Lessons

Lesson Info

Student Questions and Critique Part 1

So I'm gonna redo the student question. Those of you who are watching at home will be able to see it on your screen on gonna show you the student picture, give the students a little hopeful, helpful criticism to make it a little bit better. And then I'm going to show you an image of mine that does what they were trying to do. Now, this is not for me to stand up here and be like your picture socks and my picture is better. And this is why it's I know what you're trying to get at. Let me try to give you things that will help you get there and then show you what it will look like. Once you do right. I do not want you guys to be afraid to send me your pictures. I want to see what you're doing. I couldn't do this when I got started. I still think there are a lot of things that I really suck at right now. Like I look at some of my own work and I'm just like God, like I I don't think I'm that good in the pantheon of where I want to be eventually. So don't be embarrassed. This in these things.

And I'm not gonna make fun of you. I'm not gonna tell you, you stock, but if you totally blew it, I'm gonna tell you. You totally blew it until you fly very honestly and expect you to give me a picture after that, That gets a little closer. And if it doesn't, I'll tell you why not? And we're gonna keep going until we get you there. I would not be up here giving three months out of my life to help you if I didn't actually want to see you be awesome. Except those of you in Philadelphia and New York. Just keep doing what you're doing. I'm kidding. I'm gonna help you, too. All right, here we go. I still struggle in receptions. Hello, fluorescent lights. I've added a speed light, but I had to just place it and move around them. I like this best with the light carving amount a little, but she shed a light on their faces is still awful. I would love to know how Susan would handle this Set up in a city with a very low cost of living and most of my weddings or low budget like this one. So not a lot to work with. Visually, I love my brides, though I'm learning how to make the best of metal church chairs before we see the picture, I want to go ahead and address a few things. First of all, it sounds like this person's working without an assistant, so if they had to place it and work around it, it sounds like they don't have a person that can actually move it. And that could be kind of tricky. But that's also shouldn't be a deterrent, because I place my assistant and she doesn't move. So when we're doing what we're doing, she stands in one spot and I move around her. The only difference between her and a light sand is that she's much funnier and more fun to ride in a car with all right, and also I'm A lot of people who are sitting in their pictures were telling me this. I shoot a lot of low budget weddings. My venues aren't anything toe work with. Well, you know what? Same here. Like I'm not relying on the fancy nous of my venuto help me. So this is the image of the person. Centene. I work in places like this all the time. Okay, so what? It looks like it's happened. She said she set the light and had to work around it. It looks like the light is coming from back off over here because you can see how it's hitting the back of his head. And then if you look at her, how it's lighting up the side of her body like that, Okay, Now there's nothing you can do with the fact that there are fluorescent lights on and there and there are, you know, metal folding chairs. I don't care about that. That doesn't matter. The problem is the direction from where the light is coming. It would really have helped to see the settings. So when you guys were sending in, your image is always include the settings, so I can tell you what's going on. I could speak to this a little better if I had them, but the problem is where the light is coming from, were attempting to illuminate their faces. And that's not this is literally doing nothing to illuminate the people. The light on their faces is bad because there is no light on their face. Okay, that the light that she or he has added in here is just carving out the side of his head here. Now, if she turned her head toe, look at him where that light is right there. It would come and hit her straight in the face. You would be golden here, but when you do, send these and I want to know what your flash power is at and what the rest of your settings are so I can speak to it a little bit more now if you don't have an assistant and you've got a light on a light stick and that's all you've got to work with and it can't move, you might also want to consider a flash on your camera as well. Have your off camera flash be a little bit more powerful, so it will still be in your main light source. Have a little kicker flash on your camera. So in that situation, what would have happened is you would have let their faces with your on camera flash and then you're more powerful off camera Flash would have come in and then you're you're strong, sort of accent light source there so it would have lifted lit up their faces. The problem here is not the venue. It's that the light is coming from the wrong angle. That's the only problem now to talk about. Yeah, but my venues aren't really cool. This is in someone's backyard in Wisconsin. It's not fancy at all. It's folding chairs and twinkle lights on a tent in someone's yard. It's not. You cannot blame your venue for what your final image looks like. This is in like one of the hardest places I ever had to work out. It's called the on Tour a Mountain House, and it is literally like a dark barn. But it's just dark, and it doesn't have any ambient light in it whatsoever. So you can't Yes, we can all complain that oh my God, this venue with super difficult to work in. But you can't blame the venue for the picture. But this picture that this person sent in its not bad like your picture aren't bad, right? Like you're just trying to get there. I can guarantee you if this were my wedding and I had this image of me and my husband. Even if the flash is not quite right, I'm still gonna love it. That's not to say that we should be like, OK, fine. I'm just not gonna learn anything technical, because as long as my clients are happy, I'll be fine. Literally. The only issue here is there is no light filling their face, and the off camera light is coming from the wrong direction. That's it. It could also stand for are maybe a little better color balance, which is super tricky to do in fluorescent lighting. But we will also help you with that in month three. So moving onwards. Let me start by saying, I love this photo and I'm very proud of it. My biggest struggle in photos like this and others is that I can never make the blue sky come to life like it was the day I shot it. My couples remember their day was blue with puffy clouds, and it's so hard to get both of them in the blue sky unless I'm putting them in the bright direct sun with sunglasses. I'm not well versed in flash, so it's something I really struggle with since I could never get a natural looking shot with Flash. And this particular photo, a beautiful huge cloud came and blocked the sun for a total of 30 seconds. And I was able to get this. This is one of the most challenging things that I face. Hey, Philadelphia. I know exactly where you are. This popped up and I was like, Oh, God, City Hall like, first of all, I feel you, right? Like I'm looking at this picture and I'm like, Yeah, here we go. This is for Philadelphia weddings. They really want a shot with City Hall in it. So you want to show the big, bright blue sky? But you waited until a cloud came over and obstructed your natural light. So you got kind of a shady, no direct sun thing going on here. Well, by the time you exposed properly for your clients faces, which you've done, the sky is now going to be too bright. Okay, that's just going to be a general. When you're shooting and shade like this, there's no way to make it look bright blue when you're exposing for your client's face in the shade I would have suggested two things you mentioned. When the sun is bright on their faces, they need sunglasses. Well, they only need sunglasses that they're actually looking into the sun. Now I know that City Hall has. It's kind of in the center. There are four main roads that lead towards it. You can pick if you have the ability to tell your clients to get in transportation and go with you. Pick the side of city Hall you need to be on, but the fun where you want it to be, OK, and if you're stuck on this side and the sun is coming in, it's smacking them directly in the face is That's what I would have waited for. I would have waited until the sun came back out. It lights them up super bright. When you get it, correct exposure on their faces because their faces will be so bright the rest of the scene will darken down and you will get that blue sky that's in the background. Now. If you want to do this with flash, the reason why your flash looks unnatural I can promise you, is because you just don't have the right settings or you're too close with your flash. What I would recommend in this situation like this is the Have your flash off camera with your assistant. Come back about 15 feet away from the couple. Fire it at whatever flash power you need to half or full, depending on the brightness of the day. Before you do that, taken exposure reading of your scene right before you do flash taken exposure reading. Set your camera toe under exposed by two stops. This is going to darken down your background and give you that bright, vibrant blue sky that you want the background. Then you're going to use your off camera flash to illuminate your clients faces now because you're outside because it's probably the middle of the day. You might need a little bit more flash than you would inside a reception. I'd probably start actually at full power for something like this. But if you're if your assistant with the light on the camera is standing far enough back and it's feathering out the flash enough and it is powerful enough, it will not look super super fake, it's gonna look super super fake. If there are way too close, and they're just blasting it in their faces. But if you get a little bit of distance, we're gonna talk about this. When we do outdoor family formals, I always use an off camera flash for my outdoor family formals. It would be the exact same principle here. So either use your off camera flash in a way that I promised to teach you how to use or wait until that son comes back out and just don't have your clients look at it nice and simple and very, very easy. Okay, I shoot weddings in Jackson Hole. Wyoming and the Grand Tetons are a huge focal point that people want in images. Most weddings air late afternoon and the Tetons or backlit the sun is more south. And if I face the people toward the Tetons, the sun hits half their face. Depending on the time of day and cloud cover, I could get a great shot. There are just times they seem to struggle, and this image I tried putting them in the shade for softer light and completely lost the mountains. I know I need a fill flash of some kind, but how do I do it right so it doesn't look fake. This image was shot about four hours before sunset. I find sunset sometimes easier than this harsh light. I also shot them in the full sun. But the shadows are harsh. Any helper suggestions with midday wedding lighting when you can't put them in the shade. Okay. Number one. I never want to put them in the shade, ever. I don't care if it's new. I still want to put them in the sun because then I have something that I can work with. So first of all, if she started off your sentence with most weddings or late afternoon in the Tetons or backlit, I already hate you because it means you're in the best lighting scenario possible. You want that son to be setting behind the Tetons, right? So you can see them kind of in the background. If you can see them on the screen and kind of see them a little bit over here. I can take two seconds of looking at this and tell you exactly what your problem is. You see all this sunshine out here back him up 20 feet the second there in the shade. By the time you exposed for them, you have lost your background because their faces or darker than what's going on in the background. So adjusting your settings toe have them be perfectly exposed. You're going to lose anything that's brighter than that. If you back them up into the sunshine. By the time you exposed for their faces, you would have gorgeous dramatic backlighting on them and gorgeous dramatic backlighting on the mountains, which you would be able to see. I would do that before I would use any fill flash on them. It is going to be way more dramatic if you really wanted to fill in their faces a little bit more, put them back into the sun and use a reflector to fill in their faces. I hate you for this. This looks nothing like New York or New Jersey. And if you ever want to refer a wedding out there, I would be glad to work with this. Really? Honestly, if you look at any of my images that are in nature that are backlit, it's gonna look exactly like that. If you just back them up into the sun, you have amazing amazing canvas to work with here. Okay, I managed to salvage this, but I was trying Susan shooting down technique, But the light was really tough, and it was terribly under exposed. So when I talk about shooting brides for anybody who's ever heard me talk about that before I talk about putting them in front of the window and sitting them down and shooting down on them and what I'm going for with that. So they gave me their shot settings here, and I put them here because they're incredibly crucial because a lot of them are wrong. And I'm not saying this to hurt your feelings. I'm not at all. I'm saying this because if you literally change like, four things, you'd be good to go. Okay, First of all, you got the lens, right? 85 14 That is absolutely what I use for shooting these types of shots. Always 85 I s 0 1600 I got no problem without whatsoever. You're shooting a D 800. You can totally handle that. It's gonna be great. 1/50 of a second. No. Go with an 85 millimeter Lynn's hand holding 1/ of a second. You're risking some camera shake because it is too slow of a shutter Speed to hand hold with 85 millimeter lens. Unless your subject is not moving at all. And even then I still get a little handshake at 1/50 of a second. So you need Teoh up your shutter speed more if that means you have to raise your I s. So I'm cool with that because you're shooting a camera that can handle going higher than that first major problem is the shutter speed. Second is the aperture 4.5 is not what I'm going for when I'm going for something like this. If you're actually trying to mimic my shooting down technique, I'm shooting it at 85 14 at 14 not 45 The other problem here is that there's no light on your client's face because you put their backs to the window. All you need to do is turn your client around so that she faces the window, sit her down so that you can shoot down on her. Switch that 85 45 to 85 14 and hold it at a shutter speed that is a little bit faster. So you don't get any shake and you'll be golden. You found the window. It just kind of lacked in execution a little bit. I'm currently struggling with church ceremonies. I don't know how to use flash in low light churches with high ceilings and stained glass windows. I usually end up with many blurry photos and the wrong white balance. Thank goodness I get a few. They're spot on, but I feel this portion of the day is very up in the air for me, and I hate it. Many weddings air inside a venue that requires flash. So I need to work on flash ASAP. Totally got it. However, honey, if you think this is a problem picture you are dead wrong. This is great. Like I'd be thrilled if I shot this. Like, if this is your biggest problem, you don't have any problems, right? Like I think this is beautiful. She is balanced. She or he pardon me, has balanced the flash with the natural light coming in. It is perfectly color balanced. It is well handled with all of your settings. You have no problems with this so, you know, sad life that you have out there. This is really beautiful, right? You should be very proud of this. But if what? You're looking for it If the reason why you think this is a problem is because it is a kind of a flat lit image like this looks like it was flash on camera like, I don't know, because they didn't kind of give me the data. But if this is flash on camera, it's what it looks like. You don't have a lot of dimension to it if you have a venue that you are able to use a flash in. I applaud you because most of the venues that I work in you can't use flash like if you're in churches, they don't let you use flash. But if you were in a venue and you can use flash on your camera, why can't you use flash off of your camera? What I would suggest is having your assistant stand over to the side. Like if if the pews end up here having stand kind of over where the groomsmen are and hold that flash up off camera over there, it will get the flash off the camera and we'll give you something that looks like this, right? This is a very dark reception venue. I was desperately trying to light it in any way that I could. So I just used off camera flash in the exact same way that I would use it for an introduction during a wedding reception. Right. So you would go from having this, which again, sweetheart is is still beautiful. Like this is gorgeous, but it is a flat on camera flash. Look, you could get a little bit of dimension just by getting it off camera. You have your assistant stand up there. The second the bride comes down the aisle, back off and move to the back of the church. Off camera flash is gone. You're not gonna be that of truth of you'll be good to go. Or if you don't want it to come from an angle, you could have them stand closer to you. And it's still a little bit better. Oven angled an on camera flash. But it's a more direct approach. So your 90% of the way there pop that flash off the camera, have it come from a little bit of a side angle. We will work on that with you. I promise. And you're you're in a pretty good place. All right. One thing. I'm struggling with his first dances. I always seem to be in a situation where if I'm position to get light on the bride and groom face, the background is horrendous. In this case, my choices were a wall of windows on one side, a massive deejay set up directly opposite and the other two walls full of gaudy reception hall to core. I ended up primarily shooting into the window and capturing a lot of profiles, shooting without flash. The white balance was horrendous, as seen here, and most of them ended up black and white, and they look good in black and white. I just wish I could have figured out how to make them look good in color as well. Okay, a couple things here. Um, first of all, if you got a deejay set up on one wall and the other two walls are gaudy reception hall decor, that's what the room looked like, right? You cannot avoid every single thing in the room that you think is an eyesore. If the reception is Gotti, you got to shoot into it because that's what it looks like, right? Like you can't avoid that all shoot into the band. I'll shoot into the deejay. It's part of the room. You can't ignore it. So this is the image that they gave me and I get their problem. I totally get their problem. However, Ah, little off camera flash would have super helped in the way that we were talking about before, and I don't know what's going on in the rest of the room. If you have a wall of gaudy reception decor and it works for you, better lighting wise. If the clients are in a different direction, that body reception decor is your background. Embrace it and run with it if you use a longer lens because I use like a 72 200 at 200 for most of my dancing pictures, the compression of the long lens is going to help you a lot with your background. And if you shoot at 35 or four for the first dance, that will also help you with your background and if you use them off camera flash if necessary. That will also help you dark and down your background. So those three things will really help sort of eradicate the background, being a huge focal point. But when I looked at this image and I'm like, OK, I see exactly what's going on here with this photographer. It reminds me of this wedding that I shot where one wall was like floor to ceiling windows like I've got a lot of natural light coming into the space, which is what it looked like they had to deal with in the image before. So this is what it looks like when you shoot right into the window. But if you wait until they turn and you use the light from the window in a different direction from a different angle, you will get something that looks like this. For this. I got up on a chair and shot down on it, or this now stepping backwards. Ah, that one. If this background had been gaudy reception hall decor, the combination of the long lens F or F four and the delight on her face exposing correctly for her space, you would get a darker background. Ah, more compressed background in the background that's tossed more out of focus from the depth of field of your chosen f stop. So that will help you minimise those distractions. Equipment wise, a lot of folks are coming to you with questions about because we've been asking about experience. But is there a certain amount of equipment that people need that you feel like they need to in order to get into this class? But I remember when I started it was a camera in a flash. Yeah, you need what you've got. You need a camera body. You need someone's that you can throw one it somehow. Okay. And it would really help if you had a flash that you could take off of it with a set of radio transmitters and receivers like the ones that I use. I use photos. Ph O T T I X, go to B NH. There, right there out of raw mother right there. It's $99 for a set and you can get a I've actually been experience experimenting, and I'll post this in the Facebook group for everybody who's in it Later, These flashes by this company called I'm Spelich Butcher. The name in E w er you heard these just nodded their these all manual flashes that are $99 definitely not as robust and totally kick, but as a speed like the Nikon SB nine tens on. It's all manual. It doesn't do T TL. It doesn't do auto. It doesn't do anything like that, but it would be within, you know, for 200 bucks you'd have an off camera flash and a way to have a talk to your camera. And even if you don't have these, you can still learn the principles of them. You could shoot kind of tethered on a cable, but if I were saying that you kind of needed something, it would help if you had some way to take your flash off the camera and then have it communicate with your camera. But I don't care what camera you're using or what Lindsay's you're bringing or please don't feel like you have to go out and break the bank. In fact, in month one, I'm going to actually tell you not to do that. Please don't do that. You have sort of a specific question. I shot a wedding on Saturday under a big white tent. I haven't figured out how to do those yet. Can you figure out my question is, Where do you want to explain? You've got That's actually my like, I hate them when they're still like it's some kind of daylight e outside. But then it's like darkest You know what? Under the tent. I just treat it like it's a dark reception. Like I don't even pay any attention to the natural light outside cause it's usually not helping me. Okay, so I guess my question is, when I was firing my off gamma flash, I was getting a lot of spillover on toe. The ceilings of the tent and the little edge hangs around inaudible edge. Okay, who hates that, right? Like it flaps down and then it it's like a big white border, like standing exactly going to be away. Highlight, get about you down. But then you're really limited. What? How do you do? How do you do it? E. I mean, it's rough. Umm, I mean, it stinks right like, but there's nothing that you can do about that little low, flappy edge that hangs down on the edge of the tent. I will sometimes either try to get down. I'm shooting Mawr up into the tent so it doesn't just look like I'm missing the top half of my picture because it's the strip so you can see the tent ceiling, or I try to kind of get up enough that I eliminate the flappy down side of the tent entirely. But whoever's holding your off camera light, probably instead of holding it up high like we normally do, should bring it down lower. You're gonna have to be more careful with it because it's going to mean that, like, if you miss and you've got it in your picture, it's gonna be a burst, like right here instead of right up there. But if they bring it down, then they'll avoid hitting that flap with it, like try to aim it toward the outside if that makes sense. But, I mean, that sucks for you. It totally sucks for me, too, like it's a hard situation. And in that instance, I try to keep a lot of my shooting towards the middle of the tent as much as I can because, like if here's your tent and your subject is in the middle in your flash hits the subject. By the time it hits the rest of the tent, it's got farther traveling. It's less obnoxious. The worst hardest part is when they're doing toasts and the people are sitting in my favorite. You got the edge of the tent and they're sitting here with the outside of their background, and that's just hard. I struggle with it to bring it down a little bit and maybe try up in your eyes so and dialing down the power of your flash. So it's a little less, and then you can have my permission to go home and cry, because, I mean, I go home from wedding sometimes, and I'm like that. Like that was so hard. My personal dark place in reception is what my sister and I like to call loop lights. They kind of know what I'm talking about, where it's like you're in a party bus and the lights are like strobe in and they're flash in and you've got slashes here and spots there and you're like, I hate you because my options are either to blast my flash pop up my shutter speed and murder all the ambient light in the room or shoot knowing that I'm gonna lose 1/3 of my reception images to ghosting because the light will have crossed across their faces and I have to work 10 times harder. So if people could just stop doing that, that would be super sweet. Yes, ma'am, This is kind of going back to the having you bean there, the subjects being me to between you and the sun. Um, I just did a photo shoot a little bit ago with senior, and I was trying really hard to get, like the Teton picture. Have a background like clear and blue. And I feel like even when they're in the sun, you know, in the front of their face is shaded because it's behind the back. Of course, I still get very bright, washed out backgrounds, and you had a beautiful picture earlier from the other segment with, like, a group outside, and you could see the background. Clearly, it was obviously in light. And this is a really good example of sort of why I feel very passionately about this mentorship because I could stand here all day and I could tell you Well, you could try this. You could try this, and you could try this. But what I really need to see is that picture. I'm hoping that you'll go home and upload it to the Facebook page so that I can see if I can help you. But that's why this is different from anything else on Creativelive. Because anything else on creative like if I could just be appear telling you how to do it. But now we have three months for you to show it to me and me to actually see it and be like, OK, now I can personally help you. And then you can go do it again. So go home. I'll find it. Thank you.