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Introduction of Working with Flash

My name's drew consul men and I'm your host for this segment. This is working with flash with pie jirsa pie is thie founder of slr lounge and in addition to that he is the founder and owner of linenger's of photography if I take it away, man, this course is about learning how powerful your on camera flash can actually be as well as we're going to talk about off camera flash and so forth, but we're going to build a foundation into lighting and they're silent they're like that was that good? Yeah, so I like to do this. I like my audience to kind of like, interact mea little bit it kind of helps me to know and since you guys really well, you guys can actually chat in the chat room too, and they can ask questions, but for you all, I want to hear you guys doing something like you guys can say like yep, got it you guys, whenever something sinks in, whenever the lightbulb clicks, I want to actually hear it because sometimes I can't see it on your faces so you can say whatever you want to be a...

men love it getting spiritual army hallelujah you can stand up and clap your hands, you can go, but if you go what I'll be like, yeah, they got it because I was like the surprise what? So anyway, guys, I'll give you guys a little background on who I am and who we are as a company on we'll dive right into this thing. So about seven years ago we started linenger's a photography was actually in two thousand eight I'm not going to go into all the nitty gritty details because it's a long story we shot our very first wedding on their linen jirsa in two thousand eight is about june and yeah, and then we're like, hey, this is cool let's actually learn how to take better pictures and then we went on the course of learning how to become photographers it's funny a lot of times photographers we kind of get these opportunities to do things and we don't really know how to do them where is like yeah let's try it out you just kind of learn as you go, but what we want to do is when we started linenger's of a degree might my task in the company was the overall kind of creative direction they was figuring out like our photographic style figure out how to take pictures, figure out howto light how to do all the things that that you need to be doing the photographer and justin and chris, my two amazing business partners in addition to studying the artistry and that kind of stuff they took the front side of the marketing and the business and dealing with clients and selling and, uh, guys, I know how to take okay pictures, but what I'm truly proud of is the two partners I have, chris and justin are absolutely incredible, and they make it possible to do what we do. So we started living just photography the first year that we were going we shot, I don't know thirty, forty weddings, we were doing whatever we could possibly get our hands on low budgets, no budgets, anything I sound like a car salesperson right now low budget, no, but we'll finance, you know? But we were doing it all, and then it started to slowly kind of grow um today we shoot nearly a thousand client commissions a year as a company, three hundred, two hundred fifty, those air weddings, the rest is portraiture, commercial fitness, everything else you know, and we have a team about forty people in the studio that helps us to do what we do, and they're amazing. And when I got to actually, when I got the creative live, the people here are amazing and you kind of realize just how important the team is that you work with because they're the ones that make it all possible in create life has an incredible team, so thank you for having me two years into linenger's photography, we started our lounge, which it was actually just way did it because we're growing the studio, and we thought, hey, we need a way to train our own people, so I thought, why not just put the education online? Oliver on, people can read it if other people like it and enjoy it. Great. It was a couple years later, we had, like fifty thousand people inside a month, and we're like, hey, maybe we should actually do something with this. And then today we have about a million monthly readers that follow a site and follow what we do, and we focus on basically riel world shoot education. This past year, we started ldp studio. This is our commercial arm, that's, my little concept logo, which we're waiting for the actual logo on, and we also teamed up with my good friend and my partner, gavin weighed with cloud spot. So cloud spot is a new platform that we developed to make it's simple and easy to deliver images professionally to your clients, who I have my clicker in my pocket. Ok, so that's, who we are and what we do, I wanted to talk a little bit about our journey and the lighting, because, basically, like when we started the studio, it was you kind of take these baby steps moving forward and what we want to do is kind of accelerate that process for you all but basically you start by learning natural light you learn how to position you learn how to do exposure control reflector modification we went from that into hdr I'm going to show you some slides were quick so naturally I love natural light in orange county we have these beautiful kind of sunsets in these fields and it's just it's fantastic natural light is such a beautiful thing that creates amazing looks and so this is all just natural light stuff here were actually free lensing holding a lens slightly off camera to kind of create that nice blur we don't do a lot of photos of guys on our images so what you're seeing is pretty much out of the camera with a light room adjustment basically naturally is it's still probably is my favorite just light source I love what it does you know I love putting a bride in front of a window and just getting her into a pose where we can see your form I love having you know, just walking down the hallway you can see like none of these things there this is just all about positioning and being in the right place at the right moment and so forth these are my kids that even my four year old ellie my two year old kind of a funny story one day I was like is on a sunday and ask my wife and I we should take the kids out for a photo shoot she's like do you have a suit tux for ethan and like a dress for ellie she's like yeah that's weird why do you have a suit tux for ethan and a dress for elliot doesn't make any sense let's go do the shoot anyway I found out later on because they're going to be in a little wedding that is coming up and so she actually had them so we took him out to a field little shot again all natural light we're letting the sun bleed into the frame from the right side and these kind of things are beautiful they're simple they're they're relatively easy just a matter of getting the right exposure so this is natural light with a bit of modification we're using a california sun bounce off to the left the camera and bouncing light into it and then at some point we g o you know what justin kris I got all these white skies in my photos I need to figure out how to get my white skies how to turn them in the skies so I started researching hdr and I loved hdr but the thing about it was most this stuff that I saw this was five six years ago everything I saw online was like the very over the top candied hdr that you see in like landscape stuff and I started trying it on portraiture but it does really weird things to skin tones right and it also looks kind of fake so we developed a little process where what we do is we snap the three shots like we would in hd are we process it as an hd are and then we take the one original bright shop and we actually blended back and so we blend back for skin totally blend back for realism we tone down the hdr and we end up getting really beautiful natural types of images that have all the detail in the shot we don't do any photoshopping on these it's just we called on hdr hybrid composite that they're really complicated you gotta make name sound complicated because when you tell your clients like yeah we're going to hdr hybrid composite but if you're like I'm just going to take three photos and put them together and photo job they're like well why are we paying you all this money to do it so if you don't take home anything else take home that I'm just getting that's now what you should be doing you okay again another hdr another one we do have a lot of beautiful backdrops in california okay this the previous one so then it came to lighting and learning and understanding flash and so we go okay what's actually on stand off camera flash and lighting we start incorporating that and why? Because hdrs while they're awesome again everyone these techniques we still use today we still use in our style it just depends on what our clients are going for but understanding lighting is fantastic because now I can do it all in camera as opposed to having to do it later on there are still times when I shoot hdr images because of convenience because I don't have time to set up a light because of whatever but if I can save the fifteen minutes and postproduction by just doing in camera, I will so again this is just a camera are sorry obviously it's a camera we use to camera to take this photo it's a light placed off to the right side flashing the couple same thing here we have just small pockets troves I call my strobes pockets robes or full strokes because pockets sounds cute and I like it don't you like that sound like pocket strobe stick in your pocket it's harmless ok, so we put those off to camera left and we're flashing we're using a very high aperture here of like f fourteen and we're just basically moving up and down slightly so we can get that starburst right between the couple's faces so when you close down the aperture, have you guys noticed that it actually creates a starburst effect over lights that's what it does so shooting wide open is awesome, but closing down is great, too. For effect, this was done the bahamas again, same thing, the flashes off the camera, right? Was it done in just the groom's hotel rooms? This is an led place off the left side of his head that just adding a little bit of light. It's, a constant light will use any kind of light that we possibly can. This is a rembrandt light off to the left side of the story, the right side and it's, just a flash pointed back towards him. We're going to talk about all these different techniques today, again, using these are all out of camera guys were using light here to chisel them out of frame. Doesn't it look like they're kind of, like, just dropped on that background, and it looks like they just pop out of the frame? It's just some added light at a certain direction to make it so they pop, and then we go let's get crazy. So now that we understand off camera lighting, let's dive into multi point lighting, that's what we call basically using multiple off camera light setups, combining more than one flash, combining constant and flash and so forth, so this is a flash place on two sides of the wine this is like a wine room basically right? So they have flashes on the outside on each side we use a warm led light for the couple and we just pop a shot and the lights coming through light up all the glass and it makes it look all crazy stuff. This one went to the new york times, these are local venues here we're using a costume line, the front we're going to spray mist into the air and then fire off a flash to light up the spray. We're going to do that today, I can't get a couple to wet, but we're gonna do it a little bit. Here we have flashes hidden behind the columns and then our reception lighting like we actually this is literally how every one of our reception shots is goingto look, either we're going to do this type of lighting set up, we're gonna do a twist shot, which we'll show you both, but we're placing lights in corners of the room throughout the room. We're switching channels as we go. We're going to talk about all this stuff and they were using a light on camera to pop, so the lights in the back of the room is actually with lighting up the confetti, but we're not washing out the room color. You know, a lot of times when you go into a room and you start popping flash you wash out all that beautiful ambient light I'm gonna show you guys how to balance that like oh yeah this couple wanted to dio an eighty style workout for their engagement sessions so I'm like yeah so they dressed up like this and I was like, what bench press my flashes and like each one was lighting you up like that sounds cool so we did this shot so the flashes air lighting each other and they look very aggressive aggressively engaged this is at the st regis again two lights in the back there lighting at the fountain we have a light place to recommend a couple that's double jelled well talk about yelling in this course then we start getting into stuff we're actually mixing techniques now we're doing things like adding flash we are slowing down the shutter we're doing a bunch of things to combine so this is a slow shutter these air slow shatters with duties shutter drags and how to freeze your subjects to get motion this is what we call a whip pan where you basically put the camera on a tripod and you whip it back and forth with a flash that freezes the subject so this is an office building in the background that's what happens when you slow down the shutter shutter drags down in laguna beach I love I love should shen drags in downtown I'll shut a dragon right here love shattered drags um simple compositing this frame actually had a person holding up her vale and lights right here we take two shots when composite we'll talk briefly about that but we're gonna go into all these different techniques that were teaching and the whole point is mastering light. Um I have something I see in the studio lot photography is light understand it in the world is going to open up to use the photographer meaning that it's lighting is just it's incredibly simple when you just understand the basics of it. Okay, when you get the basics it's easy. The problem is that most workshops they teach you from the gear standpoint, right? They start with loads of gear. You need to have this. You need to have this. And then from there we're going to refine your images and then from there you gonna practice the principles and then you're gonna learn the foundation of lighting it's upside down. We need to teach everyone how powerful just an on camera flash could be. Okay teach you how to shape and sculpt that. Teaching the foundation with just the most basic of gear and then slowly working to practicing and refining and eventually when you get to the point where you refine your images and you go man I could really use something in this kind of a situation to help me out that's when you go in you expand your gear so we want to kind of start upside down so what this is this entire course is an excerpt from our lighting one on one and lighting to one course lighting one o one is all about creating amazing images using just your on camera flash we're going to teach the entire foundation of lighting with just that flash were so you had to create multiple point lights light sources with just your on camera flash and then we get into leading to one which is single source off camera lighting eventually we'll go into a three one four one but we want to show you all how incredibly powerful each of these small little tools that you already own are all right. So the whole point of this is to say we talked about that quote the tardis like understand the world's going to open up to you I'm gonna show you today what our firsts look like, which means that whenever we approach something now whenever I get asked to a client shoot a commercial, shoot a fitness shoot all these different things this is from our past year of firsts and as some of the time I'll show you some of my first bursts like seven years ago their terrible they're there I think every single one of you starting out probably takes better pictures than I did when I started up. First time I did fitness, it was kind of interesting. We did a tutorial on this to teach how to create a commercial. Images are very first fitness shoot ever. I put up to strip lights on the outside in a beauty dish above his head. We kick some fog in the room to kind of create some ambiance into it. We did this educational piece for us, our lounge to show how to create a commercial image. This's just a conceptual shoot that we did not list stairmaster, schwinn they came in, they bought the images for they bought seven images for over ten thousand dollars, and it was just to show people how to create commercial images are very first time doing fitness. I should point this way there you can sew that same shoot. So this is all part, that same fitness shoot my first time doing what like conceptual boudoir stuff again, the light we're using the exact same lights, it's just we're modifying a different we're modifying it to have a very soft look in these images versace and the other ones, they have a very hard and defined kind of edge my first time doing a conceptual fashion thought it'd be fun to go in go to the desert were like let's do it for lighting to one let's teach people how to do conceptual fashion stuff and had a light for that. So we go there and is the first time I've done any of these types of things I love this one because most the time we think it's photographers like oh we're gonna add light put their back to the sons of their backlit and then adelaide from the front there's so many more interesting ways of lighting this is one of them I have are actually facing the sun and I put a large flash right here and so what it does is it chisels her out so the light is actually matching where the sun is coming from, so it were matching the direction just boost her up. So what ends up looking like it's just like she's? A little bit brighter than the background and it lifts her out of the frame creates really nice highlights. I walked into gmg automotive there, a famous professional racing group, and they also do service they do high end european one hundred thousand dollars plus cars on lee and I talked to james difference he's there he's actually a professional race car driver for rowdy on I'm like james, let me come and shoot your cars he's like if you shot the before I'm like no let me do it that it was like, ok, so we went and we shot there. Gmg, portia, this is the ports that they sell, basically two clients. Um, this is the first hero shot my very first time doing automotive shoot all we're doing guys with these is it's, not to say how great we are, how great any of these things are. It's, just simply to show that if you understand these lighting principles, you khun go and apply it to anything. You simply do a little studying online, and then you say, ok, how can I manipulating adapt what I have to fit this scene and that we're going to showing you, by the way, this is not anyone asked me. Is that exhaust coming out like, no, I would pass out of those exhausts, its a fog machine, right underneath the car we piped in.