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Live Demonstration: Gear and Studio Lights

one is a cloth shower curtain. If we did have hard light streaming in through that window when we were working up there, we could take this cloth shower curtain over the front. We can also put it across to light stands and put a light behind it. And that's why I say Go for a cloth shower curtain. We don't want to melt it. If we do have hot lights, they could set a plastic one on fire. So cloth shower curtains 10 to $15 of Soweto at most local stores, verse, three stores and the like would probably have those three other things along those lines is clamps. Yeah, I realize Dollar. Everyone should have these stories. Clamps get him at the home improvement stores, their dollar. They're going to go a long way from using nails. I like supporting the local camera stores and the like, but there may be $4 there for the same clamp. That's a dollar at the hardware store, So gaffer's tape. It's always great to have around. That's we'd probably used to tape the the death, um, shower curtain into th...

e window. Gaffer's tape is not duct tape. Gaffer's tape has, Ah, very sticky surface, but it's removable. You can take the gaffer's tape, put it on a wall and, most of the time, take it off without destroying things. But try it in a corner first, try it. Try it at someone else's house. Maybe, but don't confuse gaffer tape and duct tape. Duct tape tends to be shiny and has a really sticky residue that never comes off. You can get duct tape in most camera stores. Production houses, stores that do displays, store displays and fixtures would usually have it. So Speed Lights is what we're looking at is what What's on offer out there? So, speed lights, we have something like the cannon. This is a 5 80 X. It's been replaced recently by the 600. Uh, we put this on the camera. It works in E T T L mode. It doesn't me. Tearing through the camera takes care of most of the exposure work for you. You can work in manual mode with with these two. Once you're getting off camera, I kind of prefer manual mode just in the power. So Sean brought in one here. This here is think this isn't you say? This is newer technology. It's a T T. 5 60 It's a very similar looking flash, but it's got manual controls on it. We turned it on and off. It has a slave built in so that you can fire another flesh that would set this one off if you're using slaves that you have to be really careful in the e t t l world because the modern flashes put out to flashes one to set the exposure and want to take the picture and on many slaves will fire with that first pre flesh and will be black when you fight should take the picture. So this one here has a setting on here called S One and s two that you can change too. Make it fire on the first or second flash and actually get in there. And that just so, the first flash sends out the signals to the to the remote strobes, for example, to set their settings and then tell him when to fire. So that sends out a flash. And most slaves will respond to that. Yeah, So those were available for about $40 that's that's great. $40 for a bunch of the $100. So I wanted to talk here, too, about the soft, lighter and using umbrellas. I tend to be a soft box user, but if I had one light my go to light my desert island like it would be a soft lighter here from foe tech. It's a multi purpose. You can see that it's like a weight umbrella here that you can put a flash inside of. The casing comes off back here so you can become a shoot through light source if you wish. But the best thing about that is this diffuser panel that comes in here. It makes it more like a soft box or like an octave box. The foe techs themselves have 10 panels, so it's like a knock to that goes to 10 which is nice. Yes, any more Spinal tap friends will understand that. So this is a more advanced light modifier. I mean, what we're talking about here is taking a points light source, which can be harsh, right? So we're gonna get into a larger life. We're gonna flash the light into here, it's gonna fill the umbrella and come back out. I'm usually anti umbrella because umbrellas things in all sorts of directions. It's hard to control, but by putting this flat surface on the front, it becomes more of like a soft box, and we can turn it and feather it. We'll talk a little bit about feathering as we go along here, too. Other accessories? You probably. If you're working with your speed lights, you're going to need something like this that has an umbrella hole for the umbrella to go through and a way to connect your flesh to it and then goes on top of a late stand and then light modifiers again. So you can have something like a small stuff in, which actually is a is a small point light source, but it spread all over the place. Dolphins and Gary Fung. These have been around for a while. A lot of people have them. They work great and smaller rooms, low ceilings, low white ceilings or in a corner of a room where you can bounce the light off the wall and get a little bit like going forward in this room. I don't think either one would be very effective. They would just kind of using other batteries feelings here, what, 18 20 feet? I don't have 14 feet. Eso the lights Not gonna bounce off that and come back in the ad much. But But as I said in a small room, these things were great and they turn the entire room into a light Sources. Yes, if it's and speed lights are good too, because you can move around with them. And I think that's what I'm going to demonstrate. Next. Put on this contraption here. This is a the black rapid double strap, and it kind of goes on this way you could take the camera. I didn't bring us a camera lug for it. Okay, so you're gonna have to help me with this one, okay? But what I We'll start here first with the camera on the flash on the camera here. I'm going to do another photo of Caitlyn. We're gonna get another sample of like, So I'm gonna on camera flash versus I'm gonna trouble the I Isoda 200 on this one, And let's see how we do in here. We talked about having the, uh, see what happens here. I'm in a V mode. It gave me a slow shutter speed of 1/4 of a second. We see we have all this blurring here, So when I use the flashes, I tend to go into manual mode and I'll set a shutter speed of at least 1/60 or so. So I'm gonna go to an 80th here and going to go back to F four again and we're going to do that. And we still have this hard shadow behind her face. Let's see when this comes up, but we won't have the Blur, but it's it's It's pretty horrible, and that's why we don't use direct on camera flash. But something we can do here is we have a flesh that bounces. I can take this card here and hold it off to the side and coming here like this and let's see what happens there if we were actually lighting with the with the cord. We haven't tried this before as a test here, so we're all seeing this together. It's a little different to me. There's still to much speculum reflections on the face on the skin and the makeup. It's still not my favorite, but let's see if we end now to this the Gary Fung diffuser yet so that if you can see that just kind of steps on like that and we're gonna do the same thing where if you don't have a car, you can do this in a corner of a room or something. So let's hold that first you have an assistant hold this here. So when you hold this right about here, So what I'm doing is I'm pointing the light at that. That's card here. What's coming? A little closer, but some light is gonna come out of the front of the flash to to give her catch light in the eye and give some modeling to her, and we'll see. I think this is gonna be a a little bit nicer on the skin. So that's one way to use your camera flesh on the camera. The next thing to do is to get the flesh off the camera. And recent product in that area is the rogue flash benders, and I really enjoying working with these things. So let's use the flash bender with a cable. Yes, that's to the camera. So that's the next method of triggering the flat. Yes. So let's do that here. A lot of cameras have the ability to remote control their own brand flashes. That's one thing we really haven't covered when that can be reliable and unreliable, Depending on with the lighting situation is and but this is a really simple way. Certainly the older way we used to do it before all that high technology took over. But having a flash diffuser on here is really helpful to Yes. So this is the large road flash bender. They have an extra large now. And I can use this at events or something like that, where I can walk around with it at my side till I need it and I can pick it up and I can put the light where I want it. So I'm gonna do a couple of shots like this. I'm gonna come in again on Caitlyn here, and I don't think I got you and focus on that one. So let me see your eyes and I could change where the light is. If I wanted more of a beauty late, come over here and we should see he had no I missed focus on that 1st So again, we still have some of the characteristics of a small flash. There are some highlights on the skin that I don't like. Um, but for event photography, this may be a way to do it. I'm gonna get the late and even a little closer promise that 85 doesn't focus that close. And there it is. You're walking out of the whip around it. A wedding. You could just have the camera off flash. Yeah, and it looks like this monitors a little little sharp. It's a lot of shortening being added here, and we're shooting in J peg here, too. But that gives you an idea of some of the things you can do with camera flashes. But for me, the rial beauty of lighting gets to be when we get into the studio and work with some cat with felt Uni away doesn't. Actually, it was the pocket wizards. Well, that's what we're gonna use for the for the studio. For the studio lighting. Yeah. There's so many ways to trigger your off camera flashes. There's pocket wizards radio poppers in the lake. Um, I've been using pocket wizards because I've had these for many years. I mean, I don't know if that's what I would go with these days. There's a number of other options. Yeah, never are. And we also want to talk a little bit about your backdrops here. Yeah. Here. We're working with the simple, seamless gray backdrop. It's what, about 44 45 inches wide that goes on a bar between two lights stand. You can get the background holders for 100 bucks or so the rolls of paper. Probably 30 $40. And you don't have to worry about Bowker background blurred all the rest of controlling the background. We never say that other. We don't say that word, but this is so the background stand is like 100 bucks or 100 100 bucks. Yeah, you can usually find went on sale. And that will help get you a clean backdrop. And you can change colors. Yeah, their papers coming in, maybe 50 or 60 different colors. Uh, it helps to be lived near a large city where you can go pick it up because they get expensive to ship. They're not light weight, people. The papers kind of heavy Eso if you have it shipped to you. Sometimes the shipping costs more than the paper. And if you had to have won a grey is not a bad one. Yeah, medium grey is great because we can pull the subject away from the background and make it go dark. We could bring it closer to the background, make it go lighter. We can light it separately and get put gels on the lights. I mean, it's getting into more complicated than we want to go for today. We're gonna have a lot of time, but you can do a multiple lights set up. Another thing here we have here is this extra backdrop. Bring Westcott where they have a bunch of pattern fabrics that we can put on in these kind of set up like this. Excuse me for a second while I go behind here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain There. You on lips if you want. Just There it is. Yeah. Go. You. So with this kind of background, you could even have a white fabric if you wanted to in life from behind. Yeah, they make white, they make green screen one. So you completely knock out the back, and it kind of stretches here. This is this is kind of background. Come with a bunch of different fabrics of the you can buy just to stand itself or standing one fabric kid. And then the extra fabrics air 40 or $50 each, I think, and that looks like folds down into quite a bit smaller arrangement than that. Yes, it fits into a very small case, and it's very late. Wait, let me just just the center one here to try to get rid of some of the wrinkles there that looks pretty good. So let's bring Caitlin over here now. I'll get the letter for you. So we're going to start talking about the professional studio lights here. Yes, and we can go as I was talking about before. This is another soft Later. They come in three sizes 36 inches, 46 inches in 60 inches, the 60 inches my favorite, but it's kind of big for a home studio, So I brought the 46 today and we have a speed Atran flash stuck in here. This'll work, though, with almost any studio flesh. There's a range of them available from alien bees to speed of Shawn and Dina lights and go from there up into the pro photos and the like. Or you can go all the way up to the bronc colors and one of the advantages of something like really high end. Really high ends like you can control the flash duration. So you're doing product photography. You need to stop splashes where you can control the color temperature of the lamps. And there's just a lot of computerized control in there that we it's overkill for what we're doing in the studio. Fine tuning, matching ambient light. Let's put it this way. The brown color power pack is about $12,000 without any light head. So I think that's that's out of our out of our rooms here so you can start out the Paul Buff. Einstein's and the like are very popular, and here I said, As we said, we're tricking these with a pocket wizard system. There's many systems on the market now, and these air radio control so we don't have a wire going to the flash. For years, we used to have ah sink or that went from the camera to the flash, and it always got in your way. And we got these wireless triggers and they got rid of that. And now they give me this tethering hidden until we're back to the wiring. Some cameras. Now we're starting to do wireless transfer. It's not quite fast enough for what we're doing here creativelive to show you on the screens, but it's getting there s so a lot of people are using Pocket Wizard, even in the studio. Yes, yes, Pocket was It's I mean, I went with the pocket Wizards, as I said, because that's basically what was available back then. And I went with the 32 channel ones because there was a lot of people using pocket wizards and with only four channels you get in each other's way if you're at an event. So I'm just gonna bring in a reflector here and set this up and I'm gonna have your point, your knees towards the light this time here. And But while doing that, I'm having her pointer face towards the light for what we call short lighting. There's two lighting patterns that we usually talk about broad and short. The broad lighting lights the full side of the face and makes the face look wider. Short lighting of like the side of the face that's away from the camera. Easy way to think about when you're doing this is tell your subject that your camera is your friend and the light is your friend. So if your nose point somewhere between the camera and the light, we're going to get great late on your face and let's see, I'm gonna goto isso 100 here and I'm guessing at about F 6.3 and test fire The flash. It's working. Didn't mean to startle you like that. That's great. Beautiful. One more like that and let's see where you are here. So again I'm it. 63 I can drop down the power a little bit here, like about a stop and open up to 4.5 and see if we knocked the background a little bit more out of focus. If not, we can always pull her towards the camera and move away from the background. We want to get less focused on the background. Do that. Let's train That s O Let's bring the ladder forward about three or four feet. Bring your seat forward a little bit more, that's it. And again, I'm I'm putting the light forward of you year. You're fine there so that the light feathers and skims across the face instead of pointing directly at her. And now when I come in here and do this, that's a little more smile here. That's great. So let's see what? But we've got here now. So here we've dropped the background out of focus and made it dark. I can feather the late a little bit back onto the the background and see if we could just bring out a little bit of light in the back there. You're beautiful in there. Let me get the focus on your eye and see how that's looks up here. So there were picking up some of the background, but now you see, by having this very large light, we've gotten rid of all those speculate highlights on the skin. We've got this nice catch. Light in the eye would probably raise the light a couple of inches. There's a spring that catch light up a little bit, so let me do that. Do you talk about catch lights. What do you mean, catch? Light is the reflection of the light in the eye that gives the photo some life often if we do it a shot where you can't see the catch later for you. Touch the catch. Light out, though, that the I would look dead. So this just gives the sparkle of light. And I'm trying to get it up into, like, 11 oclock position of the eye. Right now it's more like nine. That's telling me that the light was too low for her and we're gonna shoot horizontal for the screen. That's great. Just lean toward me a little bit engaging, open, friendly. Just don't look miserable. And it helps to joke with your subjects and get comfortable because sometimes telling the troops were we won't show that one. But it's with six depression after it's the one after it that way. Catch. So maybe they didn't show that one. I don't know. It's Mike. How friendly are you with Mike? I want you to think, turn your face this away from the light and show what happens when we go to some more of a broad light here. Yeah, this was a shortly. Now we're going to a broadly you see, the front of the face is gonna be darker. It makes the face look a little bit wider. So for some wondering era slimming, the other direction is widening. Yeah, why does the face And you could do that also, with camera to subject distance. I'm working with a fixed lens here. But if the closer you are to the subject, the narrower, their faces going to appear, the nose is going to be bigger than that. It's gonna fall back to the eyes into the years. But as you move back, the relative distance from the camera to the nose and the eyes becomes the same in the face flattens out. So fashion models are usually shot with maybe 203 100 millimeter lens because they're so thin that if it gives them some some substance, but for very us regular people, you can get in closer and get a good shot. So I'm gonna come in. I don't know if we could focus in this close here. Turn your face towards the light. Just a little bit. There. That's it. Nice smile. So is one more popular than the other for males and females. Or is there? No. I tend to short light. Almost everyone. Stewart Light or beauty? Light beauty light is the lights directly in the front. I know. When we talked about the on camera flesh, we said we didn't want to have the light in front, But I think we can do that here. So you want to try and over and under? Yeah. Clamshell there was next. Probably easier to deal with the foam core. Okay, so I'm gonna I'm gonna bring this late around him in front of you, Caitlin. And this is you just mentioned fashion. And this is really popular in fashion scenes we get on the other side here. Actually, Caven could probably even hold it herself. Here. You're gonna have this late here to fill in your face, and we're gonna like you're standing. Thank you. Let's if this takes long enough, you might be tanning. You see, if I can come in unto the late here, let me see your eyes here. Straight on to me. Beautiful. I don't think I caught it. That's gonna probably give us another one of those crazy faces. Um So let me flatten this. Laid out a little bit more, come back a little bit and just down and I'm gonna shoot up high. So bring this in pretty close. That's gonna fill the shadows under the under the chin. Here, I'm gonna get in here. Beautiful. One more like that. Give me that wink. That is there. So here we wanted to show you the versatility of working with the strobes in the bigger soft box and the like. And, Sean, do you have more questions? You want to go? Really? I think everyone. I think we want to open it up. Teoh to the audience. Some questions came up about light meters, so I'll just ask both of them. Sam Cox from Colorado. As is an incident light meter. An important piece of year to have and to master and arts and focus. Wanted to know what is a great light meter for outdoor that won't break the bank. Uh, light meter, Zahra personal thing outdoors. I very, really is a meter used the camera meter in the studio. I'm so used to working with the lights that I've had for years that I never use a meter. I do have a say, Connick l, 3 58 I think it is, and I often use it after I'm done to see if it would have give me the reading. I actually shot in and it never does. So I'm not a fan of meters. I realized for a lot of people, that sounds strange. When I shot film, I lived with the meter, had a Minolta flash meter three then that was constantly hanging around my neck, read intensive stops and it always work. But since I've gone to digital, I use the back of the camera. Most of the time, I set the blink ease. One thing I do on my cameras, as I said, the the picture style to neutral. So it's a kind of flat image, and then I can see really what's happening with light and also when I bring it into light room. It doesn't change a lot, too, from what I saw from the J Peg Point. So I know a lot of people say they shoot and look at the back of the camera and it's all sharp. In contrast, e and full of color and they bring it into the computer in its lifeless and they're disappointed. So I make it look lifeless on the back of the camera. So when I look get bringing it to the computer on, but wow, that's so much better than I thought it was. It's just a personal way of working. But meters sec, Connick is the is the go to brand, um, been all to stop making the meters, and they sold it to someone else. Do you know who I don't remember? There's there's another brand. What's iconic tends to be the meter of choice. They make a range from probably $100 to $450 do for injured $50.1. Looks like an IPhone and has a touch controls and things like that. But from myself, I just can't spend the money on it. And that way we did here, we didn't use a meter. I just kind of looked at it and said, Okay, the lights that far away. Yeah, the meter was more important back when you didn't have a way of Polaroids, But we don't always get to choose Polaroid all the time, and Polaroids got to be expensive to So is it a toss up between spending the money on the Polaroids or the meter? We should have spent on the Polaroids of the company and still be in business? Gonna really love to have a Polaroid for by five film again. Great. Thank you. Do we have any questions in our studio audience here? Not we got more from online. Don't be shy, folks. The one thing I wanted to mention here's as well. We only have like, an hour Alec. minute segment here. We're going through this quickly, but in what? Two weeks? Tony core bells here He's one of my all time favorite mentors, is here like the December 9th, 10th 11th and will be going. It's a lot of detail on this stuff. That's right. We have, ah, serious. So many classes, actually that that are on this. But of course, when there live there, free to watch so you can check that out catalog. We do. You tell me it's only one week away. Thank you. Studio. I'm using a speed Atran. Here is a speed Atran Force five. Model eight. Speedy trial has been around since the 19 thirties. They were recently bought out by another company, so I don't know where their future is going. But I've been using speed speed Atran light since the late seventies. These probably came out about 10 15 years ago, but I have speed Atran power packs, heads, and so it could have the same reflectors and accessories all the way around. But I've used friends, alien bees and Einstein's, and we use a lot of pro photos here. There's and in that range, the others. There's not a big difference for for portrait work for commercial working. They want to go into the higher level, ones that have more control and more consistency. But I've not running to issues with ease. Great. We have a question coming in. If if you guys could talk a little about, say, we talked a lot earlier in the earlier sessions about mirror less cameras, and so are there. Are there flash equipment? What would you recommend for people who are? It's not that the type of viewing system or the sense or anything like that. It's be able to control the flesh. If the camera needs to have a hot shoe or a PC terminal like you can hook your triggers to that's gonna fire it off. I personally have not used any of the mirror list systems of the small cameras. I I find a camera the size very comfortable. I mean, there's some help there. When I've tried little cameras like my point and shoots. I tend to shake it because they're so lightweight, you know, and you're holding it out here to look through the back. So with a DSLR like this, you could get yourself into a stance, top this thing against your face and you become almost a tripod yourself. You know, you get this oil, the point contact on the face, you can hold it a lot Steadier. I'm getting older and less steady all the time. So I like the heft of a camera like this. And I also feel keeping one eye open here and shooting. I could make some contact with the person I can keep talking to them. If I had the camera out here Now I put this this thing between us and it's it's hard for us to to communicate with each other. So for Portrait's, I'm still in the old school dinosaur. But that could be my age too. I'm sure over the next few years is more photographers work with them and people get used to being photographed with that type of camera. They'll come around. But again, really? What it comes down to for the studio is having a way to trigger the lights. If you're gonna go to flash route, if you're going daylight or the tungsten than almost any camera can work as long as it has a good performance at a high, I s OK. So we had to shoot at 800. Get an image there. All right, well, maybe before we go to our next break weaken do just a quick recap of everything that, like, who should get What? As far as these lighting scenarios go, I would suggest everyone just go to a stroke unit to a strict strobe unit. Uh, what we didn't talk about here is power levels. You know, everyone looks at like the only bees have 408 116 100 everyone says all we need the 1600 could it has a lot of power. And then when you buy it and you shoot it and you find everything's that F 32 you're dialing the power down. So when I go looking for a new strobe unit, I see which ones have controls that I can dial back with small cameras. Back in the day, when I shut for by 58 by 10 cameras, I needed F 90 you know to do. It's a product still life, but with a digital camera 35 millimeters size unusually shooting at F 8 to 11 or even 456 So I'm looking for low power. I want to be able to dial. Yeah, I mean, that's the flipside of what you say. These these air Great. I have a dynamite system at home. That's awesome. But unfortunately, my room is so small, I can't get the lights far enough away from my subjects. I have to shoot a difficult, but you don't want the lates consular away from the subject. But that's why I like to be able to dial it down because the further away the latest from the subject, the more contrast, the lights going to be on their face. They're going to get those highlights that we saw earlier that we want the lates to come in as close as possible to make it a soft as possible. But if you could go with, come to my house, you teach me how happy to do that. But as I say, alien B is a great starting kit. It has. It has a variable output. You can dial it down. It has standard reflectors, so you can get parts for it and soft boxes and almost anything will go into the soft white because they just go on the top of their. Actually, some of them are cheaper than a in an off camera. Strobe are much, much cheaper if you want to do with three light system three light system from alien, be with stands is maybe $2200 a three light system of Canon six hundreds. What? The transmitter is $3000 yet $600 for times three plus 300 for the the video of the smaller alien bees. About $300 or something. Yeah, to 99 or something like that. That's amazing. Yeah, and alien bees also sells a cyber sink controller that you can use to Stephen set the power on the flash. Where they become disadvantageous is you have to have battery power to do you need a sea power or battery. And again they even sell a soliciting my impact that weighs about £2 that you know how much just stroke. I think there's a 202 25 somewhere in that range, and you could probably get 200 flashes out of a charge on that. And it weighs less than £ so he's not gonna like to hear that class system. Yeah, I mean, the flesh, their advantages. Three. Cannon now on the 600 with the Ste. Three does radio control instead of line of sight, and you can settle the controls. But my eyesight just can't press all those little buttons on the thing. I like to be able to go over press the big dial on the Big Flash said it where I want, But if you're out running gun in doing street stuff, I mean, look at Joe McNally's books on Hot Shoe Diaries in the Lake and see what he does with Little Flash. But it's inappropriate for what it's appropriate for. Joe McNally doesn't only use a little flashes if you read, Look up the search for soft lighter and you'll see he just recently did an article about this was his go to light to He said some of the same things that desert island light in the lake. So you put a big light in there, but this light, you can put a strobe in it as we showed you before. So there was a light modifier is one thing, and then you can actually choose which one you want to use. Sometimes you may want to use an alien bees because you've got more power. Control are easier. Yeah, sometimes if you're flying somewhere, you might want to use the small with rechargeable batteries. Or if you're going at out in the desert, there's something that's interesting. Hopefully that answered that that's a little bit. And Sean, maybe you could just let our viewers know where on the DP review site they could go to get more information about. Well, we have some lighting segments in the Articles X section. We're gonna be flushing that out a bit more with more articles on lighting and more links to videos and things like that. So watch for that coming up