Lessons

Lesson Info

Light Modification and Control with OCF

All right light modification and control we talked about this briefly and now I'm going to go into it in a little more depth house so what we're doing now is we're working off camera right? We're going to do off camera flash now this is a scene where we did this men's fashion is like a triumph triumph motorcycle tribute shoot basically and so we have our model in place we actually got there we kick fog in the background and we're shooting early in the morning so the lights coming through the fog and increase these beautiful streaks of light and this is our first shot just with the ambulance and to be honest, this is probably what most if you're an afterlife a tiger this is what you're going to shoot and it doesn't look bad okay? It doesn't look it looks great it's just it doesn't necessarily fit the vision that I want I wanted something dramatic, right? So I think we know if we want to go dramatic we gotta pull down the ambience so we go from one, one hundred second at one point four h...

undred with a five stop nd to one one hundred one point four, two hundred with our five something I think I shot this just for demonstrating purposes I wouldn't generally you don't put a nice like a nd filter on and then raise that high so that just doesn't make sense so I saw two hundred, and then we're pulling it up to six thousand kelvin just for our white balance. So obviously, at this point, we get more of these rays coming in. We can see some color in the sky a little bit. We pulled down and we have more shadow. It looks great. Now, we need to bring in a light to adam. Do you guys notice the placement of the subject? We have some natural lights on the scene. Yes. See how we have a rim light on this edge. Okay, that's, just all coming from our natural light in this scene, we have background lighting coming from the sun. We have this rim light coming directly from the sun. Andi have feel like coming from the front. So that's kind of already a pretty swell setup scene. We just need to add one single light to it. This is the beauty of we're now getting into off camera flash, and we want to show people how much could be done with just a single off camera light source, as long as you play subjects in the right place in the scene. Okay, so to control this, what we're doing is our gear list. We have our flash, we're using a triple bracket like this one, and we're using thiss guy this is the westcott apollo strip has seen these before but they're pretty fantastic. They're relatively inexpensive about a hundred bucks you can buy modified form they work so it closes and travels like an umbrella but when you open it the box kind of cool right? So all we gotta do now is just pop this right on and you can basically just open up the bottom zippers around the bottom we're talking about light control now so we're gonna open this up it's okay? I'm a professional which means I dropped crap all the time okay? I'm gonna put this through so you can see it. So the bracket one of the most common rumor the kind of common mistakes that are lighting assistants are probably gonna make when they first are doing this and what we're going to make everything we talked about making sure the flat the modifiers a good distance from the flash is right a lot of times they'll put it on and they'll do this and guess what if the if the flash is can't open up you're going to get a small light source and it's going to be a massive difference than just compared to this where the flash is gonna open up and hit this full in the back okay, all we do now is we just close up the bottom now we have a soft box on set okay, so and by the way if you use a swiveling head it's nice because you've been kind of angle it a little bit better if you have a swift like you just put this onto a little slow but all you need is an umbrella bracket that's a triple threat where you do three uh umbrella bracket is one like this guy all right he's popping through that part okay with that diffuse our sorry speculator diffusion right this would go up right here and we have our grid and it's gonna control the light spill again okay makes sense so all we did for this shot as we put up the diffuser we put up the grid inside of this I have this place off to camera right and it was firing right on his face I'm doing one or two things split light which is basically lighting half the face for dramatic purposes and then when I want rembrandt I just tilt the face the chin towards the light love it when I get a rembrandt beautiful shadows beautiful everything the light doesn't spill on the ground doesn't spill onto the bike it doesn't just kind of gives a little kiss of fill in other places but most of it is right here being that's what the grid is controlling so here we had a little tiny grid for just our flash on camera that would be like our soft box grid okay let's do this I do want to do this little demonstration, so let's do a quick little demonstration. We're going tio backlighting to kind of create interest so let's, get our couple up. I'm going to go a bit quicker here and then queenly down the cloth on the floor. All right, let's put it this way, and what we'll do is having us come go forward that way just a bit, okay, sometimes my favorite light is the one that comes from behind and grand this isn't like a shot that if you're alive, you wonder like, why isn't like, why do certain things not look necessarily natural? If you're lighting in ways that light generally doesn't happen, like, like, putting a backlight like this against something, something that doesn't naturally happen in nature, right? So is automatically gonna have a more dramatic effect than doing something like, like adding light, like how the sun would come in or something that but it can be kind of a cool thing I'm gonna just control my foe tex so I could turn off. I'm using the controller, and I'm turning off this flash. I'm just leaving on the back flash, so if I pop a little test shot, I'm going to make sure that they're communicating and they are okay, so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna have you guys pull each other and just go into, uh I love to show you guys like posing, but we just have time so just pull each other in and then, uh, can you guys connect like, on the connect hips a little bit? I know. Sorry. Well, we won't get too awkward. Yeah, there are models. They're not necessarily a couple. I don't want to make him do very couple of things, but actually, why don't we do this let's just hold hands on each side and then pull each other in all the way. So you guys connected body waste there you go. So you close the gap between you and andrea lacks the hands down. Perfect. I'm gonna just light from right here. I'm just moving this down too, so it kind of stays hidden behind them, okay? And then do we have that spray? Is it pumped and everything that sounds awesome? It's like a sad dog or something? All right, pull each other in real fast, they look toward each other guys. Okay, I'm gonna have to lower the flash, and what you going to see is when I pop this, the flat is gonna bleed through, so we need to actually lower it, okay, thanks. You know what you could do it just place it a little behind his body so go a little bit to that side there you go perfect that's great all right now I put a gel in there it's gonna matter much for this but I'm just going to change my white balance in this so it kind of neutralizes the gel a little bit okay now keep your eyes is like bodies connected so that we don't have any yeah any gaps between let's go spray I was serious about the whole splash okay I'm gonna have you guys till the foreheads into each other so touch foreheads and closed eyes perfect perfect and right there on your right side can you pull the hair back around to the back side there we go do you see why I did that do you see it right there look at how strong that highlight point iss okay perfect now lina heads into each other close the eyes connect the bodies okay and give me missed and I want to do is is if you're gonna spray it like up over like this so kind of like yeah yeah he's like oh nice I got wet too awesome I hope mike's okay okay pull the bodies into each other guys a little closer okay spray on perfect relax put each other in tight again perfect relax thank you guys you guys have a seat okay, so if you if you go into minds I saw this I want to hear it baby give me some okay so this is pretty simple like thing right like we've pulled down we don't have any ambient light bleeding through so the background goes black already have against a black man but if we did have the white wall we just darken it we just use our shutter speed to pull it up and darken it so it's not present the flashes they're firing the back and I've done certain subtle things guys that we have learned over time right the way that is placed you'll notice that it doesn't create a super strong highlight against the face if you get that flash going too low and going up it creates a strong highlight edge along the chin we don't want that so is placed on his side is behind a shoulder and it's aiming up just a tiny tiny bit to get that look when the flash fires it lights up the water or anything the sky it could be snow it could be water it could be anything so guess what if it's raining outside the first thing we'll do is back like like when you walk out your back like where's my couple okay and who cares if your gear gets wet it'll be fine that's why we have insurance can go back to the slides okay so there's a fountain downtown that has like it's like a curve shape, and I just haven't standing in the middle of it. I placed a single flash behind. I'm actually keeping some of my ambient light because so my ambulance actually creating a little bit of lighting here that I kind of like it, like his shadows and definition kind of their bodies, so we balance it. We just kind of tweak the shutter speed to balance between the flash and everything. Guess what? If you want a wide burst of light in the background where it covers the whole frame, what would you do? Yeah, well, remember the zoom. If we want, like, a wide light, that kind of covers the entire background, we zoom it out if we wanted just to be kind of a pin light. So, for example, on the shot that I just did right now, actually had the flash zoomed to one hundred five millimeters. So that's telephoto, so that's what's, creating that pin effect where it's just highlighting directly behind them, as opposed to the whole scene, right?