Lessons

Lesson Info

Light Metering

We're going to everything on manual one hundred percent on manual this you know, this getting this down it doesn't take very long you can figure this out and an afternoon just shooting and once you know, this is so uh just will free you because you'll know exactly what your exposure is every time and it will just work work, work, work we did it outside upon the roof you saw how fast we could do it it's very faster so what we're going to do here is we are assuming that the ambient light is not going to be a part of this photo that's what we're assuming we're going to overpower this ambient light and so to make this work so I think we're going to have you over here so every khun see what we're doing and then when I put this sort of to the right of you so that these cameras can sort of see what we're doing here, maybe we can move this this big huge tv back, huh? Okay, so what we have here let me first talk to you about what we have going on here this is a cannon five eighty e x to this co...

uld be an espy nine ten it could be any flash doesn't really matter what it is, but we've set it and I'll walk it over here saying see we've said it to full manual mode so I pushed the mode button so I can push mode and it goes to full manual mode we have a nikon flash you bring one out I could show you how to do that so just pushing this mode button takes us to full manual mode right now it says one slash one and um let me going to grab one of these and then I'll grab that one um and then maybe even the sb seven hundred as well so by setting into full manual this one over one means full power one hundred percent power is much light is this comm possibly pump out by pushing this a little set button that starts to flash and now when I move it left it says one over one minus point three that means that's one third less light by hit it again point seven two thirds less light I go one more half power and I can just keep dialing that down down down, up up up so that's how I change how much light is coming out of my flash and all speed lights have that wanna grab yours so this is a totally different life I've never seen it before sb six hundred and I've not worked with one of these before but I can show you maybe that it works all turn it on here we go and let's see if we have a full manual maybe we go yeah here mode so push moat look, it looks the exact same thing one over one I can push minus and you can see that it's doing the same thing and one half negative seven quarter power zero quarter power negative three negative seven so it's saying eighth power eighth and a third eight and two thirds so it's just less power, more power so we're just taking the light up taking it down that's how that works very, very simple so if we have a nikon sb nine ten same kind of thing I push mode I take the mod ill and go to manual and then I can take that pushing the m button right here I can take that power down and you'll see it still says the same kind of thing so all we're doing there in the back here flash is there's the ability to say I want less power or mode more power I think well, yelling shoes from this guy right here is ah sb seven hundred it's a little bit different to change the mode there's a civil slider switch so you push that to manual once you get there, then you can go in there and start changing the power output on that as well, so hits select you can start rolling it up or down so it doesn't really matter which flash you have somewhere on the back here flash there's a way to set it to manual and then change the power output ok so when I say when we started zipping along here and I start saying we're going to take the power of the flash down that's what we're doing or take the power up that's all we're doing is we're going in there and dialling it from full power the half recorder to get it to where we want it to be ok still with me all right so the next thing we've done with this flash is for doing this in full manual mode and so we decided to use a radio trigger for this now we could have done this with the line of sight infrared if we wanted to we just wanted to mix it up a little bit so it is we have a pocket was plus three here um and for everybody that wants to know when you can buy these I think they're in stores this week I don't know so if you're wondering I think they're out there we got like you got some earlier and all this does is it will send a signal through this cord and it will tell the flash to fire that's it that's all it will do ok so when it goes like this it fires that's it so I will be able to tell this flash of fire so all this flash is doing now it's not doing n e t t ell me during the ninja has retired its doing exactly what I tell it to do every time. Okay. Now, if we really wanted to be awesome with this, what we would do is we put an external battery pack to really lock things now, so we're not going to do that right now so we can keep things a little bit simple. Okay, so what I want to do, we want to get this to f ten. Is that correct? That always said, but something to get my populace or so this meter, by the way, has this little module in it right here. This little module is a pocket wizard. So it's a radio trigger. So when you see me firing the flash from this what's happening is there's a little radio inside there. That's telling that to fire now most most meters specifically, see connick meters. So, do you still have yours? Let me swept. Swap you really fast me check yours doesn't have this. Year's has a new transmitter, but you're not out of luck at all. You can still use this and so there's. Two ways to use this with a speed light one is you can get a sink cable that goes from this and plugs into the side where this is so you can actually use a cable to do that thea other thing you can do that's probably easier and I'll show you on this camera right here there's a mode on this meter I go over here says flash it's just a little flash um and what that does is when I push my meat oring button that's a button on the side here that's how you measure the light notice that this is flashing this little teeny little teeny thing right there that's flashing and this is called um auto reset cordless flash me during mode. Yeah, that took me a long time to memorize that auto reset cordless flash me during mode what I call it is you, khun, do this without a cord that's what that means so what it means is when you push the button, the meter just waits for a flash to fire and when a flash fires then it'll take a reading so to prove this what I'll do is I'll take a transmitter here so this is sit on the right channel yet? Let me see here. Yeah, so we're not getting it. I have my flash and time it to turn off after it's not used to it was timing up, so this will trigger that flash okay, so let's get an external battery packs it's a little slow it's a little slow so what's happening here is watch this we'll show you this on this camera so I have this light here turn this so it can actually see ok I told it to wait for a flash it's just waiting around flash fires see it's it sees it and understands it if I go closer flash fires you can still see it so it just waits around for a flash to fire and when it does fire it shows up there okay to go closer to her right in her face and our two meter the flashier you still have to do that? Yes so when you're meet a ring with a light meter like this it is me during the light where it's falling so if I am mentoring her face I can't meet her it over here because that's not where the light is I need to meet her right here and the loomis fear this little white dome has to be pointed right at the position of the camera so if I am taking a picture over here where josh is ok so I'm gonna take the picture right here when I meet her the light I need to meet her the light right where my camera is going to be so not this way not that way not down on over here you need to be right here right where my cameras okay there's some more advanced metering modes where you can put the limits for down a meter specific lights to get ratios you might get into that tomorrow but for now if you were just starting out and you're doing portrait's underneath the chin right at the camera okay, so I'll do that man and that meters at what my nine f nine is what that says we'll show you guys right here it shows f nine okay, so f nine if I set my camera to f nine we have a proper exposure but what did we want? Ten okay, so the question is this can I go anymore on this flash? No it's his bright as it can possibly go right now but I can't do this could push it closer let's think of pushing it closer will get us to ten am this meters at thirteen? Yeah inverse square law is going on here so that's a little bit more soldiers back it up this a little bit until we get into f ten, right eleven right now we're pushing back a little bit more way have ten okay, now you still following me? Good because I'm having his meter in a second all right, so now what I'm going to do is my light meter I had it set to a two hundredth of a second my cameras in manual moon I have it set to two hundred of a second I meet it at ten my apertures that have ten my light meters at one hundred my cameras at one hundred so we've set all three points of the exposure triangle all right, let's take a picture. I'm not tethered I should be tethered so I'll take a picture once I'm tethered and we can show you what this looks like fresh uh, fresh you have a question mark here ready. Okay, let me take this one picture very quickly way we'll see if my settings are correct they are and that right I I knew that it would work because the science proves it and you can see that I have this picture that's properly exposed it's probably exposed every time we have nice soft light and it just it's right every time and so if I want to be a two point eight we can get there if we want to be so we'll do another one maybe two and we'll do an adjustment where we change the power of the delight and we'll do another one but let's let's ask questions and answer some questions really quickly you've got one kobe wire going below the chin and not look at the nose okay for let me show you so I need to go teo this camera right here to show this so why have you come out here this way and turn sideways by the way don't do this to models it's really forget I have I tell people all the time doing touch models and then attrition so what I want to do is I want to expose right where the eyes are that's really what's important to me is to make sure that the eyes are crystal clear and exposed correctly if I wanted to can you put your hair back there so if I put this right here my movie this week at her eyes so look up that's not really good right? I can poke an eye out we don't want to do that it's like running with scissors don't do it so that's no good it's going to turn you back underneath her chin so you know right here notice that the loomis fear is right in line with where her eyes are so it keeps the loomis fear at the same distance but there's one other reason for that so enough moving back this way if you are outside in bright sunlight and you're meeting ambient light okay this is just a bonus tip and you metered like maybe beside her face right what's happening is sometimes really bright sunlight that hits the loomis fear directly can throw off your meter ring it can actually cause problems by meeting underneath the chain you're actually eliminating that problem you're sort of shading the light meter and it will fix that so kind of like if you're in a park with, like trees and right, so some guys will meet her like this when they're meeting. Um, you know that, so photographers will do this to get light meter, and I do portrait, almost always. And so I just am under the the habit of doing it underneath the chin, like I didn't even know the trick about that. Will, you know, save some of that until the guys I talked to this iconic people all the time, because they tell me when I'm messing up, I'm teaching, uh, they're like, we love that. You teach that thing because if you know, and I'm like, oh, I had no idea. So I accidentally learned how to do that.