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First Photoshoot with Model

Lesson 3 from: Compositing 101

Aaron Nace

First Photoshoot with Model

Lesson 3 from: Compositing 101

Aaron Nace

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Lesson Info

3. First Photoshoot with Model

Lesson Info

First Photoshoot with Model

Well, we're going to be doing is kind of just going through some tests and we're going to be I'm going to take some photos of you and it's just going to be working with our lighting so it's going to be like, maybe ten minutes long and all you have to do is like, sit there and I'll tell you when we start the real shoot is that okay? Perfect, okay, I'm gonna come right around you and I'm just gonna move this stepladder out of the way because we don't need this to be in the final photo. There we go and if you want to scoot your chair in perfect and basically you're going to be maybe screw your chair and just a little bit more, you're going to be, like, right over top of this cereal bowl. So for a couple minutes here, all you need to do is just hang out there and we're going to make sure that you look amazing, that sound okay, perfect. All right, so we'll take a picture with you in the frame and then basically we're going to talk about everything that we need to change with this so you can...

kind of take a little bit of a break if you want I'm going to talk about our shot here and some of the things that we need to change so this is a lot of the time where we start off with a photo shoot and this is, you know, oftentimes people don't usually talk through this this is like, okay, the shot doesn't look good yet how do we get it to look good? So here I am, creative live, which is great, I'm going to go through the entire process of like, the shot doesn't look that good how do we get it to look good? Ok, so they're a couple things that I want to look at with the shot you can see thanks to our fill light here that her face isn't really that dark if with the film light off, her face would go like pretty far into shadow, which we don't want, but it is a little bit underexposed you can see a little bit of a highlight on her forehead while the rest all basically goes into shadow and the reason is the main light in this image is kind of like that little bit of harder light that's casting that shadow there on the bottom of the orange juice and there's something blocking the light from hitting our subject right, can you get to see what it is the giant box of cereal, right and that's making the light not hit our subject? So there's a couple things we need to do and then we bring in another life or we have to have our subject kind like scoot a little bit forward so that light make sure we hit our subject and it actually clint creates what we want so that's what we're going to try to do would you mind scooting just a little bit for and then maybe even bringing your head just get comfortable you're gonna be sitting down for just a little bit perfect would you mind scooting forward almost like bringing your head like straight over the cereal you can't reach we get what if it was a little bit higher would that be easier? Okay, cool do we have like a like a phone book or a little pad okay, well we are seeing the back of the chair in the frame so maybe well yeah let's try pushing why not bring it on in. Thank you, john and if this doesn't work we'll try it again. No worries. We have plenty of time for you to hang out with froot loop piece is that better? It looks like it looks like it's more comfortable, perfect and you want to look like straight into the camera for me? Beautiful, beautiful. Come forward just a little bit more if you can do we need to go a little bit higher with the chair it's okay all right, just a little bit more forward if we can beautiful there we go okay so let's look at the frame now and then will kind of see what's going on here so we can see now she's pulled forward a little bit and we can start to see that light is hitting her face which is exactly what we want her face is no longer in shadow which is just not that interesting and it's a little bit underexposed so we can see they're on her forehead as well as the nose you can see a little bit of a shadow from from the light from her nose and her cheek as well which is bringing a forward now there's still a couple of things that we want to keep in mind here it still looks pretty good but it's not great yet and I can't really see the light that's going on here until maybe I turn on something like a modeling light and a modeling light in this case is going to really help us figure out okay how do we get our subject toe actually be in the light so what I'm gonna do is just waken turn on the modeling light for this guy here if you had the function button yep couple times still goes to the model and then hit the up arrow till goes to full if you want to there we go perfect and now we can probably see that we can actually see the light coming from there and hitting our subjects face so we can do a couple things at this point if we want her to come even more forward, we can ask you to do that, but it sounds like that's a little uncomfortable, right? Ok, so we're going to do is instead of bringing her bore forward. Yeah, we're just going to move the cereal box back. Go ahead. There we go. And we can see that now the light is hitting her face and that's the really great thing about using modeling light. Now, people had questions about using natural light, and if you were using natural light, well, you wouldn't have to turn on a modeling like to be able to tell, because you could just look at it. But now that we have a mauling light, we can see the light really does look great honor. So that's that's exactly what we need to do. So we're gonna take a picture. Can you scoot forward? Just? Yep. Perfect and looked right at the camera. Beautiful, beautiful. So let's, take a look at our shot now and see what we've got. Basically, the light on our subject should look quite a bit better, maybe it's a little bit. Harsh right now because the cereal box was blocking a little bit up before so we can kind of take that exposure down, but we can see as compared to when we flipped back a couple where she was maybe even more if we flip back oh, look this yeah, and the one even more before that if we could go there we go, so we've gone basically from our subjects, her face is almost completely in shadow, too. Now she's got a really nice highlight on her face so we can see she's a little bit more well defined. It looks like that the light's kind of coming in from the side and we just haven't organizer portrait it's a little bit too bright because we're seeing that little bit of a hot spot on the bottom, right? But you can definitely see how you know compared to the top right where her face really isn't to find that much to the bottom, right where her face really is kind of coming out so that's our goal with this lighting, we want to make sure that everything kind of comes together to make our base shot, which is this look really good, and after that this shot is really set in place that we're going to switch over and take all the different pictures of the of the composite so we're just going to keep on going if you don't mind, I'm just gonna we've brought the power down a little bit awesome, yeah, maybe two tenths of a stop or one fifth because really mad people out there let's go with the seven, eighty seconds of a stop. Perfect. All right? And if you could come just a little more for sarah, right? Yeah, perfect, sir, do you want to grab the the spoon there? Perfect. Now what we're going to be doing is it sounds really funny, but did you hear earlier there's gonna be a little man in that cereal? Perfect. So what we're going to be doing is pretending like you're really excited about this like, this is probably the best day of your life. You're eating cereal and this all of a sudden there's a little man in you cereal and you're like, oh my god, what happened? Where did you come from? Things like that? So if you want to live the there we go perfect and actually let's dump the milk out and you can have it like, almost like straight up, like kind of like you're just holding it like, oh my god, and there we go perfect little bit of milk turpin on your hand is exactly what we want we could leave it there. It looks good. So if you want to get your face like almost like right to the cereal and then kind of look at the camera and just be, like, so excited like, oh my gosh, there we go, perfect! And we're just going to change our perfect you want maybe open your mouth a little bit to kind of get like, surprise like, oh, there we go, beautiful, beautiful. So here we're seeing a little bit more of what we want to do and as we go basically I'm going to change our exposure over and over again and change our composition. Could you get maybe a little bit closer to bowl of cereal? Beautiful and maybe having to look down into the bowl very, very nice. So let's, john let's, bring down the power of this light just a little bit. So here we're starting to get what we actually want, and this is one of our components of the photo shoot and sarah, you're doing really good. This is one of our components of the photo shoot, which I want to talk about it it's actually written on the board right back here, so the next thing about making deposits believable and making them good is having your subjects interact with each other, which is right over here now keep in mind there is no subject in this serial there's there's nothing there which makes sarah's job a little bit harder so what we're gonna do is we're actually going to put something in that cereal and that's goingto be like make pretend that's the little man so I didn't actually tell anyone we were going to do that way just have to like figure something out there we go cool a nice little ball of gaffer tape in our cereal please don't eat this cereal there we go so you can kind of pretend that's the little guy in your cereal so if you want to kind of get close to him be like oh my god wish what do you do it there we go and back up me with your eyes just a little bit awesome you look really excited it's perfect you want maybe dip a little bit of the milk with your spoon and then there we go and you can bring it up and actually just like let it let it kind of fall out of the spoon like you khun khun spill it a little bit there we go awesome let it spill a little bit more perfect like what is happening here perfect so you can take it we break we'll just take a look at these so these are the kind of things that we want to do like she's actually interacting with their subject here and another point we talked about earlier, when using these strokes is being able to freeze motion, so if we can actually just zoom in on the very last shot that we got there, we go perfect, where we actually see a little bit of the milk, like coming off of the spoon that creates a little bit of action in the shot it kind of creates like that. This is happening now, as opposed to, like someone's posing for a photograph, so, like, the milk spilling a spoon, and you guys like that detail it's kind of cool, right? Did you see the milk spilling out for spoon? So I think we should even go for it more. I think you like let's just go, like, wild with it, and not just yet, but we can have a lot of milk spilling off the spoon and then it's going to be like, oh, my god, what's happening, I'm really excited about this. This is just a really fun day. So before we do that and sarah, you're doing really great. I'm just going to talk a couple more things about about our lighting, and I'm going to just turn off a couple of these things, and we're going to take a shot without a couple of these lights on, because I think it's important to see what these do and the things that I want to talk about it with lights that are behind our subject right now, these are the rim lights and these air what's basically going to be like the light that's coming in in the middle of her like the morning you know, the morning like so we're going to point out so if we switch to this one, we will be able to see me, which is ok, but her her hand in her arm that's actually holding the spoon you can see off to the right side there that light that's kind of carved out on that side, you can see it also in her hair, which is separating her hair from that kind of like wood in the background and you can see the light on the background itself. So all of that light is coming from this strip box here and the light that's right up here. So what I'm gonna do is just turn these off. There we go, we're going to turn the power off on those and we're going to be able to see what a difference that makes. So having that light, what it's going to do is it's going to separate out your subject from the background? So we've got a well lit shot here and we've also got it back so there we go we're just gonna take a picture you want to look right at me beautiful and now we're gonna be able to see what a difference these lights in the background really do make you'll be surprised this image doesn't look that good does it it's like boom? Well, that's much crap you're good job it looks flat it looks boring she's not really that well lit and if we can kind of pull maybe a comparison but from the two there we go we can see how much more like it looks like maybe there's sunlight coming in from the back ground this is the morning maybe there's some windows and things like that that keep in mind we're not shooting in an actual house here we're in a studio so like, you know, if I wanted to put a window there we have quite a bit of demolition, teo instead we're just kind of like duplicating that same idea with light show us it looks like a lot more front lit and generally if you want someone to look like they're, you know, just a little bit mohr three dimensional you'll front like them, which is kind of like your phil, but you'll also back like them and that's going to help like carved them out and make them look a little bit more three dimensional so in this one she almost looks like a two dimensional like sketch right she almost looks like a drawing and in the one on the left she looks like she really is kind of like coming out of the frame at you so that's the difference that are backlight makes so we've saw the difference that our fill light makes and now we're seeing the difference that are backlight makes does that help everyone out it's kind of cool right yeah so how do we actually get there well in taking our images we I might have started off with this and said you know like okay this is she's not too underexposed but she's not really that interesting at this point nothing no offense to you it wasn't it wasn't your fault and at this point we had amanda's our stand in anyway so it's amanda's fault way needed add some light here in the background just to make her like kind of stand out so that's what we're going to turn these back on and we're going to continue to shoot with those lights and I read on the internet somewhere is like my favorite quote about how to use lighting and they just said when you're using lighting think about light like a big splash of water like wherever like if you were to dump a pitcher of water in somewhere like where would that water hit it would kind of like fill a room and then like bounce around and kind of like spill around everywhere right in light is kind of the same like if you hit one wall it's gonna like start bouncing around the place so that's why this light although it's pointing at the back wall it's hitting the back wall but think about it like it is a splash of water it would hit there and then we would kind of like, come splash back this way, right like does the exact same thing so it's hitting that back wall and then it's going to come splash this way in lighter subject up is well, so a really cool way you can kind of use indirect lighting to help, like bring out features and things like that of your subject. So there we go cool, cool stuff on letting all right, sarah, you ready and awesome this time let's go all for it scooch nice and ford for me if you can there we go and if you feel free to spill a cz much of this milk as you want, we got gallons of it, so wear we go and let's see some spillage there we go let's, do it again and this time you khun spill actually, I'm just going to push this back just a little bit if you don't mind there we go this time you can spill some outside of the ball to you can be really messy with this this's all the times you took mom told you not to make a miss. This is like, hey, mom, look at this making a massive thing today so that's exactly what we want to do perfect you want to pick up some of these fruit loop ease there we go and you, khun bring him up and let's film all out like, oh very, very cool! All right, let's, bring some of those images up there. You're doing great so we can see here hopefully as they come in some of the more spilling shots that we've got. Oh, that was amazing. So we could see some of the drops in there if you want to go back one or two there we go. We can see some of the drops like in the air as they're falling from the spoon. This one is actually coming in. So which springs up another point let's say that we hadn't planned this out, but let's say that in this final shot we love the one where she's actually like spilling some of this into the milk well, that creates like another challenge in our composite because if we could pull up the bottom left image, make that full screen if you don't mind perfect so she's spilling milk, which I didn't really plan on that that's just kind of one of the fun things of the photo shoot as it's happening, but you can see it's kind of creating some turbulence in our bowl of cereal, right? So we can totally just do that well originally planned on having the pool that we're going to be photographing later not, you know, be relatively still, but if there's going to be some turbulence, well, we just retreat that on a slightly larger scale in the pool, so maybe just, like, stick your foot it or whatever you want, but that's, one of the really cool things about compositing is like, you want to photograph again, like the big part of the puzzle first and then those little parts and you can see like, okay, maybe we didn't plan on turbulence in the concept, but if it's looking really cool when we like it, we'll we're just gonna add it after the fact we're going to make sure that we put that in after the fact and yeah, I think it's looking really, really good so one could washington check. Are you at all concerned about the shadow from the orange juice that's falling into the milk? Falling into the milk great question so when we started today off here, I was here it like seven a m we started off with lighting that was a lot more flat, I didn't have that light in there, the light was a lot more flat, it didn't have these shadows and things like that and the light, it would have been a little bit easier for the composite, but I felt like the light just wasn't that interesting, so that's kind of like the balance and you have to play it's like, is this like, interesting? And in this case, I think having some side lighting is relatively interesting, but it does make a little bit more of a challenge with the composite, however, I think it's kind of a cool challenge, because now what we can do is we can bring that same thing into our composite when we photograph the pool. So for instance, right now we're using this v flat to kind of shine light into right, but let's say when we're photographing the pool, if I need a big dark shadow in my pool, why don't we just close up that v flat and use that to block the lighting that were lighting our pool? And then we're actually going to recreate that shadow in the final pool that we're going to be creating too so I'm not concerned about the shadow that's coming through the that's coming through the cereal, I just have to keep it in mind when I'm doing the positing I've gotta retreat that shadow on a larger scale, that's a really, really good question, and ultimately, what I decided is that it was mohr interesting tow have these shadows in the photograph, making the composing job just a little bit harder, but the end shot is just going to, um, or interesting and it's going to be more believable, and we like these details if that was just a pure white bowl of cereal, I just don't think it would really be as interesting, and actually, I'll just turn this light off and you guys can tell for yourself rather than we just talk about it, there we go there, you can just hang out just like you're doing all right, so our light is off there, we don't have like, a harsh shadow coming in from the camera left now, and we can just see it kind of looks flat kind of looks boring. I could put a soft box in there and just kind of lighted up, but without that nice shadow is just like you it's, not a school, right it's, not a dynamic, so that's why we've got that light in there and there we go. Looking great, cool, great questions. Do you wantto let's keep going with it? Was that fun? All right, cool. Let's. Put this guy back in the middle and you can look at him. There we go. The soggy milk operator. Over here, you can look at him if you want to and just kind of have fun with that again with that spoon and kind of bring it up if you can. Perfect, you can even let's say instead of grabbing it like proper let's say you grab it like this. So the spoons kind of like coming out of your hand like that. There we go. Perfect. Perfect. And if you want to come right over the bull serial really close, beautiful and kind of like, look up at me as you're spilling what's this guy doing in my cereal, you can kind of like looking down at him again. Wow. Very, very cool. Can you get even closer? So maybe almost your chin is like, almost on the bowl. Very cool. Beautiful inland looked right back up with me. It looks like what is happening here. This is just really, really weird. Oh, somebody's are amazing do you want to see sarah, can you see on the big screen there very, very cool so it totally looks like she's just having a bull of big kay's, fruity, loopy in the morning, and then maybe there's going to be someone in the in the actual fruity loop, ese. So you're doing great the other couple of things that I want to keep in mind at this point, our I'm pretty happy with how this is going to come together as a composite, like, our job isn't going to be really that hard and that's for us to worry about a little bit later, but the things that I do want to come up, you know, like, we're not going to change a whole lot of this shot, like, if I what we are going to be doing is we're gonna be putting a person inside a cereal bowl, but is that alone going to make a bad shot? Better? Probably not. So at this point, I need to kind of forget that person in the serial, and I just need to focus on like, is this is this a good photo like, is this going to be the basis of our good photo that's gonna wind up as a composite? And these are a couple things we want to keep in mind like, do I like that jug in the background is that nice is our subject in focus. And you can see here we are shooting it won over one sixteenth of a second, we're at f fourteen and it is a one hundred if you guys in the control room could zoom into our subject if we could zoom into sara's eyes and hopefully we can see if she's in focus and to me it looks like she's in focus she doesn't look too dark if we could scroll around to the background so you could see like that jug or something like that, we can see like that's a little bit out of focus, so we're kind of we're bringing our subject like separating her out from the background there. Okay, perfect let's zoom out again and composition I think looks pretty good our shadows there just a little bit dark, so if we want to know writing those up, we could do so by bringing the v flat in just a little bit closer to our subject, or we can break them up in photoshopped that something that if they're like a half stop too dark you khun you, khun brighten those things up in photo shop so in this case that something that I'm not really that concerned with, but the rest of it like orange juice placement or showing enough of the photograph but not too much let's just maybe I'll zoom out here there we go, sarah, do you wantto just kind of, like, dip into it? Perfect look back up in me perfect, great job, and we're going to take a look at that image here. So here we're zoomed out a little bit, and what we're going to see is not only do you see the actual soft box that's in the frame, you're getting a little bit of flair from it as well, but we could see it's just it's too much, right? We're seeing too much of the image she's way too small in the frame, and the other thing that we're missing is the cool detail in this photograph, the end image is going to be that person in the pool that's the cool thing. So we want to fill up as much of the frame with that as we can, because if there was a person in that and you saw this on the web like we're looking at on a large screen in here for those you guys viewing it at home, it's probably relatively small on your computer, but if you're viewing this like eight hundred pixels wide, this person would make up like that big, and if yu saw thumbnail, you probably wouldn't even see the person at all. So it kind of me thinking about those things as well when you're kind of composing the shot like what's the cool element to this photo let's make sure it's big and it's in your face and then you actually see it if we could pull up like it before in the after with this shot and then maybe the one previous there we go we can see like if you saw a thumbnail of this you could probably actually see the guy that's in the pool as opposed to the one on the right which is just like yeah there's some weird stuff in the background there's a kid in there so probably not something that anyone here would do like why would you take it image that zoomed out this just kind of like an important thing to think about like make sure your nice in close to what you actually want to be showing off about the image so let's zoom back in and just a quick question what camera and lens are you using? People always want to know and weight of general settings on a good question let me just zoom back in there we go so I'm using this is a cannon five d mark to this is a couple of years old and it's the only camera that I've used basically throughout the last couple of years I think it's a really, really good camera if I were to buy a new camera today I would probably go with the nikon d eight hundred because I think it's an amazing camera or a cannon five d mark three because I am already invested in a lot of cannon lenses I would by the cannon five mark three if I was to buy one today for this type of thing I'm using a twenty for toe one o five f for iceland and this is a kid lands guys this came minutes kid it's like a still too nice lands but it came with the camera when I first bought it when the cannon five day was first announced it was pretty hard to get just the body only so I bought it with this lens and I still shoot with it it's not a too wait lens it's not the nicest, most expensive lens in the world but you resumed in way earlier and we could see like it's clear especially like fourteen it's going to be nice and sharp the other thing about this lens which I really like it's actually like a semi macro lens if you look on this side it actually says macro on the lens which is like you wouldn't think about this lens is being a macro lens what that means is the focal distance is relatively short so if I was this close with like say a seventy two, two hundred two point eight I think the focal distance about what that is like a meter, so I might have even be able to focus on my subject if I was using that lens, so I'm using this lens not only because it's it's wide enough to get what I want, but I can also zoom in to make sure that I'm nice and close and cropped on sarah's just like we talked about, but also because it has the ability to focus on the relatively relatively close to the lens now seventy, two hundred to eight would also be a really great lens to use here is, well, perfect that's a really good question, andi, the lights that we're using, all these lights are by polls see buff, these ones in the background are the in signs, which are the newer lights, and I love them they're really, really great. These background lights here, these are just the alien bees and, you know, for something like this, they're like, they're great. I'm traveling here from chicago to seattle, and I packed all this up in a giant pelican case, so for travel like these, things don't weigh anything at all that it's like the perfect way to do it. I put all six of these lights in one case with a couple of foam padding, and they travel they ship really easily, so I really recommend him plus, if one breaks it's it's a couple hundred dollars, they've got really good customer service, a policy buff, so I really I love that company. I'm not endorsed by the middle, I just I really do, like, really good questions. Cool, it looks like we've got about fifteen more minutes and I'd love to use this. We're going to say, we're going to take a couple of photo more photos of you and then we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to be doing basically the exact same thing, focusing more on like expression and things like that. Is that is that okay with you all right, let's on a nsync, your little guy here. So this is what you're going to be looking at? Maybe over the break we'll find something that floats. That is not gaffer tape. Perfect. That looks really good. So this time let's get like a big spoonful of the milk. You just take his test shot to make sure we're working and come on. Nice and forward for me again. Perfect a big spoonful and go ahead and just like you, khun let's, go fast with this this time let's go fast, you can like, let it spill all out of one there we go and whenever you're ready awesome awesome let's do it again I love to see how that was kind of like dripping down let's get really close and I love it when you're let's maybe could you look it right into the camera for me there we go let's just spill it all out what it's a really good oh my god if we get a shot that's better than that I wouldn't be surprised that was so good syrah you got to say I think it's going to come up on the screen there we go really, really cool oh and a really cool ripple there. So the other thing about compositing that I love is let's say we get the most amazing shot of milk coming out of the spoon but in that shot you happen to be looking down and we want the shot where she's looking up well that's another topic compositing that's what we're going to be calling our frame compositing which we're going to be focusing more on tomorrow but we can take one element let's just maybe let's side by side the top two on these if you don't mind let's say I love her face on the want image on the right but on the image on the left I want that little bit of milk well that's not something that I have to get all correct in camera because using frame compositing I can use just her face from the image on the right and I can put that on the image on the left where she's got that spoon so not only does it kind of helped us out in creating like a special effect like someone's actually like coming you know going to be in this milk but it also allows us to be able to see like okay, I love this part of this image I love that part of this image I love that one and let's stick him all together and see what we got in the final you can take these little pieces that you love and put them all together without worrying too have to, like get everything perfect in one shot which as a photographer to be honest, it makes your job a lot easier this is something you really couldn't do with film so you have to cut get every little thing right in one friend in one take and I rarely do that usually I get one part of a person right in one frame I say okay, I love your body in this one let's focus on your head and I'll just what kind of move their head around you can replace that after the fact so it just makes your job a lot easier is a photographer and it makes it a lot less stressful to be honest I mean I'm here teaching live and I'm not stressed out about the shot at all because I know if I like that shot with the milk and a different face that we shot fifteen minutes ago we'll just put those two together and we got a great final image so it'll make your job a little less stressful won't be is worried on the photo shoot and you focus on what's important, which is sarah and sarah I apologize because I'm not giving you enough attention, but I would always suggest even though you guys are gonna be doing a composite, you got a lot of things going in your mind here we got this list behind us here we've got to match our camera angle with the bowl of cereal we've got the match, our camera angle with a giant pool, which we're going to be photographing soon we had a focal length we've got our lighting from the of the shots we've got to do a rough composite on the set we've got our subjects interacting all these things we got to keep our mind on it's really easy to forget about what's really important in this final image and in this final image we wants their toe look like she's super excited we want a lot of like really nice emotion and we want to make sure we interact with our subject so that's why we have this list here I don't have to think about it right now I could just kind of like cross these office I go through so normally if I if I wasn't doing live broadcasting where I'm teaching instead of talking about all this and instead of worrying about all my lighting I would be spending about ninety percent of time just hanging out with sara just taking some pictures and have a lot of fun so we're at a little bit of a disadvantage because I can't do that as much probably helps that I'm explaining some things were going along but I just wanted to let you know that when doing this you got a lot of things to keep in mind but the most important thing I think is this interaction so so you ready let's do it one more time let's go crazy with it oh you know what in this time let's put the syria let's put the spoon back in the cereal and this time I want to kind of like pull it out so it's almost like it's spilling milk like as it's coming out all right ready and come on forward and bring your face and look towards me perfect let's just pull it out whenever you're ready awesome let's do it again even even even more this time let's get like see if you can get miguel went over there okay miguel this guy in the in the in the white shirt flick it back in this way and see if you can get him with ready. All right, three, two, one, let's, go for it. Perfect that's really, really nice let's. Do it one more time. I just want to make sure that I got it. All right, here we go. Come on, four. Come on forward and look directly in the camera in three, two, one and go. Really, really cool. Beautiful. Sara, you doing a really good job so we could see, like, all that really nice detail. And, sarah, you're just doing really, really good. So I think we've got maybe about ten minutes left, and I'd love to reserve that time for question and answer things after the break word and come back and basically resume here. We'll get you all cleaned up and everything like that. Sarah, start taking more pictures. So we're totally ready for question. Answers fans really fast like this has been a lot of fun. Every question I do. I have a question lined up from lewis, who is joining in from argentina and early we're explaining about the camera angle and the focal length of of this shot right here. But how do you match that camera position, an angle, focal length from the bowl and the picture and the pool in the picture because your camera is going to be a lot higher later. And how do you make sure that you're on the same angle? Are you taking notes? That's a really, really good question were actually being addressing that in kind of like a pretty good amount of detail in part number two, we've got a little bit of mathematics that we're gonna be going through it's not hard, I promise everyone is going to get it. I've got a like a nice graph that I'm gonna make you guys, but if it is an important thing to think about your camera, focal length, distance and things like that, so I'm going to show you guys like a really easy way to kind of, like, calculate that out to make sure you're doing it right. The other thing is to like, if if maybe you're, you know, not as sure about your focal length or you're new to this and you're like, should I be closer to the camera? Should be farther than camera in section to what we're also going to be doing. We're going to bring either the laptop of the computer on set were so we're going to shoot, tethered and as we're setting up the camera angle for the pool. What we're going to be doing is taking pictures and doing the very rough composite like while we're actually doing the photo shoot and this is something that I will do during a photo shoot so you can see is this the right camera angle like and so I can actually photograph the pool I can bring it in like two seconds in photo shop see ok do I need to go higher? Do we need to go lowered when he'd come in or out and I'm gonna teach you guys in section two how to know if you have to go higher galore that's like I don't know higher lower it doesn't look right but I'm gonna teach you guys how to do that in section two really good question the script you have any questions from anyone here in the audience by the way yeah so just out of curiosity on the lighting if I would have looked something like this I would have thought that maybe the front of the cereal box being in shadows might not have been a good thing why choose this lighting over? Maybe like let's say like a cross lighting or like a clamshell lighting toe light her from the front so that it lights everything evenly that's a really good question there were a couple of reasons why I chose this lady if you want to zoom in maybe on the very bottom left on this so we can see it here and then maybe we can flip back to me. That's a really good question. When I started today off, I had something that was a little bit maur broad and really did focus on our subject working in photo shop will give us a couple things and you're totally right that cereal box is too dark it totally is too dark the shadows in general just maybe are a little bit dark maybe over the break we'll pull in our pulling our fill light bright, no shadows up way talked about in photo shop if some things just a little bit too dark it's not really that difficult to bring it up if something's like black and you want to make it like in highlight that's pretty hard, but if you were like a half stop too dark that's something that I can bring up in photo shop the other reason is as I was setting up the camera lighting, I saw the light that was kind of coming in through the windows here and it just looked a lot more interesting than the original light that we had so that's why I kind of changed it up the next thing is and this is also an interesting point is this the box of cereal actually causes quite a bit of glare so if I were toe, bring this around like actually just do it normally you don't want to move things around your set like while you're actually shooting because then you know now I can't composite that area let's see if this picks it up here um that's not really showing up but at certain angles the reflectivity of that fruit loops box is going to cross a lot you can see it kind of like on the left there it's like it's kind of causing a little bit mohr glare in this case it's it's not really that bad let me try bringing it that way, it's kind of hard to I can't see the lighting obviously because we're using strobes in this case but at certain angles well kind of can see it course when I'm trying to make a point can see it all we've got rid of glare, everybody this's a glare free studio but at some point it was reflecting so I couldn't really see the design very well and it was almost only showing as glare so that's kind of like why? Why were rotated that way there's another reason which is very interesting which I had to worry about today, which I never have to worry about either I started off this whole photo shoot when we were doing our test lighting there was actually a big octo box right here which what you were just saying? Like, why don't you just put a big light off to the camera, right? Which would like your subject? And I totally did start off the day like that. That created two interesting problems. One none of you guys would have been able to see our subject so that's something you don't have to worry about on a normal photo shoot, the cameras wouldn't have been able to see sarah because there would have been a giant black box right here so it would have made it would have made this section of the tutorial a lot worse because you can actually be able to see what's going on the folks at home and you in the audience. So that's one thing that we kept in mind, the other thing is having a light source right here, it just made it it made it so broad, it just it was kind of like not really that interesting. It was almost like what the like you would expect to see in a lip portrait rather than something that looked a little bit mohr environmental like someone's in their kitchen, they got, like, coming from this way they got, like, coming from that way that, you know, they don't have like, the perfect beauty dish with the, you know, with the highlight in their eyes and like the rib and things like that. So it was also an effort to make it look more like, you know, not lighting that was designed to look like a a portrait, but that's a really good question, a lot of the reason, because there would've been soft box here that was this big, really good question. All right? Another question coming in is from sam cocks in loveland, colorado, and he asked, since compositing, it depends so much on consistent lighting, is it difficult to combine images from different photographers or different sessions? Are there ways to build a library of composite shots for which lighting is not a major problem? There's also a question about whether you ever use stock photography in your complaint. It's okay, those are both really good questions. So as I mentioned earlier in the day, there are multiple different types of photography of compositing, and as far as I know, they don't have a name, we're calling this type of of compositing element compositing because we're photographing all of the elements together and then we're going to put him back together later tomorrow we're going to be going over a type of composite photography called frame compositing and again those two names that element of frame I totally made those up this morning like don't look him up, they don't exist, but I think they should be called that so that's what we're going to call him today now things like bringing in stock images that's a third type of compositing because that you know what? That would be a really great time for compositing one oh two, because a couple of things it's a lot harder to do when you're bringing in stock images images where you don't have control and you have to match everything else to this image that you didn't even take it's a lot harder to do. You weren't on set, you didn't know what the lighting looks like, you don't know what camera they used, what angles they used you, you know you might not have access to the same software, the same camera it could be like they shot with a medium format and all your shooting with his crops sensor. So using stock images and things like that, you don't have the control that you do in this type of photography so it's a lot harder is it possible totally but it's a lot more on the photo shop heavy side of it, so that would be a really good chance for for compositing one or two if you did if you were the person who took all the images like if you said keep a library of things you couldn't deposit together, a great way to do that is to just make the lighting consistent. Lighting is a huge a huge part of it, so if you were planning on compositing, many different images together do do simple lighting if you can and try to light the mall like maybe everything that's going to be the deposit has a big light coming in from the camera, right? And that would be a great way to composite altogether because we're doing element photography and I have control over every single one of these pieces were not taking in any stock images today we're not doing anything like that if something doesn't look right in the frame instead of trying to manipulate it in photo shop to make it look right, we're actually doing is making our lighting matches in their camera angles, things like that. So we have complete control today in tomorrow over everything that we're doing with our images and that's why these two types of imposing that we do are the easier types and for someone who's starting out with compositing would really, really recommend that they start out with these types of composites and then once they really confident with these types composites then you can move on to the more advanced compositing methods

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming-HD.mov
cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming-low.mov
LaundromatWorkingFiles.zip
FrootLoopysWorkingFiles.zip
Love at the Wash.pdf
Swimming in Cereal.pdf

bonus material with enrollment

cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming_Short-HD.mov
cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming_Short-low.mov
PhlearnDiscount.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Great moment i Won't miss. 2 of my favourites learning web sites in one !!! Thanks Aaron for all you bring to me including lessons of English...(don't understand every joke but...when you smile , i do too... ) Best regards from Brittany (France)

Mohamed Rasoon
 

i'm amateur photographer.i had a hope move on as professional, this is great lesson and CreativeLive motivate my self step by step to fulfills my hopes.

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