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Lesson Info

Outdoor Events at Night

We're going to talk about something that's very, very similar so you've seen the theme here today is shooting and really low light and so the next scenario we have our events at night outside events outside at night events that night outside like two different ways to say that and so these are when you're trying to take photos and it's completely dark outside the differences. When we first started this, we said we didn't care about ambient light on this one we're saying is, hey, I want some that's the difference first time we said we're shooting events outside at night we're shooting kids trick or treating and all that kind of stuff we said, who cares about me it like now are saying I would like some, I would like some, so what we're going to do here is we're going to again, we're going to the cannon because we can do, um we can actually tether it and I'm going to give this to john oh, you're going to take that up for me there you got it, okay, that little thing I'm just connecting by ...

the way, if you're wondering what this thing is the jerk stopper, it keeps me because I keep stepping on the cable that keeps it from flying out it's called jerk stopper and it's made by tether tools it's really cool and it's really secure actually awesome so this is events outside at night so what mode to use well again it's a simpler very, very, very similar to what we did earlier so we're going to choose to use aperture priority for manual mode depending on our shutter speed. So if you want if you don't care that you're shorter speeches really, really long, then you can just stick it on aperture priority mode and your shutter speeds going to drop to, you know, a few seconds and lesser shooting with a nikon and you've restricted that to a certain setting. Now I like to keep my shoulder around thirtieth of a second or faster and I like to do that to try to control the motion, the blur now you can cheat that though if you have a tripod, you can cheat that quite a bit can go down to maybe half a second or so I'm going to show that because that's sort of something that's really fun also we might need to use him gels, and so I'm going to get john's going to grab some of those gels that I showed you yesterday on bill we'll try to do some of that stuff here and then also we're curtain sink to add motion now this is f ate fish, one of the issues that we have here is we can't create we can't create the environment that is ideal and so I've done a lot of workshops it in las vegas so w p p I I've been there ah, a bunch of times it's really fun and so a lot of people want to go outside and shoot on the strip in las vegas or maybe if you're in new york, I want to go to times square or if you're in san francisco you to go down to you know the peers or if you're in you know you name it there's a place that you want to go mill avenue in phoenix it's the river walk in san antonio and on and on and on right? So when you're at that place, the lights that are outside even at night are much, much brighter than our little christmas lights are right here. Um and so sometimes those lights are so bright if you have your aperture open to two point eight and you slow your shuttered down too half a second or something is too much ambient light and so in those situations that we can't replicate here if you're shooting in a situation like that, you might be able to put your aperture to around f eight maybe ten maybe if seven so it's a ish to restrict the ambient light while allowing you to use that slow shutter to introduce a motion by still freezing the the subject so times square is the perfect place for this because those lines are way far away and so you can really separate what you're shooting the same thing the strip in vegas is perfect for this, so if anybody is out there, please take some pictures posted to the facebook page put this into practice, but we're going to try to emulate that in here with our little bringing christmas lights that aren't as powerful. So I'm going to keep those on going to shut off all of these video lights so that we can show you that so john and kill so you're gonna run and shut the video lights off and then yes oh, did you? Of course uh, right, I always forget this is the day three meltdown, so one of the things I love about nikon then I always forget is I'm gonna tether this so you guys can see this like, on has controls on outside of their cameras that you don't have to dive into the menus so you can change me during motion all kinds of different love it so one of those controls is a flash button you push that flash button and then at the very top actually will use this camera here the very top you can see that there is a little icon, you can change your curtain red eye reduction nothing rear curtain red eye reduction nothing that's a turn on rear current sink is just pushing a flashback some night cons like I know the d seven hundred I think has the it's on this side there's little button there but right uh thank you gelsey the chap who helped me thank you chat room okay yeah it's that flashman like of course okay so events outside at night we're going to try tio capture some ambient light I'm gonna add actually some of these lamps that were a little bit too bright and they're going to try to do some color correction as well so what I have is my five eighty x two on my cannon and then come forward just a little bit a little bit more because I want to make sure we have some separation between you and the background and then I'm going tio ad one of these rogue soft boxes I love these things these air terrific are we giving these away yeah we're giving some of these away their north yeah yeah they're great not yet not yet so first what I'm going to do someone has set my settings according to what I just said so to point my shutter speed is thirtieth of a second and we'll just start there we're gonna start there and again this was almost like difficult to what it was before right almost identical so I'm on a tripod instead of a boat I'm on a tripod and you can see we get a nice balance of ambient light and background lights now I'm going to do something here though I'm going to take my shoulder speed and I'm going to take it down and take it down to about a tenth of a second and then sarah what I want you to do is to fake dance I just needed to do the twist that's right? Just twist and twist pretty fast here we go okay, so I'm doing this twist so we can see how our flash freezes motion so we have that so she was dancing around that'd be great in fact let's have you to us so much that you're like doing a commercial with your hair okay? Area so we have a lot a lot of motion and you can see that we're gonna be a freeze this motion here. See that pretty cool, huh? Pretty pretty cool. I'm gonna take this off my tripod now and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna introduce you live even more motion just a little bit and I want to show you that we might need to change your aperture, so I'm gonna count three when you do the same kind of carefully be thing, okay one, two, three go okay, so I introduced some motion through this and I got nothing but hair on the shot so we'll do it one more time and look out crazy that is looks like her face got sort of crazy off there that weird? Yeah, because some of her face was illuminated by the ambient light and some was limited by the flash and he got just not a good shot of sarah so we're gonna try one more time there you go. Yep twist ok and one more time we have no face on sarah ok and that's because you know she's facing away but you can see how we can add motion to this so what I want to do is show you why if you're outside at night not in a dark room like this you might need it change your aperture value someone take some of these lamps here I want to turn them on. Turn these guys on we'll see if you could turn that one on turn this guy on? Yeah, there we go. Now we have all these lamps these air going to emulate what it might be too will be on um the strip something like that and specifically there's one really bright lamp back there. What I'll do is I'm going to take the picture with the same exact settings we had before and notice what's happened here to the lamps because they're much brighter than those then these christmas lights so now we have a lot of background light, right? And so if we wanted to slow down our shuttering in balance that now I'm going to have to do outside and this kind of an environment just take my aperture value and shrink it down a little bit. We'll try that one more time, taking my aperture value, shrinking it down. So now we're at an aperture value that is about I don't remember is going to appear in four point five, so we're starting to control that that ambient light back there, all right? And I didn't focus it on syria, folks, that on the land we're controlling that I can even take that and make it a little bit smaller, okay? And we're seeing that we're going to get less and less of that ambient light, so we're getting a little bit less of that so that's that f eight now I can start creeping my shutter back up, so now I'm a thirtieth of a second taken here that shut her much faster, so I might have to start controlling it that way, and you'll see that that, uh, starts to drop now, one of the things I want to show you let's show those two exposures side by side there's something interesting happening here, it has to do with the color so you can see the color on sarah is starting to shift and also you see that the color of this background is a little bit different than sarah is so what I want to do here is going to get one of those uh, gels and we're gonna jell this so the one of me using here this's a mister can use that in the back here we have jails that warm and cool are flash these air incandescent lights, incandescents or a new orangish light some of those air fluorescent so they're all different color temperatures but I'm gonna grab a gel that's just a little bit more orange going here there's like so many to choose from so many to choose from all right? So I have this old jail and I want to stick that on my flash he's going to stick this on here what I'm doing is I'm trying to get the flash to more closely match what we're getting behind us so now that that's on there I can still put the modifier on it and it's going to have a different color of light new this think this on here snapped it on okay? We're gonna try this one more time so I was looking right at me when I focus on you this time instead of the background good now we've changed the color of our flash and it changes the color of our background now look the background and the foreground all look the same color except for this one really bright light and it's not the right color right it's all I because I still have my flash and auto white balance and the flash thinks that the white balance is what the flashes so I need to take it off auto white balance so take it off a lot of white male the flash is telling a are white balances flash when taking off that white balance I could use a great card that's the best thing to get this exposure to work but I don't put this in um in the incandescent light months a little light bulb okay and see how we do there so I've got it change now and now look what happens crazy huh yeah now are color is this is more natural it's this lamp and sarah look correct because this lamp and sarah have the same color temperature but everything else is a different color temperature so we have basically one two, three, four, four or five different color temperatures behind her so to match this with a gel is going to be impossible because we have five different color tips so if all of the lamps happened to be incandescent then now everything would look right but they're not we have sarah and lamp that look right everything else is looking sort of greenish so the gels were terrific if you have one thing to balance two, if you have several things in balance to then you're going to have to choose. Which thing is the most important thing to balance with. And so what we could do is shut some of these off. We could wrap these lights with gels. We could start doing all kinds of stuff that sort of crazy for this application. But you can see how the gels really change, how the light behaves and how we match light.