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Live Demonstration: Window and Hot Lights

So, John. Yeah, We're going to go over a couple of things today. The first thing we wanted to start with was like to teach people how to do holiday lighting, holiday portrait lighting so they can get a little bit better portrait's than they would normally get, Say, from using on camera flash or whatever. And then we're going to go through and we're gonna do. We're gonna start with window lighting right there. We're gonna go through, and we're gonna do something called hot lights, continuous lights and then flashes, Speed, lights, lights. And we may even go into a studio like Okay, very good. So let's start with action packed. Let's start with Why on earth would you want Why wouldn't you want to just use your uncounted flash? Let's take a picture with our on camera flash. Pop this onto here and you're going to be my willing subject here. And let's just look at this chin down just a little bit right there and let's see what we get here. We call this our deer in the headlights. So there's...

there's this this little catch light in the eyes that the faces got height hot spots on it and kind of flatly lit. So we want to get the camera flesh off the camera, right and go to other types of lighting. So I think it's almost like having a headlight on. And we don't go around the world with the head. Lighting s less. You're a minor amounting climber. What do you mean? Most of the time? It's how I get very interesting. Okay, so anyway, the whole point is that this isn't how we see the world. We don't have a white label on our heads all the time, so we're gonna show you how to move away from that. Right? Okay, so So the first thing we do the best way to start anybody using. Let's start. Let's start with what kind of camera do we want to use? What kind of cameras do you need to get good holiday portrait save with the window like scenario, we're gonna explore their It comes down to cameras with good high ice eso capabilities because there's the window light were defused. Window is not direct sunlight. It's kind of low light. It looks like a lepidus. John said in the last section. Are someone said there that there's always less like than you think there is. So here we're gonna probably shoot this at about I s 0 800 I tend to work at apertures from F Ford F eight for portrait. So I am one of those people like to have both eyes and focus so But also, for those who may just have a regular point and shoot camera or a smaller SLR than your five d here, is there an opportunity still to do that? I mean, a massive size prints or the canon 70 DSR all do fine like that on. And what about even just have a small point light scenario Help? I don't know about the window late. I've done with the Canon G 10 or G 12 and a camera flash gun. Nice Portrait's with a small camera, but really want to go to DP Review and look at the performance said it s 0 800 see if that's going Okay, so you're going to need to raise the I S o use this wind election area a lot of the time. Yes, even with the continuous lights, will probably be working s 0 400 or 800. I mean, that's where the speed lights and the strobes really come in. They pack a lot of punch, and you can work at low ISOS for higher quality. Okay, Well, you want to move up, Teoh? Yeah. We've got Caitlin waiting up here for us. So what I've got on here is the Canon 85 1.8 lens I'm shooting at I s 0 800 My temperatures now said it f four and I've said a cloudy white balance because because we have this diffused light, the sons on the other side of the building, If you notice I have Caitlin pushed all the way back against the edge of the window. So we're using the whole window here like a large soft box to light her face. It gives a wraparound effect way, say wraparound. But late, you know, doesn't rap like travels in straight lines. It doesn't curve. But if she was up here, there'll be no light hitting the side of her face by being back in the light here late comes through the window here comes across there facing lights up. A little bit of this side. It's still gonna be shadowy. So let's see what we get here with Caitlin and ask you to kind of lean forward a little bit engaged with me here. Little that's great. Smiles. Kaitlin's great at this a. A. And here you can quickly see Turn your face into the late a little more, but your eyes back to me. Come back to That's it. That's it. Beautiful. Come back to me a little more right there so we can see here. We've got nice shadow molding the face, the 85 millimeters, a good portrait lens on a full frame camera. We'll talk about when we go downstairs about camera, distance and lenses. Choice but Temperature. What adversaries should I'm shooting at F four? As I said, I like to have both eyes and focus. I'm not a 1.2 person. Four is doing OK except four should do fine here. I mean, that's an advantage to sometimes to the smaller cameras that you can shoot at F to eight and still get things and focus because the depth of feels greater on the smaller sensors. Okay, so to get counteract some of the shadows here, I'm gonna bring in just a piece of foam core. Um, you can get stuff like this at a dollar store, you know, two pieces for for a dollar, a phone court, probably 18 by 24 inches. And we'll bring that in on sort of on the camera access here. And let's see how much different this this gives to the look there. That's beautiful. Chin up. Just a hair right there. That's great. So let's see if we can compare with the reflected without The reflector. Looks like it's filled in a little bit more. Yeah, it's still coming in. What shutter speed are you able to shoot with? Let's see, I am getting 1 1/100 of a second here. So that's within the general rule that people say Shoot a shutter speed of one over the, um though the focal length of the lens. So in 85 millimeter, 1 1/100 works well, So that's basically what we can do with the window late. And, um, do you have other questions about working with white bellies? Weight balance, White balance. First for this one here. I'm working in cloudy when I'm shooting outside. See Nixon, the like I may use auto white balance. But once I'm in the studio working with people, I wanted to go to a preset white balance. And that's why I have consistency through the session. Because as I move around here and I framed something different here, get her focus. Now you got to face on the side of the frame versus this side of the frame. The white balance may change in the camera because the camera's looking at her skin. It's looking at the background, and it's trying to make a guess. So if I was on auto white balance, each of these, maybe in a different white balance this way, I could bring it into something like light room. If I need to make a change of global change through all the images, I can do it together in a batch. Which brings up another question about white balance. I mean, if you were the white balance for this for this scene to get it exactly right to get 100% white balanced with that, would you be? Sometimes there's a lot of people want to go for accurate white balance. Accurate is not always pleasing. Sometimes I want to warm up the image a little more. If you're shooting cosmetics adds, maybe yes, then you need to be have the super accurate color to match everything. But when you're shooting people, you probably wanna warm things up a little bit. So we're just playing with here. As I said, I went to cloudy and let's see if I went to another white balance the daylight here and see what happens in the same thing. And it's gonna be probably a little a little bluer. Now it's hard to tell in the studio monitor here. That's but for the home team. That's clearly that's a little bit lower than the last one. That's just by changing the white balance. So for up here in the window, I think the cloudy, shady white balance is the way to go. Okay, you have other questions about the I'm like, not so much. I mean, we have temperature and all the rest. I think that's pretty good for that. Yeah, a lot of this stuff was also covered in the last segment by John talking about people photography, so let's move down and move into some studio type setups, so see if you managed to not fall down the steps. So the next thing we're gonna look at his hot lights. That's why they call the hot lights. Would you say they used to be called hot lights? Because they were hot there? Used be tungsten lights are usually 500,000. 2000. What lights? And they baked your subject. There were very uncomfortable to work with when I was shooting catalogue stuff. We would do our winter catalogues in the summer, so he's in a in New York City in July. In this high humidity we have people in Park is with 5000 watts of lights on them and trying to make them look good for a catalogue. Nowadays we have tungsten. We've gone from tungsten to fluorescent lights in the first and write lights run a lot cooler, but they're still constant. And the nice thing about constant light is you can see what it's doing to your subject and what you're getting in the image. And there's also led lines which which is coming out now. They're still pretty expensive for most of them, but I expect in time they'll start coming down. Led Zehr interesting because you could just the power on them. You can also just the color on some of them. So you can kind of balance your do your white balance from the lights and said it from the camera. Most of the light like this, your adjustments are basically moving. Eso here, here. We just have on and off on this one. We've turned this on and looking here. It's a collection of fluorescent tubes. Welcome. Wake up one. Yeah. We're gonna kill the camera weight exposures here, but turn it off. Probably not often. We can see the bulb. Yeah, actually, because So what does this have? 12345678 eight or nine bulbs in here. This is okay for a studio. You probably wouldn't want to take this on location transporting all those bulbs and trying not to break them. You probably need to take him out individually, put him into cases. But in the studio of these air, working pretty well these days now are these just traditional bulbs that anybody could justify the hard. Now, if you really want to get a fluorescent bull that has a high C r. I color rendering index in the high nineties. Ah, lot of the bulbs you get in the store is still kind of greenish. I mean, they're not as bad as the old days. We remember if you're shooting in a hospital hallway or something, you have the sickly green color from the fluorescent lights. They are warmer now and getting better all the time, but most the household brand household level ones. The cheaper ones tend to still be a big green okay, and they're also there's a little bit of risk of them being a little bit spiking. In other words, instead of a full spectrum of light they're going to be putting out even even the night is gonna be putting out. It's not as bad as mercury or sodium vapor, where you can't correct at all, so you may find yourself doing some corrections, but we'll do a couple of shots with this light, and just to see how it looks and compares to the window, it's a much smaller life in the window. So we're going to bring this one over here, bring Caitlin over again. So there are there any advantages to this to this other advantages to this set up in terms of it's quieter, there's not. It's not flashing in the flight or not not flashing it, but it is bright on the user, so some people might be more comfortable with Flash. I think the subject gets used to the flesh pretty quickly, So let's raise this up a little bit. Yeah, Where's John? Oh, okay. Anyway, again, I'm meeting from the camera here. When we were up in the daylight, I was over metering off her face, using the matrix metering and overexposing by one stop. Caucasian skin tends to be about a 36% reflective. So when the meter reads that, it's gonna want to stop down to make it darker. So we say overexposed to bring it to the 18 to 12% range. So let's see what happens here. That's a hurricane, which lean forward, a little bit engaging, smile friendly. That's great. And you here we see the color balance is way different. I was still on cloudy. Let's see if that comes up on the screen. So if we say we like things warm, but maybe not so that quite that warm. So I'm gonna switch to a day like balance here and see the same thing. Lean into me a little bit. There, that's beautiful. Caught you in the middle of a green nets it perfect right there and see, even at the daylight balanced, this is a little warm. So these for the fluorescence, I would always suggest shooting in raw if you can. Your camera has it, and then you can play with the adjustments later and we're looking. Also, we're looking at a lot fairly. We've got some hot highlights, and we've got some kind of sharp shadows. Yeah, that thing. That's because the slightest small weak and we can make the highlights get bigger and more diffused by bringing the light and closer only often joke with my friends and subjects that they shouldn't be too claustrophobic and that it was going to even out the face a little bit. That seems counterintuitive at first because the lights in closer it's brighter, but it's not harsher. People just tend to associate brightness and harshness, and we can also bring in a reflector here on this side. So what's and this is A five and one reflector were used in the white side on this as we saw, the scene is already warm with with the fluorescent lights, so we don't use the gold side and I have the lights slightly ahead of her. So that it again, it's more of a flat lighting over the face. That's great. Smile. It's really fun to work with Caitlin here, and we should see here now that the faces even doubt by bringing the lighting closer, got a nice catch light in the eyes, good modeling and definition. And the late is also doing some modeling across the background now, Yeah, that really filled in the shadows nicely. So this is a reflector that you can get. It's called a five and five wonder. We could probably also do it with the foam core if you want. You know, before you go spending that money. If you want to hold this over here, it's so this is a 500 reflector with a light stand. So naturally, if you were to really get serious, so if you want. But I could just stand here. You can prop something like this up on a chair chair or get a friend and you want to hold on be at the access of the lens here. Beautiful. So you can see we have a really nice warm quality to the light here. And that that works great is in terms of equipment. This is about three or $4 down on any any story? Yeah, and art supply store. And as I said, you have a dollar store nearby. They sometimes sell two sheets for a dollar. Very true. They're usually about 18 by 24. And these air foam core. So this is not just posterboard that a little bit a little bigger. It has some body to it. That's great. So another thing that is a disadvantage about hot lights. I mean, you kind of have to have a dark room. Yes, I'm in here. I mean, we turned off the lights on this side of the room so that we can work with this, but the ambient light in the room will affect the exposure and the color with the hot lights and hot lights. Also, we have to watch the shutter speed. I didn't even pay attention where I was going here, but I'm getting a 200 of a second. So it's pretty similar to what we had in the window there. It's on the screen to that. They're showing the information out of the way there. So from from here, I think the next step would be to go to your camera flashes, right. We're gonna have some of the equipment over here. Turn this. We're gonna give you a little break, Caitlin. We'll be back on the same set, though. Quick question for the two of you while we're making this switch is can you just kind of review again? That next step we started with the window meeting much. But as we're going through building a home kit, who is this for? This last set up and again reviews the different products that the fluorescent lights are pretty reasonably prices. Someone who's getting started is not comfortable with their speed lights or wants a bigger light light source that's gonna give softer light. So it's probably the next step up from window lighting in terms of budget. Um, you know, a speed later, Canon and Nikon speed light at the top of the line. Ones are probably in the $ range. Where do you know with these bones or you get in $100 range for wearing that for these fluorescent lights? Probably not with 1,000,000 bulbs in. Yeah, I don't really mean that much. And then the reflectors inexpensive light stands can be $25. It would be for the home hobbyist photographer who just wants to improve their photography a little bit. And again, you can do a lot with just a single light source and a reflector. In fact, almost everything we're gonna be showing you today. A single light source. Yeah, personally, for myself, I'd probably get a slightly larger soft box than that. Um, but that's the one we had with this kit. And maybe maybe twice that size. It'll just give you in a softer lighting, as if we bring it in really close. We'll be eventually looking over here. We have this large umbrella system here with the diffuser on it, and we'll see what the quality of light does. When we moved to the studio stuff.