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Dynamic Range

Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Understanding Light

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

6. Dynamic Range

Next Lesson: Golden Hour

Lesson Info

Dynamic Range

all right, Color wheel. So in light room, there are two sliders for color temperature. One is the color temperature slider, and the other one is for tent. And I want to show you how these correspond to color. So if we look, we normally talked about blue to amber. And I put this arrow here on purpose because we mix yellow and red here and we get this nice. Make sure we actually don't get yellow. We get on orangey color and so I don't have orange on here. But if you look over here when you see that when you're mixing are red and our yellows were getting orange with orange and blue. So when we're doing our white balance, you're you're going back and forth between these two spectrums of this mix of colors. But what about tent? Where does that come in? We'll tent is actually this way so green to magenta. So we have those two things and so we're actually going in opposite directions of this mix of color light. As it travels through the atmosphere, light travels in wavelengths of red, green a...

nd blue. Those are are our primary colors. When that is printed using pigments and ink. Guess what? The primary colors are the exact opposite. Now they're cyan, magenta and yellow. So if you look at this so this is science. Magenta and yellow. The opposite of yellow is blue. The opposite read. The opposite is green and so colors in print or exactly the opposite of colors in light. And, uh, again, just so if you're wondering why I had the primary colors mixed up there now there's two different sets of primary colors. So we're talking about red, green and blue. Okay, so let's talk about stops really fast because we haven't You hear about stops all the time as we're talking about light, and it needs to be a stop brighter. Stop less. What the heck is it? What does this stop? All the stop is is, uh, half assed much or twice as much, that is it. And so, if I had a person that was three feet tall and we had a person that was one stop taller, that person would be six feet tall, right? But it's exponential, so it doubles every single time. So one stop is twice as much Light. Two stops is four times as much light. Three stops. It just gets bigger. Bigger. So nine stops of light. How much more light is that? Then one stop. You can do the math. So it's 2468 16 32 64 1 2 56 5 12 512 times as much light is nine stops, and then it goes on. And I used to be able to count on buying areas weird back when I program my vic. 20. Um so, yeah, nine stops of light isn't like the differently. Nine stops and five stops is spectacularly mawr light. And so it's It's important to understand that when you're talking about, it's an exponential ramp up and that affects something called dynamic range dynamic Range is something that we hear about a lot If you look at ah ah, a bunch of light here and these air stops right? This is absolute black. This is half assed much half assed, much all the way to absolute white. Okay, this is light. As we see it, our eyeballs can see about 24 stops of light from the darkest to the brightest. We can see about 24 stops, depending on your vision. So what? They can see if you're shooting in film or you have a medium format camera, you can see about 12 stops of light so you can see it quite a bit, but nowhere near as much as we can see with our our human eyes. If you're shooting with a normal DSLR camera like we have, you can only see about five stops of light. Okay. All right. So if you'll hold this for me and we actually have you come out here with us a little bit more like so what we have here is we have an Lexus wearing this shirt and out on purpose because we want to show you that we have different dynamic ranges. So we have black, gray, white. We have different graze here. We've got different colors on her eyes and stuff. Can our camera capture all this properly? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna shoot. I'm gonna take my eye. Associates were using just normal light gonna shoot it an issue of 12. 50 and I'm gonna leave my white balance Teoh auto for now, and we're gonna shoot it about 2.8. So hold it up about right there. Yeah, right on your shoulder. There we go. I'm going to see what we did. OK, let's take a look at what we have here. And we haven't talked about why our camera is so bad at figuring out what the exposure values are. When we look at this image, take a look at this. Here we have this white and we have black. So is this black actually black on that screen? It's not black, right? It's gray. This is great. Is that actually white? We have this tool called the hissed a gram that can help us out a little bit. It's up here on the right hand side of the screen. And what this hissed a Graham does is this over here is how much we have of blacks were gonna do. Hissed a gram on the last day. Actually, this is where middle Gray should be and this is where white should be. So this white here isn't even close to what it should be Way over here. Not even close. So what? Weaken Dio to try to help fix that. We can change our exposure a little bit, so we get the whites more white. But as soon as we make the whites white, look what happens now. The blacks are being pulled with it. And so the problem in photography is a lot of times you can't get whites absolutely white and blacks absolutely black in the camera.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Understanding Light Day 1 Presentation
Understanding Light Day 2 Presentation
Understanding Light Day 3 Presentation
Gear List
Zone Lighting Basic Setup

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