Pre-Shoot: Love at the Wash-n-Suds

Lesson Info

Pre-Shoot: Love at the Wash-n-Suds

Let's go ahead and get started we're going to build the lighting from nothing so like we said earlier we're going to be bringing basically this image completely completely the life and we're gonna be using a relatively five past shutter speed so I'm gonna go ahead and durable settings in my camera and like we say guys today it's going to be at a different pace from yesterday yesterday was like fast pace we're like boom boom boom boom boom today it's gonna be a little bit slow, we're going to focus a little bit mohr on instruction and literally I don't know where the light's going to go like it's this is not staged, I promise. What have I told you where the light's gonna go? We don't, so we're going to figure it out during the actual photo shoot and this is gonna be so helpful for you guys as long as you have the patients to see it through because you'll be able to see the entire process of like what like does he start with first? What like does he start with, you know, come up with sec...

ond, like where these thoughts come from? So keep in mind today is a lot more about the process, and I think if you keep that in mind, you'll get a lot more out of the day so I'll probably try to remind you guys a couple times, so I'm gonna come on back here and the camera's set up it's on a tripod today now when shooting frame compositing, it's very, very important that you do keep the camera on a tripod because we have so many different elements happening actually going to be going on in our frame that if I move the tripod, I won't be able to do the compositing very simply in photo shop afterwards, I don't want a new complex, you know, using the pen tool and cutting people out like that's, not our goal. Our goal is to make it easy, easy, easy and photoshopped. So as long as the camera stays on a tripod, you're setting say the same, your focus has locked everything like that frame compositing is going to be very, very easy, so I'm gonna go ahead and take a picture now I already know that I want to free some action, so we're going to put us into manual mode here and I'm gonna shoot. We're going to go to something like, I don't want our lights to be incredibly bright. I don't need, like a lot of power out of my lights, especially because I want to do a little bit of rapid fire. So if I got a full power with my lighting it's going to take a little bit longer to do recycle time and things like that so I'm gonna shoot it something like five point six now I'm also going to shoot at one over one sixteenth of a second and that's going to get us various fashion speed that's the mathematics think speed with the five mark too. If you guys using like some nikon cameras will think of two fifty of the second someone said, was it john? You said that five, three one, twenty five one, twenty five a second. Okay, now, if you guys are using strobes, the really cool thing to keep in mind is that with strobes, they really will do a great job freezing motion because the duration of the light it's kind of like, have you ever been like a nightclub or something like that? And you see, like the strobe lights and you're kind of like walking through, but you only see, like like flickers of a person or something like that the's strobe lights are basically the same thing, so if you have a stronger speed that's one over one sixtieth that's not really gonna freeze the motion, but if the only light that's hitting your subject is happening during a very short bursts something like what's going on with our strobes that's what's gonna freeze emotion so think of these like strobes that we're using as strobe lights obviously your eyes are always on in a you know, in like a dance I don't remember the last time I was in a dance club probably sweden and studying abroad in college but we'll talk about that later but basically you see those small burst of light and that's what freezes demotion so it's the same idea here are small prison of friezes of light from our strokes that's what's actually gonna freeze our emotions so we're at one over one sixteenth of a second tier shooting at five point six and I'm just going to change my eye so down toe so one hundred now were also shooting with our white balance here it's going to be in the flash setting and that's going to set us up for fifty, six hundred degrees kelvin, which is matching from daylight basically, which is what our strobes balance that as well and our focus I don't worry I'm not too worried about it right now because our subjects aren't in there, but once we do, we're going to focus on where subjects are going to be and we're going to make sure that we lock that in place I'm just going to choose r ruff focal distance here just kind of zooming in and moving some things around there we go and I'm gonna take a picture and I don't really expect this to be lit at all so we'll take a picture and I can't see how it looks probably is gonna be black that that's just my complete guests pretty close to it so this is how you create magic guys just do this and then photoshopped to make it look it now but we can see here this is this is all we've got so this is the amount of ambient light that's coming into our scene right now so everything that we're going to do this image we're going to build up from completely dark now this is actually even a little bit more light than I thought we would have and it's probably due to the life that we have on set here now what I'm shooting on location it's a little bit different from what's going on here on location I'll use the natural light from a scene and match my strobes excuse me match my strobes to that natural light but in this case since we are in a studio I want to basically build it all completely from scratch and it wouldn't make sense to have these lights be the light that actually lights are laundromat because they're placed for for the video so it it's it looks good for you know me standing here but obviously they're not designed to look good in a lunch matt so the we basically see a very dark scene and oh, so we're going to start building from there now we've got one light here and this is actually a video like that's we can see in the background so if we wanted it actually like I don't even know well that raise up john, you think a little more, which is this the video light that's right there and it's on a light stand that's back there? Yeah, I could probably all right, if not, we could always either photoshopped that out or change our crop and just come down a little bit. We've got a little bit of video lights and things like that here either way, there's not really a big deal, all right, so let's, go ahead and start it off. I want to hearing your guys suggestions on how we should get this to be great and does anyone have will do it raise of a hand what's the first light we should start off with where should we put it? And maybe what should be? Well, I always like start key, you start with the key like, okay, so all the pens were the subject we're going to be whether they're going to be in front of the the washing machines or whether they're going to be off to the side so once we determine that then we could set our key siddiqui and that's a really great way to start, so for those guys were unfamiliar, aki line is basically going to be the main light on your subject so usually if it's a portrait it's probably going to be a beauty dish or something like that it's a larger environmental portrait, maybe you can see a whole person be a large octa box something like that it's a very large you can even use like the flats like we use yesterday to be a key light it's well, if you're looking for something it's going to be very broad and even so we did figure out our subjects are going to be right about here, our guy subject, this is probably going to be open we've got some clothes that are going to kind of come around fly around here and he's going to be kind of in the year right over here and then our girl is going to be right here, so I think we should start with the key light let's go ahead and do it. What do you think? I think we should start off with a strip bacchus box and I'll explain why here's here's why we should start out for the strip box and this isn't I don't usually use this trip box as a key light it's kind of like a you know, it's usually used for something like a rim light, but there are two reasons why I want to use a strip box as a key light. The first reason is I want kind of imitate what would be fluorescent lighting, like a long, thin tube of fluorescent lighting. I kind of want to imitate that because we're laundromat that kind of makes sense that the overhead lighting would be like long, thin tubes. The other reason is that I kind of want, like, a relatively hard shadow, so we have some levitation there's going to be closed flying in the air and things like that in the best way to make that really believable when you're doing any type of like levitation is to not only have your your object that's floating in the air, but its shadow, the shadow was a huge part of that. And because we're not going to photoshopping shadows here, there's gonna be real shadows. I want to make sure that they're well defined and then they actually show up. So I'm using a little bit of a smaller light source. I'm going to produce a little bit of a harder shadow so we can actually see that shadow in the shots, so if we get a maybe one of our einstein's okay way have some mine signs today and we have some alien bees I trust the einstein's a little bit more there a little bit newer a little bit higher build quality so for a key light I would definitely try recommend using the highest quality lights you have feel like if it misfires once or twice or something like that that's probably fine so we'll get an einstein I'm going on with us one of our strip boxes here yeah let's get it up above let's bring let's bring the ladder out totally cool throwing a wrench in the production lighters on set what's going on we've also got this really nice grid right above us which normally probably would not have if you were actually shooting in a laundromat or something like that you probably wouldn't have a giant grid above you since we do have one we're going to be using it why not? So we're going to use a super clamp and clamp our light onto the grid here and then always got power run already right on thank you john so we've got power run and we're going to clamping our super are light onto the super clamp up here and then kind of adjusting power everything going from there so this is it's totally like you guys are here for literally the entire process could we hear some stuff from the audience? Is this cool? You guys excited okay, cool. So it's a totally like different it's a total switch from yesterday, right? But yeah do you have any comment go now I was just checking to see if anybody else had when I am shocked at how this is going to come out this is like big big production here so it's gonna be awesome very, very cool. I'm shocked too. Oh, I will be shocked because I don't kill and this is basically how every photo shoot starts right it this is usually going on in your head you don't really know what's going to happen by the end of it, right it's gonna be like, oh, I think this is gonna look good but what's gonna happen today some of the lights we set up they're gonna look great and some of the things that we do it's gonna look horrible but that's the whole part of the process, right? Some of the things we're going to be doing and I'm just going to like that looks really bad let's change it, but that happens during every single photo shoot. So I'm going to do my best job to identify when things don't look exactly right as well as change those things and explain why we're making those changes and why they don't look exactly right so that's I hope what it's going to be the best learning learning technique during today is like explaining when some things might not go exactly right and how to make them go right? All right, we could grab a pocket wizard as well. Make sure our life is going to fire there should be some in my camera back or they're probably seven pile actually testing the lights. I'm gonna pull this ladder out a little bit so we can see our beautiful hosts. How's that that's beautiful, beautiful you liked how I did was not discreet about that. All right, there's not a thing. So, uh, what is the kind of just general lighting strategy that you're going for here? You're going for more harsh light than we did yesterday. We're going for, you know, just hey there that's a really good question when I do lighting and things like this, I usually use references s so I do have some references that I've pulled, unfortunately, don't we don't have these on the screen, but we're going to be using a somewhat similar technique to what we did yesterday. We're going to be using generally self lighting. I do want to fill in my shadow's pretty well again because this is supposed to be like a commercial type of image, it's not necessarily like a fine art type of image. So I do want to fill in my shadow is to make sure we have, like, a bright, airy image, but I do want those hard lights and you get them with, you know, every day, natural lighting so it's really easy to want only soft lights in an image like it's it's easy because it's, like, you know, a big, broad light here in a big, broad light there, but what you get sometimes is a pretty boring image and you it's important to realize, like, you know, if this were a laundromat like there would be a bank of windows right here, you know, and this if this were like, nine or ten am light would be coming right in those in creating some hard light and some hard shadows, so if you ignore all those things, you get something that doesn't look real, it looks live and it looks set up, but it doesn't look real, and you can probably think of like, a you know, sitcoms like full house or something like that from from the eighties and nineties were lighting I'm sure you didn't notice that at the time, but if you ever go back and watch those like the chairs are placed in everywhere, there's a chair, there's like a key light. You know, like a hair light on the person's separating for the record it's like where these lights coming from, you know, it's not real at all and I think you know, in some ways for like, television production and things like that, you know, camera settings those are important, but to some degree I think like having those hard lights in there they'll make it a little bit more of a technical challenge, but in my opinion they helped things look a little bit more real and we're trying to pull something off that's not really at all some of some of those times the lighting decisions that make it more real can really make a difference in the final image. I didn't expect to be up on the ladder today, all right? But I'm not above it, so I'm gonna choose my choose my power here to be about a half to three quarters power I think you're right this is another I think relatively important part I'm just going to move this over the side of the of the process. I think it's I've met photographers and this doesn't happen all the time, but I have met photographer who won't set up their own lighting or you know they will they will do certain things because they figured out somewhere along the way that they're above it and I don't really agree with that I think that you know it's cool to have help you know getting people tto help you set up lighting and things like that on di do really appreciate help and you know having john and julie here but I wouldn't ask him to do anything that I wouldn't do and setting up lighting is I think it's part of that it's pointing about here putting about they're alright it's could probably come down a little bit that's I don't know what this looks like so let's just take a picture and then we'll see because that's that's literally what I would be doing so we'll take a picture and uh thanks to the wonders of technology you guys will be able to see this directly on the screen I don't get in your way it's gorgeous it did almost nothing didn't it oh there it is it did something perfect so way did decide that what we wanted to do let's have our guy like standing here and there's going to be some clothes floating in the air so we said we wanted a little bit of a hard shadow going on here we want to make sure he's lit so let's go ahead and test that hard shot on technique john if you want to go over the shutter I want to feel the clothes it's fun captured the clothes you know as they're in the air right here we'll just do our test that'll be a start of a the start of our tests we ready? All right let's do it all right good job so that it'll be a good start to the test are we capturing these? Are they decently well exposed and can we see the shadow right on we can see the shadow there you know what I feel like the shadow was still a little bit too soft. What do you guys feel it's not as well defined as I would like it to be. Well, that's not a big problem but we can do is take the diffuser off here take the whole thing off that's a really good suggestion we can start up with soft boxes you do get some diffusers let's try taking the diffusion panels off first and then why don't we take the diffusion panels off the second strip box and then I'll just replace those that one has a grit in it. Okay, we might we need the good later. I don't know if that's a good question pull this one out okay? I don't know that's the honest answer it's got two diffusion panel so we could pull these off and while you do that thank you john I'll explain what their fusion panels are so that's kind of what makes a soft box of soft box so you have like a bright light in the center of your soft box maybe we can take them both out john and then you have a couple of diffusion panels in there and basically these air like sheets of fabric like white fabric that are going to, like, hit the lights, going to hit this fabric and bounce back into the soft box and then it's going about bounce back out again. So by the time it does this a couple of times, the light that's coming off is hopefully dispersed throughout the entire space of the strip box. So instead of having, like, a very small pin light source, you get something that is a lot larger and larger light sources lied to softer shadows, so that's the whole goal there we go, we can take these off, and what we're using here is this's, a policy buff, einstein and these air, the policy above collapse, collapse full soft boxes, and they're really great for travel. I basically all my gear into to pelican cases for this, for this event, which is very, very cool. All right, we're going to move that back off. And, uh, how is that I'm creating seymour production issues today? Aren't the camera crews are like, why are you moving everything around so much? All right, no, they're they're not saying that. Okay, so now we've done is we've taken the diffusion panels out of our strip box here, which was john's idea and now what we're gonna do is try this again so it's going to be basically we have a hard light and we have some reflective surface in there so I'm going to throw this up hopefully we can we can see what it does there you can see my excellent posing by the way this is why I'm not not at all the model okay, we've got a couple things that I want to address here first of all is anyone noticed the extreme shift in exposure? Yeah like we've got a lot less between the actual between this strip box and the subject there's a lot less fabric it's not hitting all that stuff so the light is going to get a lot brighter let's just do it again and sue would see what's going on with shadow here if we get this here I would like the shadow to be a little bit more a little bit more that way does that make sense? In other words, the shadow that we're getting here from this close is kind of like straight on I would love it if it was mohr actually on this, so if we brought the light this way then it would push the shadow that way let's just try it one more time and I'll just do this right about here so we can see what the shadow actually looks like there we go and even the way we still have yet to get our exposure correct we'll be able to tell a couple things yeah you know that doesn't really look bad and here's a couple things that I do want to address so in cannot like coming up with the idea for the shot why would we have the shadow can anyone look at the image and tell me I was I can tell you see if anyone let's go on the internet why is it kind of important to have that shadow just to show that it's elevated in there yeah totally let's just look at it without the shadow like without that it kind of looks like that piece of clothing is like glued to that washing machine doesn't it like there's no real depth there but we put the shadow in there and all of a sudden it looks like it's separated out from the washing machine and you can tell that it actually is in the air so certain things like that when you guys are attempting to do levitation or create these effects it's a really I feel important part like think about you know okay something's in the air how do we like actually show that it's in the year well a shadow is a really great way to show up things location because you you can identify this with his shadow and see that okay it is floating in the air and it's it's casting that shadow here especially this is kind of like a blob shaped here but when it's a person and the person is actually going to be here it's going to become really clear because you're going to see their hand shadow you know here here on the washing machine and things like that so that's what's going to really come through is like not only is this person levitating here but we've got the shadow yeah, we have some people shouting out from the internet todd allison and corey aaron see photo both say too degree depth in the image and insect of photography says to create realism exactly realism toe in depth you've got shadows and things like that so that's why we're not starting out front lighting this if I were to front like this with some like very large broad light sources maybe like a couple parabolic reflectors here those shadows would get very, very soft and we probably wouldn't even see them now just looking at this from like just when we started off now I do see another thing that I want to do to kind of help separate out this piece of clothing from the washing machine's behind because we're looking for depth here on dh that is maybe I can give this a sidelight so if we gave this, if we gave this better close a sidelight here, then it would show the side like that would kind of, like, basically separated it out from the background. So even though we're so early, where we haven't even started bringing in our subjects, we know now that, like, okay, we've got our shadows, maybe I want to pull this light this way we've got a sidelight in here that it's going to help separate our subjects out from their background as well. So all these cool, different things that we can do, even from this early on stage, you're just going to really help make this image a little bit more realistic and give us those, you know, those really cool key elements. So ah lot of this is like using the lighting to kind of sculpt this out. So yes, in position now, do you or do you think we want to move it over just a little bit on johnny? We can go ahead and do that now if you want to, we're gonna move it over just a little bit now, if you really did want to make this like uber over realistic, I would probably start jelling these lights. Maybe put a little bit of a green light on these two look like they're tungsten lights because that's what tungsten like an overhead light would be we don't have to do that because it would probably take a while and every time you start using gels things just take a lot longer to work with the color marty k says that shadow tip just made my day I've been missing that element for my flying objects that is awesome marty I'm glad you made it comment thank you for saying that marty yeah totally like if something's gotta shadow it really does help to put it in place thinking like peter pan when he's flying like he was always trying to nail his shadow down because that kept him in place as our second peter pan references teo so another thing that we are looking at we've got our life back here so as john gets this in place we're going to start continuing tries to get it in place yeah I publish it is john we could take the strip box off momentarily and then and then move the light whatever's easiest for you you've got time there's there's really no hurry I'm gonna work on the way you're talking yeah no worries okay so we've got that and we know we're going to wind up bringing our power down a little bit right because it's over exposed but we have a couple of options here let's say this is up there and we really don't want to start. We don't really want to move it around it's over exposed does anyone know what I could do with my camera settings to make sure that this does not come out over exposed? Looks like todd is on point let's say it. Yeah, you could you could increase your f stop would be the first thing I would do exactly increase the f saw. So if those of you guys who are watching at home or here in the audience are not used to using strobes, there's a couple of things that you can do with natural light, that would help make things a little bit darker and you could increase your shutter speed so we're shooting at one over one sixty that the second right now, let's say I increase that one over for hundred of a second. Well, that would wind up letting less light in the camera. However, when you're using strobes, you have something called sink speed that you have to watch out for and with this particular camera, I don't feel comfortable going. It's rated toe one over two hundred of a second. But sometimes the shutters don't complete their actions before the flashes of light happened. So when you get then is black bars have you ever got you've seen that right when you tried to take a picture in the black bars like in your frame that's actually taking a picture of your shutter like trying to close there so mark my shutter speed I can't go any faster than one over one sixtieth and that is because I'm using the strobes in the sink speed is just not fast enough so what we can do instead of changing that to make a little less light we can still change it we can still change change to things and top was totally right we can change our aperture so if I wanted changes from five point six two maybe f eight which is one stop it's goingto let half assed much light actually enter my camera from this light here. Another thing I could do is three things there's so many options with photography. The other thing I could do is on a five day mark too you can lower your eyes so down from one hundred you can go down to fifty isil low and that's going to change that as well, so that's going to let half assed much light in his loss, so if I went from five six two f ate that would be the exact same thing is if I went from is a one hundred down toe so fifty and the other thing I could do and he's got it someone's got it what's that I could adjust the light but if I didn't want to just like what's the last thing that I could do yes think accessories here filter there we go neutral density filter so what a neutral density filter is you put it on the front of your camera lens and that allows less light in your camera so we've got a word for different methods on howto let left light in your camera a neutral density filled you combined in one stop to stop three stops you screw them on the front of the camera and all of a sudden you have less light coming into your camera so all those things you could do with your camera and not touch this light at all or if you did want to touch the light you could you could do that too so in this case I think we're gonna wind up bringing our power down apologised john because way are going toe to toe pulling down the power a little bit and here's the reason why in this case I don't I want to keep my power on my struck from being very high I don't want the power to be very high and the reason is because we're going to be taking a lot of frames and I want to snap these off over and over and over again and I don't want my recycle times to be higher, so if you guys are using something like a pro photo ate a heir or something like that which shoots thirteen frames a second at full power, you don't have to worry about recycle times but basically anything other than you know, a twenty thousand dollars strobe you've got recycled times that you want to worry about, so if aiken you know, shoot with by five mark to which I think does does anyone know the frame rate so it's like four and a half frames per second it's pretty slow four and a half incher second, so if I wanted to hold down my shutter speed and every frame so four and a half francs for second and have these lights fire over and over again, I wouldn't want to make sure to use low power and for a lot of types of compositing in a lot of types of photography, you want to make sure you can have that option to be able to like bring your power be ableto shoot over and over and over again and have that recycled time come in so that's a question about that particular image vern family is wondering why is the light creating a double shadow from that that piece of clothing you know, there's kind of the main shadow and then there's another lighter outline around it double shadow reminds me a double rainbow oh my god, what does it mean that's a really good question what we're getting here is because we've taken the we've taken them basically the modifiers off of this soft box so what we're getting is we're getting a direct light from the actual bold itself was like the bare bulb so that's one of our shadows the second shadow that we're getting is the light that's kind of bouncing around inside of the strip box and then coming out so it's it's a little bit like it's kind of like a quote unquote messy shadow, isn't it? If we wanted to clean it up even more, I would just take the strip box completely off then we would be shooting what's called bare bulb and then we get like very hard shadows just because this is an environment where I don't think we would just be seeing like a light bulb hanging that's what bare bulb simulates is like just a lightbulb hanging out. I don't think the shadows were doing that harsh in this, especially once we started filling this area up with a little bit more ambient light you can see our ambien is still very dark I mean, this image doesn't look I mean unless you guys think it looks good but I don't think it looks good that way so we don't have what we want just yet but we do have a couple elements that I do like let's say our subjects are right here in the foreground there we go we got it again should throw something that the break buttons up there to bring the power down cool hopefully brought it up and then we have to bring the ladder back in yeah, there I am acting like an angel. What was that you levitate there? Yeah, yeah, I'll do it why not? I'll just jump right here in place can you get me in there? There we go. All right, here we go. Three, two, one it's pretty impressive. I know I'm not the subject I'm not the model for today but it will come through. I'm so excited to be levitating. All right? This actually thank you for telling me to do that drunk this brings up two really great points there's so many cool things to think about when doing this type of photography can everyone see the fall ofthe between my head and my feet like how much brighter my head is then my feet there's a huge difference in lighting my head is overexposed, my feet are under exposed so therefore subject really was like jumping in place here we would need to completely change our lighting. The light that we're using right now just would not work because we're getting such a difference between the top of his body to the bottom of this body. Luckily for us he's not actually going to be standing straight up he's going to be like off to the side more levitating something like this so the light fall off from his body should be relatively even but if we did have a concept where we wanted to do that we would have to do something like bring our light and put it way up higher so it would degrade it. This is the inverse square law. We're just talking about math are we again? But if the light were higher the light that fell on him would wind up being more even because it is that's. Well, that's how light trumps you guys want me to explain the inverse square law? You get it right? No, no math, please. Okay, so that's cool. But the other thing that I really do like about this images we are getting some really nice separation between the foreground and the background and that's that kind of depth that we're talking about you can see that here where subjects are there going to be decently well lit and here in our background which is really only a few feet away is pretty dark so if you do want to create that depth in your in your image this is a good way to do it use a lighting modifier that's really only gonna light party or image so we do have a couple subjects that are going to be right around here and they're going to go back in to fall off there they're going to go a little bit farther into darkness all right? The next thing I want to focus on is maybe we just can we take one more photos so we can actually see the light that we're going to do they're going to throw anything uh no I kind of want to but we don't need teo all right thank you so the next thing I want to focus on we are probably going to bring that rim light in is well but I do want to talk about our our next like here and this is this like the little pan like that we've got there in the background and I want to bring that and I want to make it relatively interesting because I think that can actually wind up lighting our scene is it too low do you think it's a little too low I think it might be a little bit too low so we're going to just probably raise that up a little bit but the next thing we're going to do is we're going to fire a strobe. Into it and yesterday if you guys remember we talked about how light works john, I think somewhere over there is a cto gel if you want if you want to grab that right back there near the power chords we're going we're going to jail this light how explain that in a second? But yesterday we talked about lighting being basically a lot like splashing water, right? Like if you splash water in one direction it's going to continue to splash all around so if we want to make this light looks like it's on like there's no light bulb in there we hardly saw that earlier what you could do well, we could just solve the top off of this and then like trying to put a light down in there that would totally work, but if we don't have that option which in this case I don't think we do because I didn't ask permission to solve the top of that light off what you can also do is shine a light into that light and then that light will shine right back down. So that's, what we're going to try to do, we've gotta like here and this is set up we've got are basically an einstein with a grid on it twenty degree thank you we've got a light with a twenty degree grid on it and that's going to shine light directly up into this light here and then it's going to come back down and basically make it look like the light is coming from this light instead of coming from the ground, we do want to raise this a little bit. I think maybe we should do that first. Yeah, I'll get the lettering again. Perfect this's part of the fun of actually doing things while we're explaining them to is, you know, instead of doing this all off said or, you know, last night or something like that, we decided to do it today during the set because you can actually see the entire process of like, how we're thinking, yeah, miguel is a question I wasn't asked you if you were doing this let's say we were in a really laundromat. Would you consider possibly using speed lights to kind of not have all this gear everywhere? You may be limited on space? Could you even do it with a speed light? You with people like that's? A really good question? S o speed lights are there super popular, you know, thanks to like the strongest community and things like that, and I got my start using speed lights, basically, I use them for everything for about a year, too, I don't really use them anymore. I have a couple of reasons why I don't use them first of all is like reliability anything that needs to run on batteries in my opinion is just a little bit less reliable than something you can plug in power and things like that if I'm doing a personal shot and maybe you have to like stick a light that's very small in a certain place a speed light is still a really great option for that if I'm doing a client shoot and someone's paying me money and I think I've got, you know, something that's like dying in the corner and losing power or something like that or we're not firing properly that's that's goingto then in turn look bad on me like you know you don't want like a piece of equipment to be the limiting factor on how good your photoshoot khun b and speed lights have gotten very, very good when I first started they were, you know, not as good as they are now, but I still don't really use him. It happened like a couple of times where the speed light was kind of like the thing that made the shoot not great like they started losing power or that I was like shooting it one one, two, one power because I needed a lot of power in the mark of a cycle time was like every six seconds and then in twenty minutes my batteries died and like I started losing power on there the sun was setting and all this stuff and the last thing I needed to keep on my mind was like let's replace the batteries in my little speed light so a couple of times of that happening and I was like, no, I'm done no more speed lights but for like little options sometimes if I need to put like a light in a refrigerator or something like that a speed line is a great option for that or just like a little rim some places or in this case, if we did have a reason for putting a light inside of these washing machines, I might think of using a speed like they're too because you wouldn't have to like run a power court in there as well. So for those options I think the speed light is great for this type of stuff I would I would still impose on the buildings would set up all kinds of lights and rigs and light sends things like that yeah yeah let's see what we got you want take a picture and see how our heights looking beautiful I want to try to not touch that camera single time today and still call myself a photographer we were like air what's this workshop called getting other people to take your photos for you one on one I know the alien be eight hundred using our what? Three twenty five maybe on the open market right now and the high end cannon flashes over six hundred yeah so I mean it used to be an issue that stroke for very expensive but I don't think that's true anymore that's a really great point you know if all you want to shoot with his pro photo on ellen car alan crom and brawn color then there's a huge price difference but you know with an alien be being totally acceptable for a lot of applications and less expensive than like a cannon five eighty ex too then yeah it's you know it's really given take there are positives to speed lights when you needed stick a small light in a certain location and you can't have a power cord running to them but for reliability we're shooting all day today you know and he's already been on this ladder enough times I wouldn't want him to replace batteries like you all right, here comes an hour and a half john replace all the better he's an office plead lights for me please people like I hate you just use strong like a normal person so that's a really good point all right? I think yeah I think that looks pretty good on height so we're gonna we're gonna give this a little a little test here and see what we've got right is this cool for you guys to experience? Like seeing the whole shoot come together like other would actually come together? Very cool. I was hoping that it would be, but there's, no way of knowing there are a couple things to keep in mind what we're about to do here. We're using a grid on the front of our eyes on the front of our seven inch reflector, the greed is made out of plastic. If you use a modeling light, thie grid will melt. Gels are also made of plastic. If you use the modeling like the gels will melt, however, following lights are really great to be able to see where your lights going, especially when you are using a grid, because you want to see where the lights are. So can we call it in turn, are modeling light on on the full power trick ears? Do not leave it on a long time. You want to just be able to see where it's going and modeling lights are basically there to show you what's going on with with your actual stroke? Like where is the light going to be hitting? And then we'll be able to save him there we go so we can actually seeing here normally in this application, what I would do is if we could turn out lights now I don't think the camera crews can get too happy if we turned out lights but if I was in like our studio or something like that and I couldn't actually see the light like is it in fact hitting inside of our there we go we can see it like very faintly hear I think we've got it in the right place but if it were too bright in the ambience, what I would do is I would turn off all the lights you know in the house just for like a second or two and then position my like correctly and then turn the lights back on so we can turn the modeling like back back off then we'll see if this works but there are no guarantees that's what today's all about there's no guarantees that's why the models aren't even here yet or not we're not wasting their time yesterday we talk about wasting clients time doing this stuff obviously if you were doing this sort of thing you wouldn't want your client on set yet they'd be, you know, hanging out in their trailer you know come a few hours early, get all this sort of thing set up and then tell your clients to come in, you know, ten eleven twelve pm or if you're not shooting with clients, just tell your models to come a little bit later unless your models are really interested in learning lighting there's really no reason for them to be here at this time on buchanan was you standing especially if we did have is that ready go perfect if its slaves from that okay perfect we go would you mind just so you know aaron mariah says it is absolutely helpful watching this production as it is in process I'm a college student and I'm trying to always assistant shoots so I can get this experience in watching him participating from start to finish in a production so I'm definitely enjoying being able to see it awesome perfect well that's that's really cool and this sort of experience is like I'm hoping it's like people are here on the on the actual set and we could see that actually did work is there any way to pull up like before and after with this real quick there we go so light off and light on but it's still not really doing much right it's not like it's not it's illuminating in here but it's not illuminating everything else eso let's pop up the power and see what we can do now that's the really cool thing about these strobes is they can get very, very powerful and put out a heck of a lot of light all right how hard full power all right let's see what we can do you can't even hear it you can hear the power that was amazing that's really really cool okay so we have we have used a joke now when you do have something close to full power and you do lose a couple of things you lose things like your color s o that's something that we have to battle with if you do want a lot of light coming with it the higher the intensity of the light the lower the saturation of the light so if we wanted mohr that yellow color we would have to pull down the pull down the intensity of the light however we can see that it is in fact lighting we pull up sorry this final image with one before we even started before we started teo put the light up there there we go very cool so we could see a couple things not only is the light you know actually liked lighting our fixture here in this image but it's actually lighting some of some more of what's on the floor there and everything like that so if we wanted to pull this like even farther back they might be hard in this case but let's say that was like hanging from a light stand we could actually move this entire rig backwards in this direction and what it would wind up doing is letting s'more of what what's going on behind there the other really cool thing that we can do is you can trick the camera and trick, the mind a little bit let's say, we wanted this like to look like it was lighting, you know, like this tree and things like that. Well, it doesn't actually have to like those things. What we could do is we could set up another soft box or a bearable or something like that, right up here with a warming gel on it, and that would create a light basically right around here that would make it look like this light is lighting everything else around there, but instead, there would be another like to try just to bare bulb, right about yeah, put a bare bulb, like, right, pretty much behind behind this guy here and we'll see what it looked like. So aaron, jorge is wondering because you're already starting to set up light stands and everything. Are you going to shoot a shot without all the lights, stands and stuff so you can composite them out? Most definitely. Yes, exactly. And that's that's a really good question. Because that's the entire, like essence of what frame compositing is, everything that I put in here. Now, this light scent is a little bit like farther out into seth, and I would probably do myself if we had like a you know a boom or something like that and it could come from behind the wall that will be great maybe we can do that during the break we could just re set this up but if not it's not a big deal because we do have way have the shot with the light stand there but we also have the shot without the lights stand there so in frame compositing you know like if I'm standing here in one picture and then we take another picture and I'm standing here we can remove me from the place that I was standing there because we have all that information so that's the whole idea behind frame compositing have for instance if I was in this situation I would shoot it and I would say well let's remove the light stand and get a blank shot the problem is that I come across this now that that shot is much darker the shot is darker right because you've moved the light certainly so to me I have a hard time then re compositing that in okay that's a really good point now sometimes that's only gonna happen if you're moving an object like a piece of clothing you're never gonna have that problem because the clothing is not what's lighting your scene but if you're moving something like a light you are going to sometimes run across the issue where moving that light then changes out party, you're seeing you, khun, do a couple a couple of really cool things, they're depending on what kind of grip you have. Let's say you have a standard light stand that's, you know, coming from the floor up to support your light. Well, if you decided you were going to remove that instead of removing your light completely, what you would do is stand over here, hold your light in a similar place, and then you would still have this entire area without the lights stand, and you would still have the light lighting this area so you would use, and we can probably try that today because we're going to run into some of these some of those same issues today. So instead of worrying about, like, you know, let's, remove the light completely, just try moving a little bit changed the lighting modifier, so you still have that blank area and, you know, you could hold it or use a boom or however sophisticated you want to get with it. Really a really great way to do it is if you are using some type of boom or, like, you know, this camera jib right here, which is really nice that we could actually focusing on this. Could you just move that jib like up and down just a little bit if you don't mind so as we move that up like pretend there was a light on there right now and then move it down a little bit and now there's a light right there so if you were to move that up and down even just a foot you then be able to composite the differences between those two and for those you guys either here in the audience or at home who are like I don't really know that compositing process that's what we're gonna be doing a little bit of rough compositing today and then tomorrow we're going to bring it all together so hopefully all this will wind up making a lot more sense starting starting later today join us later today for compositing actually playing around with a computer I love it that we're compositing wanna one by the way and we haven't touched a computer yet today isn't that awesome really is I mean to me it's it's like I said yesterday, it's ah it's something that I learned and I'm really excited to actually put into plays tow focus muchmore on the pre pro then I do on the post yeah it's so fun I mean just you know compositing justin the computer it's that that is totally fun but being able to build all this sort of things like building entire set building, entire concept up building entire image up with the idea that it's going to become a composite and building our lighting in that way I think it's just it's a really cool lesson and this is a whole lot of fun so something I wouldn't want to miss out if I was learning the entire process why don't we take a shot and we'll see what we'll see how it looks okay because the light is to basically firing from, uh from the right it's right behind this wall here just in case anyone can't see it there we go it's look it's looking like it's coming from back there, which I'm not totally opposed to it's kind of interesting it gives like a little bit of light in character back here it doesn't make it look like this is the light flighting, that sort of stuff but this's what it's all about it's kind of building it up so what do you think? I don't think that looks bad with that shadow and everything like that do you like it? What was that? The papers on the board look kind of over exposed I don't know if that's something that would oh yeah totally overexposed you're definitely right about is not going to be replaced or having them over exposed yeah, well, just lower the power oh yeah yes way we replace it with a properly exposed image try there yet let's try it again. Thank you. Yeah, so in kind of coming up with your lighting design and figuring out you know, do you like the placement of these lights and things like that? You know, part of it is like do do you like what's going on in the shot itself let's pump the power up just a tiny bit if you wouldn't mind john maybe two tenths of a stop so part of it is going to be do you like the light that's actually hitting your scene and the other part's going to be is it properly exposed? All right, cool let's check that out and with the very overexposed shot creeping owl who was very active yesterday so welcome back says the shadows are a dead giveaway of direction of direction yeah, yeah he's totally right. The direction in this does not at all look like it's coming from that light. So originally we talked about making it look like that this light would be lighting these in this case that wouldn't be what we were trying to pull off if we were trying to pull off that we would definitely want our light basically right behind this with like, a little bit of a globe or maybe some diffusion material right around so the shadows they're not as hard in this case you're right we would not be going for the idea that this is the light lighting those it would just be a completely different lighting set up saying that there is a unknown light source maybe it's just a lamp or something right you know right off camera that is in fact lighting these things so at this point it wouldn't be trying to fool the eye into thinking this was the light lighting these it would be there's another light right off camera newman seven three three says it could be that it looks like it's the front door of the laundry mat and it's sunny outside letting in cem a stream of light that pretty much love that is the description of the front door the laundromat any scream here I can't see the shutters it's still too bright good point so what jonah is asking me is the they're like that sitting here it's it's basically right behind this wall and its bare bulb and for those you guys julie would you mind bring me like that's bearable so I can kind of explain explain what that is for those guessing some people don't know what bare bulb is but in case any everyone does there we go it doesn't have to be on or anything like that okay, so bare bulb basically just means and this is a alien be but we're using a nine sign back there they're they're very similar bearable means exactly that there's nothing surrounding the bulb so let's just turn that around there we go. So this is bearable and what this means is like there no lighting modifiers on this and a lot of people when using strobes they think I have to put a lot more I got to put us off box on something I got to put a seven inch reflector I've got to use grids I got to use umbrellas got to use all this stuff but bear will provide you with a really interesting light it za like that basically looks like a light bulb and it's going to give you those really hard shadows it's going to give you a completely different effect and in my opinion it actually more closely resembles like that you would actually see in an environment so in doing environmental portrait's and things like that this light instead of just coming out in a beam this way or being in a soft market it's kind of kind of go everywhere so a lot of the times it creates a light that's I feel a little bit more realistic toe what you actually see like a a light bulb hanging or something like this you know it's not it's not like directed entirely it does have you know this is basically the same thing is like a beauty dish or whatever just needs like a little bit of a disk right here and that's basically a beauty dish, right? Kind of cool? Well, yeah, it light is like whether it's continuous or a lamp or a beauty dish it's all basically the same, so this would basically imitate, you know, like a lamp. Something like the cover was off for something like that. So basically here we're deciding. Is this interesting? No, jorge is wondering whether that background should be much darker so that the people in front, our focus and not the background that's a really good question, and we did talk about that earlier as well and that's totally like a non artistic and stylist, a decision that we can make everything ok back there, ok? That's a that's an artistic decision that we could make if we if we start taking pictures, also keep in mind that there are going to wind up being people hear in the background that I don't necessarily want completely in the dark. We also you don't tend to see laundromats that do just have a light right here like that kind of wouldn't make sense, but if we are taking pictures and we're like, the subjects really aren't standing out as much as they should, then that's a really great time during the shot, and we'll probably get to that in segments two and three when our subjects are in here, when we're able to decide, okay, yeah. It's a little bit too bright back there. Let's. Knock that down. That's a great suggestion. All right, so it looks like we've got a got a flag going on here and let's take another shot. Basically, john set up a flag, which is going to keep the light from hitting this wall so much and so it should darken down just this area on the wall but still produce light coming towards beautiful fight. Cas you've got going on. There we go. So we can see our exposure is a little bit more normal. Maybe we could. Could we pull those two up side by side? There we go. It's kind of hard to tell, isn't it? Maybe when they're a little bit bigger, but maybe if we yeah, let's pull it and the little baby a little bit. There we go. Can I get a little bit closer to the light? I feel horrible that you guys can't even see what's going on back here, but I'll describe it to you and riveting detail. All right, we can pull this back out of the shot there. Thank you, julie. All right s o a flag basically what we're using here is a piece of diffusion material or like a black card or whatever is in this case it's just a piece of white foam core that's right next to your light so flight is going to be shining out in this direction if it's hitting the wall and creating a hot spot there is just something that blocks the light from hitting that wall so the light is coming out in this direction instead of just hitting the wall we're good to go cool let's try it again all right and there we go so we can kind of see I didn't realize I'd be there but now we can see this shadow here that's kind of coming out from the background that is actually from the flag so if we wanted to bring those back a little bit oh cool thank you for doing that the shadow there is actually from the flight you can see it's not hitting the wall so much but we are getting kind of like a interesting shadow there on dh that's just something if you guys decide you're like yeah, that shirt looks kind of cool leave it in there if you don't want it in there don't put it in there something you know like perfect lighting wouldn't have a big shadow there, but you know something that's supposed to look like it's actually riel and lit and, you know, an environment like this, it just may have a shadow like that. So totally, totally up to you in your decision undoing this sign on the door, there's a sign on the door, which is casting a shadow wait don't pull it back a little bit that would actually be really cool if you could use something like dura trans, which is, if you guys have ever seen, like, of the side of a bus shelter or something like that, where there you'll see like an advertisement and it's lit from behind that's, what endure a trans is and you could use the dura trance here as a flag, which would make it look like there's actually like a projected image back onto the wall right over there. So instead of just being a dark a dark shadow, we would look almost like there's a projected image and that actually would look like there was a sign on the door that you were shining light through so all pretty cool we don't have a dural translating around the way, probably not I did not listen and make sure there's a during transit looks like an exit sign on the door all right, let's try popping that off one more time I'm going to get way back over here and we'll see what that looks like. All right, perfect. And I think we're looking great. There were not over exposing that certain area. And we are we are in fact, like in this area. And I think, you know, these hard shadows, we see there's a shadow on me here as well as these shadows here. Unlike the gumball machine in the plant and everything like that, they really do give the image a little bit more character, in my opinion. So mixing hard shadows with soft shadows and, you know, generally good amount of fill light, I think, is a great way to kind of, like, draw a little bit more. Just try a little bit more interest on your photo, so I'm gonna ask you guys what's missing still in earshot, we've got three lights set up, what's missing what's still looks a little bit off to you guys. How could we improve maybe a little ambience for phil environmental film? I love it. Yeah, some environmental feel like we're seeing still like some dark shadows here on the floor and things like that. This is, like, fading pretty quickly from from highlight into shadow. So we really don't have a whole lot of fill light or ambient light, especially if we were to have our subject, I mean, look at those hard shadows like if this were a laundromat that had windows and things like that, you wouldn't see such hard shadows on people like you can see me in a room right now. I don't have, like super hard shadows on me, that's just because, you know, like most buildings have have windows and it's going to let light in its gonna bounce all around and fill in the shadows. So we do want to do a couple things that are going to allow us to have quite a bit of fill light in here, so they're a couple of things we can do here way could choose to use like giant parabolic reflector is here, we can use kind of the room that we're currently in to see if that's going to actually fill our light, and I think let's go for that. What do you think, john? So we're going to use behind our beautiful studio audience here, we've got a giant white wall and that's like a pretty perfect reflector, so if we take that light right there, that aren't sign that's got the long through reflector, innit? And we just put it behind our audience and fire it that way at a very high power, what it's going to do the light is going to hit that wall it's goingto make it quite a bit brighter and the light is all going to come back in this way and what it's going to do is it's going to produce a very large feel like it's going to be a feel like that basically looks like the entire side of the wall so maybe there is, like a window bank or something like over there so it's just another cool example I think of using what is like a pretty small I mean, you know, if you guys can see the reflector that's on there it's an eleven inch long throw reflector and it's not it's, not a particularly large and fucking you wouldn't think that would trade off ah phil for an image like that you know of this size but if we pointed against the back wall and that's going to bounce all the light back this way and that's going to produce him really great phil all right, let's, get that going on we'll turn the power up just a little bit and then we're gonna be done with our segment it's gonna be so cool. There are other suggestions. Well, we're getting that set up let's see, michael porterfield was suggesting the strip box from the right feathered in front of the machines to give a little bit of phil to that oh, yeah that's already hanging out there? Yeah. Great suggestion. Michael, we also talked about remember when I was throwing that piece of clothes there, how we might actually wind up bringing something in here to give a little bit of a rim to those clothes and that that's basically going to serve the exact same point. So, michael, you're right on the right path. That's exactly what I was thinking, too. All right, julia sleepwear and crank the power way up on that big up arrow sign and we can see and hopefully come through that's not on yet. Perfect. All right, this will hopefully give you guys another great piece of, like, how I do my lighting everyone's different, but I like to start with one light. And then I'll add another light, you know, add another light and then I'll add another light and then once I get a light especially if I'm getting upto like four or five lights in a scene I love using letting it's not it's, not something that you need to do to be a guy good photographer by any means you can light however you like. But once you get four or five lights in a scene and you think something looks good, one thing I always do with sounds totally counterintuitive because I always turn them off individually all get the shot like looking how I want it and then I'll go through and turn off one by one each one of my lights, because a lot of time you tend to over light things and something's probably sometimes it looks more interesting with just one one of those lights back off again, so I tend to, like, build my lighting up, and then I turned those lights off each one by one and I'm like, you know what? That shot actually kinda looks better without that light back there so well, just, you know who's do without that light don font stick actually asked why not just open the shades and let the sunshine in hate sunshine? Can you tell from my complexion? That's a really good question we are shooting at a shutter speed here that is we're shooting at one over once sixty of the second at five, six and one hundred and remember, we do have to freeze that motion. So unless it's like very, very bright outside, we're not going to see rememberwhat we started off earlier with with the amount of light that was in the room was almost no light in here, not only that, but that what we're relying on to freeze our motion in this case is that very fast. Burst from our strobes we're using a shutter speed that's not so fast that it's not going to freeze motion on its own so if we do have light coming in from the ambient that light is going to be present during the entire duration of our shutter which is going to create some motion blur in the final shot so if we don't want that motion blur either we need to use just ambient light and really crank up our shutter speed or we need a pretty much kill or ambient light and just use our strokes which have a very short frustration so all part of like trying to figure out do we need things to be frozen and if they do we probably can't use that ambient light that makes it so simple how you just explained we're freezing objects yes good job cool well if you want to go ahead did that flash in the back and it was like oh yeah we'll see if that fills our life phils are saying and it should and it did good we have enough power coming from that light we can see that's pretty impressive that light is you know, fifteen feet away firing into a back wall and it's filling our entire set it's way too bright isn't it cool let's go ahead and turn the power down not only that but we're starting to see some interesting shadows this is of ah I don't know what that it may be a camera something packed there some glare and reflection off of the glass does anyone have any ideas on how we could reduce that glare from that glass? The hard question well initially with reflections you would change the angle of the light buses were lighting up the whole back wall can you move the wash machines off kilter a little bit that's a good point okay or open the doors air oh, there we go. You know I really dig that idea. I like it a lot because that's not something I would have thought of myself we could move the back wall we could move the back wall which would totally do it let's open up the door is a little bit and see if that kind of solves that problem I wouldn't have thought of myself that they're just going to keep going yeah let's let's pop it off again and see what we got did we lower the power just a little bit as well? Okay, cool. We did lower the power of that light as well. All right, so open doors what this is going to mean is hopefully that they're not going to see their flair yeah, there we go so those open doors you can see this store here on the very right that is open we can see through the glass there and the flares basically completely gone, which is exactly what we wanted to do so we could open the source another thing we did we could do if that didn't work is instead of firing in the back wall we could fire it into one of these sidewalls we could fired into a sidewall the light would bounce here and then come back and phil are seen as well. So it's all like angle of incidence equals angle of reflective and if the cameras here and the light's there it's going toe fire back and forth airing creates and flare so another really good point there's also suggestion to use a polarizing filter on the lens exactly you could definitely use a polarizing filter on the lens, but that makes it a little bit tricky andi I'll explain why are you guys have is anyone used a polarizing filter? Okay, you can use them outdoors with like the sun which is going to produce the amount of glare that's in the sky if you go ninety degrees from the sunlight it's going to make a darker sky polarising filters are all about math now here's the great part about a polarizing filter what you can do is you can put a polarizing filter on your lens which is basically basically going to capture light coming in one direction now if you have a light source, you have to put a polarizing filter on that light source, too. So the light source khun send the polarizing consent those light rays basically going off in this direction so you won't see them on the final you'll see we'll still see the light that illuminates your object, but you won't see a glare now. The difficult part is a polarizing filter will change the direction of your light rays. It'll change the order orientation of your light rays once, but once that light hits an object it's almost like it's a reset switch. So if we have a light and it's hitting the back wall and then coming back forward, that back wall is a reset switch for that light. So in this case, if we were to collide it just like that, it wouldn't work. Does that make sense at all? Ok, cool so we would polarized light until it hit the back wall, and then once it hits the back wall, the light would come back out in every direction again. And then by the time it hit here, it would not be polarized, and even though we had one polarizing filter on our lens, it wouldn't work unless we have a polarizing gel expert in the chat rooms there's actually some really creative suggestions in the chat room right now one is from corvi says, bring it with hair spray spray the doors with hairspray to give it a matt look and also jean says that try spraying the doors with something like pam like pam pamela hairspray wow ok, cool so that would create a little bit more of like a funny appearance like a mat look to it. Yeah, totally. I like that for those of us who don't want to do math yeah or smashed through a glass out with a hammer and hammer giulio visual wizard suggests just polarize the wall just pull don't really make skin look really bad we're gonna have people in the shot so would kill any reflections on the skin and make skin totally flat there we go gian brings up another good points on people you can see it on on my skin probably right now what you know the area that is actually my skin and then if you see any white highlights on my face that's what's actually being like that's the reflected light I don't have pure white anywhere on my face it's the reflected light like what you would see if someone were squaring glasses and that's what gives skin that like a little bit of like you know like vivid night gives it its life, so without that people tend to look like flattened almost like weird, so you're totally right john about that as well so a couple different options and that's that's awesome that you know, here's the team we've thought of so many different options on how to bring that together so we can either open the doors if we don't want those doors open let's say we do want to be one of these doors close let's try instead, john of pushing that towards the back wall I know how to close these pretty well let's just try pumping it on the side there and seeing how that looks and I can't guarantee that that's gonna look right because it's you know it's light it's kind of hard to calculate in your head. All right, let's, do it again. See what it looks like. Something tells me though, that hopefully this will will solve the problem. So instead of shining on the back wall there we go it's shining on the side of the wall which is still bouncing around the room it's still giving us that phil that we want to get way are seeing I think these air the camera reflection can you guys see the can you see your reflections in the in the glass itself? Okay, so from here I can see a student wearing red okay, cool that's an interesting point as well, so the direction that the camera is actually looking at the glass we'll determine what reflection it sees so you can either remove the whatever the object is or you can change the direction of your camera angles where you can put a black cloth over all the students to cover the students with the black claws so all these things are really, really cool suggestions in cool ways to like work with these images if you're not shooting glass or mirrors or think mirrors just a pain because they really do reflect everything but if you're not shooting that sort of stuff you really don't have to worry about this sort of thing so cool we're almost wrapped up for section one maybe we'll take a couple questions here at the end of thin and plastic just from the uk is when I what advice would you give to someone that hasn't got a collection of lights and is limited to the amount of a kid that a photographer has what's a good starting point that's a really good question now in this in this environment if let's say if this were a natural light workshop in which I decided I was only going to be using natural light or like that was available for me in this very scene what I would do is I'd probably make a couple of compromises with my camera settings that would then kind of solve that first of all I would open up these windows that are in the back light we have we have shades kind of coming in here and then I would let that natural light in to our scene so I would light it with a little bit more of the natural light instead of working with the strokes. Now if I did want to freeze motion still, I could still do that with the natural lighting, but we would want to use a shutter see that's just a little bit higher, so let's say it was like a cloudy day outside, it wasn't giving us a ton of light. What we'd want to do is lower our aperture down a little bit, maybe shoot it f four point out, we're still shooting fairly wide, so a lot should still be in focus there. The other thing that we would probably wind up doing is cranking up are so quite a bit, so if we're shooting at four point oh, and wanted to shoot it something like, you know, one over six hundred the second we probably look be looking at is so of at least eight hundred and maybe even sixteen hundred to get the proper exposure here. Fun cards is asking a question we always get what white balance setting you're using with all these different types of light using cool, good question I'm assuming in the cameras there question I'm using the flash white balance setting it's just a looks like a lightning bolt what that's going to do is it's going to match the white balance to these strobes that air set at fifty six hundred degrees kelvin which is basically it's supposed to imitate daylight at like noon so the interesting thing when I first started in photography I thought flashes were warm I thought daylight meant like you know warm like like what you would see like from the sun but it's it's not that it's actually cool so daylight means basically when this the sky the sun is like at noon and it's reflecting the blue sky so daylight is a little bit cooler when you get like towards the evening or here in the morning it's a little bit warmer so if you're taking a picture and you wanted to make it look like it's a morning shot or an afternoon shot you want to use warmer whites so you can put cto gels color temperature orange shells on your lights to make it look like it's either earlier the day or later at night on dh then you would want to keep your white balance on the camera the same so you would want to keep your white balance on the same setting so that warm would come through david scotland is wondering if you ever use light meters to measure your light you're not using one on set today but in a real set do you ever use one good question I use light meters I used to use light meters all of the time I used them religiously in fact that I told everyone that I met that they should be using a light meter and I was all about light meters and then I met someone who was like way better than me and they were like I don't use light meters and I was like, well how do you measure your light and there's where let's look at it and so I was like, well, if you could do it then I'm going to try to do the same thing teo I think in this case when we are shooting tethered and I can really get a pretty good idea of what my exposure looks like using a light meter it's not going to help me as much as being able to see my final image on it in the camera if I'm shooting outdoors and it's bright and sunny and all I've got is the l c d on my camera that in my opinion is a much better use for a light meter because I don't have can't be accurate judge of what the final image actually looks like so I'm relying on that meter to tell me am I properly exposed question in studio if we did not have this awesome white wall to bounce the light off could we use the parabolic umbrella maybe here too kind of fill in the shadows definitely yeah, that would totally work there are a couple other options if you don't have a white wall I know like david hobby he runs travis he keeps like a white bedsheet in his like stroke it so he'll hang like a white bed sheet I think maybe it's joe mcnally who doesn't he'll hang like a white bed sheet and that becomes his giant reflector s so that's that's one option two yeah there's we could use that we could use a couple of large umbrellas here if we needed to do those as well and if we didn't need to freeze motion again, what we could probably wind up doing is just opening up our shutter speed and letting a lot more of the ambient light in so that's that's what all the cameras that are filming me right now we're doing they're not using any strobes to like me so there's enough light for these cameras to be using but not if they were shooting it I don't know what are your camera settings? Yeah fifty six hundred oh then that's your white balance okay, perfect and then shutter speed an aperture I don't shoot video yeah for ok cool so they're shooting at a similar sort of shutter speed than I am their justice stop more open so that's why they're getting more light than my cameras we're gonna go let's go. One more question on this kind of a basic for this frame compositing smart photo from brittany, france says if the camera moves accidentally, what do you do? Restart the shoot? You run around and you throw things and you kicked people and you throw attention temper, tantrum, that's a really good question here at this point, we haven't really started anything that's important for the shoot, like none of these photos that were taken just yet or are going to be moved if something does happen like you've taken half your shots and then the camera moves like when you've already taken the important shots. Yeah, unless you want a lot more work to do in photo, shoot a photo shop brother, you would redo those a lot of, like heavy your duty tripods will have a hook on the bottom of the center post where you can hang something like a sandbag. So in some of my shots where I really don't want that camera moving all hang like a twenty five pound sandbag from my tripod, so it really is like hopefully he's going to stay in place as much as possible. You could also gaffer tape it down, gaffer tape tires all on the tripod, strong arm, anyone who's, teo, teo a really good question

Class Description

Lessons

1. Introduction to Compositing
2. Lighting for Compositing
3. First Photoshoot with Model
4. Developing New Ideas On-Set
5. Matching Lighting and Camera Angles
6. FreePreview: Testing Composite in Photoshop

   Aaron demonstrates shooting and editing techniques to make compositing easier and more efficient.

7. Shooting Second Image with Model
8. Adjusting Lighting and Angles for Composite Image

1. Introduction
2. Pre-Shoot: Love at the Wash-n-Suds
3. Test Shoot with Models
4. Creating Levitation Effects with Compositing
5. Shoot: Love at the Wash-n-Suds Part 1
6. Shoot: Love at the Wash-n-Suds Part 2
7. Culling the Images

1. Wash-n-Suds: Lightroom Culling and Exporting
2. Compositing: Wash-n-Suds Part 1
3. Using the Pen Tool
4. Compositing: Wash-n-Suds Part 2
5. Swimming in Cereal: Culling and Exporting
6. Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 1
7. Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 2