Lessons

Lesson Info

Butterfly/Clamshell Lighting

I want to show you another lighting set up okay, okay we're gonna keep going on portrait we've got time to do this I want to show you something that's called it's called butterfly light or one light set up let's say that you have one speed light and you really want to get a nice portrait and, um what do you do? Well I'm gonna assume they have one speed like that you can take off their camera ok, so we don't bring sarah back out and bring you back out here, sarah and what we're going to do is we're gonna have you sit in the chair and I think that right here is good that's fine right there you want to do here is I want to get I mentioned earlier that just straight on light isn't very flattering unless it isthe sometimes it is okay sometimes you can do some really cool stuff so I'm going to do here is I'm going to use my soft box and I'm going to put it right above serious face okay, so certainly just set up base this way every yo so she's going to sit up there I'm going to elevate this j...

ust above my camera's lens just above the lens of my camera see if we get this to fit in here so you wouldn't get it to fit okay, so I'm zooming in its seventy millimeters here dig it and I want just to be right above where my lenses and if I can lower a little bit I will and this is just starting to peek into my lens and so I will have to raise that just a little bit now what I might do is, um if I had a longer lens of seventy two, two hundred I could sort of cheat this little bit normally I'm not shooting on a tripod when I'm doing this so I can shoot around but we're going to do here is I'm going to not use this in what will this do in manual mode since we're already set for manual mode so this guy's in manual mode I need to make sure it's in normal manual mode yeah let's just get a pocket wizard out here and we'll just dial this in this way you can use it tomorrow levin method or you can do what we're doing which is just sort of dialing it in okay, great so you can trigger this however you want to contribute with your radio trigger, you contribute with your line of sight whatever works for you doesn't matter that it's the er is the shaping of the like that we're talking about now so we have them meter ok, here is the meter all right, I want to meet her this make sure it's actually firing remember this has a radio trigger built in so I'm gonna meet her this heading young look straight and sit up there we go this meters at six point three which is close to where I like to shoot which is five point six so we're just going to go with six point three to save a little bit of time and mysteriously my camera was on six point three wow it's craziness okay so what I want to do here we get up is take a nice shot we're gonna make sure my lens is ready to go okay we have this light falling um and what happens is we're getting the shadows underneath right shadows underneath so what we're going to do is we have a reflector so kelsey's gonna come out we'll have this little some people call this clamshell light so kelsey stand over here so we can see and so some people will take this so if you could just sort of hold your arms out like that some people have a little clamp or something to hold that but we want to do is get this is close to syria's faces possible so it bounces like underneath so kelsey's gonna stand on this side she's going to do that so let me put it where is ok good right there it's good. All right now take a look at what this little chunk of styrofoam phone board does boy I know beautiful catch lights. Nice soft light. One light. Very affordable. It's a winner every time. Now, the other thing I can do is if I had a longer lens, I could show more of the top of her head. I can, you know, sort of move around. There were sort of cramped for space, but this is one of my very favorite lighting set ups because I can really control what's going on now, what I want to do here is I'm going to increase the power of my flash. Okay, we're going to increase the power, and I'm gonna meet her that really quickly. This is probably gonna meet her somewhere around thirteen. I'm guessing thirteen point three. I don't know how that happens. I don't know. I'm just guessing. Yeah, so we're thirteen and a third. Okay, so now we're just dialing down the aperture from, or depth of field received would actually get serious. And here good, good. Something is happening here. So this at the very top that's the soft box they had to watch for that. I liked the first one a little bit better, like the first one a little bit better because this one every single thing is in focus, and so we don't get that dreamy feel. So that's why I think that shall adopt the field is really important must do something else here let's play with the aperture a little bit more because I think it's important to take this down to a really low power setting this I think is going to be so sit up again here we go yeah that's one point for so that's what we need mohr life in that more life than that okay let's see if we get this up to two point eight as two point five so that's just a third stop away we're really close and so you could get this a two eight two point five I lied okay, so this should be two point eight minutes three point two so you sometimes my math doesn't work it all going to go with three point two area so we're just a third stop away looking right at me sarah good, good good. Excellent. Now this when we have three point two we're gonna start see that shallow depth of field so things are falling out of focus the back of her head, her shoulders, etcetera and that to me is a much better portrait much, much better ok, we still have a little bit more time we've got about fifteen minutes before when you take a break I think about that okay um so let's take a couple more questions lite, bright ass all your demos have been with colored backgrounds what if you want pure white would you blow out the background and keep your model perfectly exposed or how do you work in that situation? Ok, great question I used seamless white backgrounds or seamless paper that you can buy their come in roles that are nine feet wide or twelve feet wide and they just go for it thirty, forty, fifty feet depending on the length of role you buy and so normally I'll just hang one of those behind my subject but the question is can you just blow out the background let's try that because it's something that a lot of people try so you have to, uh just to bear five eighty excuse and I'll show you why this is not a good idea it's really not a good idea so he's gonna have to lights set him on full power pointing at the background kelsey's bringing one more here, okay? And that was at full power and one one to one and it needs a bucket wizard on it. All right? So going to get that so we're going to do here is we're gonna have this and it's because going to explode the light back there and so are getting a radio here somewhere to kelsey's bring that on out just bring it on out, okay? Awesome, thank you all right, so this one, I'm going to sit back to manual mode, so it was on radio trigger slave, so we'll do that, putting it on manual mode, it's at full blast, you see, if we can get is a many flashes and stands on this set is possible would be great. This guy has to be turned on. We're about ready to go, okay, there it is. All right, so what we're trying to do is just blow out the background. I just blow it out, so sarah looked right at me. All right, there was excellent. All right, we did blow out the background and look at what happens to this what's going on there's. So much reflection. Yeah, this isn't going to work for you because what's happening is the light. Bouncing off the background is going right into the lens of the camera and it's, lowering contrast and sort of get enough light toe overexpose when you're close to a wall like this. You get too much light going into the background and it's not really consistent on the lower right hand side. You can see we still have some of that yellow filtering in and so it's it's not the best thing to do. We can see that around her hair. The details are being lost specifically in hair, on african zoom in in light room, on the right side of her head. But on these hair strands right here, there's this weird thing that happens when you start to see detail being lost, and that happens when you have a bright, bright light coming from behind. Yeah, right to the right of her head. If you could move that over there we go, yeah, see these these right here, see how that's being lost. Yeah, so blowing out the background and doing something like that is something that I think every photographer has tried because the theory is, oh, yeah, we'll just make it much brighter than the subject will be over exposed, and then we can, you know, it'll be white, but what you're doing is you're throwing a massive amount of light into your lens, but the other thing that this shows is that you can put speed lights and throw him on a wall and throughout a massive amount of light for shooting groups and things so let's try one other thing let's do something else because we bounced our speed lights earlier why can't we bounce him now what we can so sarah let's hop up off that stool hump about that stool and so this light is now off this is off I'm gonna have you stand right over here right there you see just how much light so face me this way yeah go this way though. There's a camera in funny coming this way there you know it's like square dancing, huh? Uh like what do you want for me? All right. And these guys are they on yeah, I'm sure they're all there it goes on to make sure we had all of our zones on that's it four point five for both of them this one time down here we go. All right, now we're firing you now we're cooking with gas four point five all right, I am going to put my camera on four point five which is what that metered on what happened is these guys they timed out they went to sleep they went to sleep I'm going to try to take a shot right here of sarah using that bounce light and check it out we have nice soft light on sarah way also got everybody else in the background which is cool you can bounce light and get some cool stuff like that okay cool all right come back over here let's see if we have another question way absolutely dio ph ex photo dog would like to know when shooting portrait ce do use different life for men than you do women yes is a harder light or harder light and so on on their two basic styles of light called broad light and the other one is called paul light and it's basically on so if you speak up if you have your head so turn it this way a little bit quite that much just there you if you have a subjects that is has there had turned this way this is the broad side of that subject's face right the broad side and this is the tall side and so for men normally you try toe light maybe from back here and you try to do tall lighting you want illuminate this side and let this side going to shadow with women you generally like the broad side of their face and let the tall side go into shadow that's called broad lighting and tall lighting and some people think it's called broad lighting makes your lighting women who are broads but that's not it at all it's just the broad side in the tall side of a face so when I'm illuminating men I try to make it more hard light and a little bit more rugged so I might take a flash and actually shoot it this way and illuminate just that, but you can't get away with that on with most women specifically somebody really pretty like sarah it's not gonna look good, you wantto you want to really make that, you know very rugs that what your parts of men say yeah all my portrait of men have yeah, yeah most thie other thing with with portrait ce sidelight all right, so sarah looks straightforward sidelight when it goes this way sidelight goes this way it's going to cast shadows on anything that's elevated if you are doing senior portrait pse and use side like then any blemish on a person's face is going to be increased and augmented, so don't do that and it doesn't matter if you're shooting a guy or a girl. If you have a senior in high school that's got some acne don't use sidelight because it's going to take any little bump and cast a shadow and it will make their skin look worse than it actually is and that's just not a good a self esteem booster. So yeah, so so don't use hard sidelight with a person with limits is for skin problems just star from savannah, georgia wants to know what's the maximum size umbrella or soft box you would use with a speed light it's what we're using now and I don't know what the size of these guys are but they're about s oh, come on out. Chelsea it's the voice from from off, so okay, so it's thirty two inches. Yeah. There's a tag here that I will not remove because a ninja might come get me. Um, yeah, it doesn't say what about thirty two inches. It's about this big. I got a tape measure. Look atyou. Tape measure. Man, you wouldn't put one in a fifty inch softball. Forty one inches. I'm sorry. You wouldn't put one on a fifty inch box. Um, I would try it. Yeah, I would try it. Thie filling reason. I wouldn't put it in a larger soft boxes. What we saw this morning when you zoom out for maybe yesterday can't keep track when you zoom out your your flash tio have even coverage of something this large. The more you zoom it, the less power you get. And so if I put it in a fifty inch soft box and I had to get that soft box so close to my subject that you know, to get any kind of power that I would, I would have to stop.