it what happens is like you saw with the road grid where you get the drop off. Well, if you have it going all the way around you're going to get the drop off all four corners if you only wrap one corner then it's going to drop off in that one corner so this is giving us tons of control this's a really fun picture. This was we did a cake when I did a workshop for pocket wizard and they very nicely invited us up to burlington, vermont and with a group of photography's we lit this bar. Now this barn is an acre the floor space, not the whole bar. The floor space of this barn is one acre in size, which was good because we got to drive the car right onto the set and just left it there all day but if you take a look at every window in here every single window that's lit has a strobe in it has a different strobe innit? You know I mean the question was well how many lives does it take to light a large barn and the answer is all of them on her if you come up in here they're like large sets of mostly dinos so there's a couple in here there's a couple of there's a couple in here there's another here and this is an assortment of fine alights and some other studio strobes and speed light and every single one has a pocket wizard on it you can imagine how many pocket wizards that took and then next to the farmers so this is this gentleman's barn or one of his barns on dh there's ah medium shamir a soft box right here so we're firing this strobe so I'm not really far away we're firing this strobe that's sending the signal to this light all right and then we get in here we got a fire all these will some of these lights are so far away remember I mentioned the repeater mode that's how those were fired I was on the repeater mode on dh this was actually you want to see how this was done if you either go teo rick friedman dot com there's a section of videos in there there there's a video on how this was created and this was done by the entire group on dh we're going to kind of get through this and then I'm sort of thinking maybe we'll do a group photo I'm quite figured that out yet but we got a lot of smart creative people here in good twenty five minutes to do it so we should be able to figure this out so this thing was actually lit this was fun we did this in about two hours and all it took was eighteen professional photographers and a couple of pocket was a tech guys this one here this's blowing shadows on the sky this is all done in camera this is not photo shop there is no photo shop in this picture other than bringing the levels so all these shadows on the sky we had an enormous strobe system out there and we blue shadows onto the sky married at that last few moments of light unfortunately we made one colossal error we brought all the gear hood during daylight and didn't bring a flashlight because it was dark when we were done this was one of the larger lighting jobs they've ever done. So this is a radio telescope in harvard mass this is sort of like e t phone home telescope thing is eight stories high it's six stories across and it's silver and color so we lit it and jelled it there's about nine sets of dinah lights around this thing it's probably on a couple of generators on to the streaks those of the stars on we took some orange gels just like out of the lighting kit stuck him over the head but the camera's on a tripod and farted and then sat there all night ducking bats that was a lot of fun this was a peace we got this assignment go photograph a composer at the piano hey there's an original idea we've never seen before so where's the comedians they were not doing that so on the way over the currents well let's just go get a piece of plexi and have him write sheet music on the plexiglass and then photographed him through the plexiglass so this was a port a magazine portrayed on the assignment is to go photograph the gentleman this is what we came up with this particularly one here. This one includes a lot of elements that we've been talking about. So this scientist has a wall pretty much like this if I think his was cinder block you could sort of say little cinderblock wall there okay, what you're seeing in the background that's projected so we just took his laptop we plugged a projector into a projected it on the wall now I have the basis of my exposure the element I can't control now I need toe light the gentleman and this was lit with dina lights I take my grid from my dinos I put some tough spot on it take it right out of the lighting kit now put some tough spot on its soften it up because I can't have my white light hit that wall my white light hits that wall it's gonna blow it away so now I've lifted the scientist and I've let the background we get a couple of monitors in this so there's another ambien exposure on dh after while I was getting tired of white microscope so I thought I would make this one yellow so literally what I did is I went and I just grabbed a shitty yellow jell o when we're in here there should be a sheet of yellow jell o come on there it is I see it there's a shitty yellow jell that's gonna pull this out and then by a very technical means I hear this to the to the front of the dialect that's created where's my roll of tape I just taped it on there and then I took the center foyle and I scrunched it down until I was just throwing yellow light where I wanted yellow light go by bending the senate foil I'm completely aimed at wherever I wanted to go the only thing I had left was I looked at it you know the lenses are a little born just looked like your officer so you don't have yellow microscopes there I didn't think so anyway the lenses were a little boring so I have these tiny little strobes like twenty five what's second slave unit and I just took a shit in green out of the package cut a little piece off of the green taped it over the little front of this slave unit and it's actually sitting right on top of the far side of the microscope smellem backlighting the lenses and that's what's giving us the highlights in there so it almost comes under the category of creative playthings this was a fun one so we get to this assignment and the editor has informed me that all of the gentleman's work is theoretical so I think I'm going to go photograph the guy in front of his computer and I get there and the gentleman study zebrafish oops there's sort of a minor miscalculation. Okay, so I turned to the assistant I say to the assistant this was before keiko was working with me I say to the assistant go to the car and bring me everything and something said to me about this shoot like, you know, throw a couple of extra cases of dinah lights in the car for the whole back of the car was full of gear although we went in with a small amount of care and I get this look like what do you mean everything it's like literally just you bring it? I'll think this off so this is what we ended up doing with the gentleman and the way this is lit on the far side of the tanks on both sides is a dyna lite packing to dyna lite heads, okay, there's, a gobo, right, just a piece of foam core in between the two heads, one head has a blue gel like right out of the package taped over the front of it. The other head has a green jell taped over the front of its that simple. Then I do the same thing on this side. Now. I've got my back lights blowing through the tanks, so now we've got everything lit, but our scientists want to point something out. You see a little hot spot right there was sitting on top of that tank is a speed like in the plastic stand with the grid on it aimed at his face. So the light that's illuminating the gentleman is the speed light. So here we've gone, and we've mixed speed lights and studio strokes.