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Large Soft Light, the Easy Way

Lesson 17 from: Go-To Lighting Setups

Mark Wallace

Large Soft Light, the Easy Way

Lesson 17 from: Go-To Lighting Setups

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

17. Large Soft Light, the Easy Way

Mark bounces a flash off a white wall to create an engaging portrait. Bouncing your light is the easiest way to create a huge soft-light modifier on a budget.
Next Lesson: Creating Motion

Lesson Info

Large Soft Light, the Easy Way

Well earlier, Theresa and I shot some catalog shots using a gigantic light modifier. Well you probably don't have one of those in your garage or backyard, but you might wanna do a similar kind of lighting style. Well I'm gonna show you how you can get big, beautiful soft light the easy way. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use one light. This guy right here. This is an ELC Pro HD 1000 watt-second light. So it's pretty powerful and so to do this effectively, you need a light that has some punch. So this one definitely does. So the light modifier we're gonna be using, well it's right back here. It's this gigantic white wall. Now this could be any big wall that you have. It could be in your living room. It could be in a studio. It could be some seamless paper. It doesn't have to be a giant 20-foot psych. It just has to be a white wall that's 8-by-10 feet or larger. Just a big area. And so what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna let you hold this, is we're gonna use that white wall as our di...

ffusion. And so I'm gonna take this light. I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna point it at the wall. So I'm gonna turn this on and what this will do is this illuminates a big chunk of this wall. In fact if we turn off our video lights, you can see that it's an old-school amber light is our modeling light but it lights up a huge space. So that is effectively a light modifier that's 12 feet wide something like that. It's huge and because it's really powerful, I can bounce that light off of this wall and toward my subject. So Theresa is actually going to be standing and facing the wall, not facing you. We had to do this one backwards. So I'm gonna meter this light. So when I do that, pow, man, it snaps, pow. So that's f/11. I don't know if meter cam's gonna work, but let's see, f/11. There it is, it's f/11. Okay so f/11 that's all I need to know. I will take my camera. It is set to f/ and then I am going to shoot toward Theresa. I can stand in front of this light, it doesn't matter. The wall is so big. The light modifier is so big. Kapowi, that it just works. Okay. So what I'm gonna do, this is gonna load up. We can see this beautiful shot. I'm gonna change this from camera standard to Adobe portrait. It's a little bit nicer to skin tones and you you can see that we have shadowless directional light. So we have no shadows on Theresa under her chin. And it's just beautiful, soft light. Similar to what we did with that big light modifier. We do have shadows on her collarbone and stuff 'cause this light is coming straight at her. It's just beautiful. In fact, I'm going to shoot a little bit wider in a vertical shot here just so you can sort of see what's happening. Kapowi okay. You can see it's evenly... Our light is illuminating Theresa head to toe. It works great. So what we need to do is in this situation we need to be able to fix our background. So how do we do that? Well you could add some seamless paper right here blue paper, whatever, any color you want if you happen to have a set or something, that's perfect but we don't. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna move our main camera over to sort of show you this thing that we're doing. We're going to take a couple of foam core panels and then we're gonna move these in. So I'm gonna move one. Lexi's gonna move one. We're just gonna put these in position here. I'm gonna grab your side here. If you can grab that side. Whoops. There you go. Got that? Excellent. Let's push that about right there. I'll push mine in. Yeah, let's push this over just a little bit. There we go. Okay. And then I'm gonna push mine in. I can't see what I'm doing. Okay and there we go. We've created a little box. Okay. So from the overhead cam you can see that we've created this little box here. Now that's gonna give us a couple of things. It's going to give us the benefit of the light bouncing around inside of there we go. We're gonna have a benefit of the light bouncing around inside of here. So we're gonna have light that's surrounding Theresa as well. So let me go back to where I was. Nothing changes as far as the metering goes. I'm gonna go over here and now I'm gonna get a nice headshot. Wham. And I'm gonna bring that into the develop module. 'Cause I need to set this to the right color. So Adobe portrait is what we said looks pretty good. And just like that, we have a really nice wraparound white light shadowless look. You will see yourself in your model's eyes, but that's okay. It looks pretty cool. And so let's do one that's a little bit wider than that just so you can match that catalog stuff that we did earlier. So I'm gonna go it back and then we'll do this. Perfect. Great and I'm gonna put this on screen as well. I'll change the color. So it's also Adobe portraits and I'll also remove the 16-by-9 crop. There we go. And there's that shadowless light. If you're doing catalog work or something, you can see we have just no shadows, no shadows at all. And that works just really, really well. Okay. Now that we know how to do this it is time for us to take our last looks. (upbeat music)

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Look Book
Lighting Diagrams
Frio Grasp Mini Discount
Tether Tools Pro Starter Discount
Tether Tools Pro Kit Discount
NanLite_WALLACE5.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

LeCompte
 

The class is comprehensive without being too complex! An all around 'how-to' guide with examples in real time with real people doing it for real. Showing 'What If' structured classes and showing 'Here is Why' Does not drag along but quick and concise. AND brought the support staff for deserved bow at the end. Nice Guy & Nice class 4 Stars at least!

Student Work

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