Lessons

Lesson Info

Adding or Enhancing Light Direction

Working with a similar theme is our last video in this video we'll be talking about adding or enhancing existing light direction so again we're kind of deepening that last technique just a little bit further and here's the cool thing in the past say a year year and a half I've really gotten into fitness bikini and boudoir photography and the reason for it is because I feel like these areas of photography have have really honed my posing and lighting skills too ah wholenother degrees simply because that's all you have to create your image all you have is where the lights placed in how you outline and shape the body in the form and the pose that you actually put the body into because we're not dealing with a lot of clothing we're not dealing with other you know other people in the types of shots where we can use to conceal so like a regular couples photo it's fantastic I love doing engagement photos and wedding photos and and all the other types of port sure that we do but we always have...

other things to kind of like pose along with the body we have clothing we have another person we have everything else that kind of plays into that and so we don't get to practice lighting and posed in such a pure type of way that you do with fitness and bikini and boudoir photography so I've really kind of drawn a special affinity to these areas because of that so I'd highly recommend going out and trying these genres of photography because they're goingto elevate your lighting and you're posing skills to a whole another level now with this particular shot we have our beautiful model jill and you might remember her earlier because we did a shot with her in lighting one o one we actually use this shoot to demonstrate lighting one on one and lighting to one techniques for this particular shot we're using the bold baby twenty twos with the pro photo or if I uh dr box okay so you can use that or you can use the pro photo btu's either way totally fine you guys can go the full feature out are you guys going to the manual route either way we give you both those options but for this particular scene we're going to need a medium strobe we're gonna need roughly two, fifty two three hundred watt seconds of power to get her adequately bright okay so starting with our process and tips for composition and attributes well I want the background are rocks and kind of the highlights in the water and everything to have a sort of soft focus too I want the book and the water the sparkles on the water to kind of hear so what am I thinking? Well on my sigma fifty million art I'm going to shoot at f too so that we were not fully wide open. We're not at one point four, so we're gonna have a little more sharpness. We're going to see a little more depth of field, but we're still gonna have that kind of soft look overall, which is going to help, not only in separating her from the background, but also in kind of giving us soft and silky skin throughout her body. Okay, so that was number one. Number two sync we're at half two. This is midday sun what we need either high speed sink or a five stop neutral density filter. I mean, you could get away with four stops too. You need five stops if you're one point four since we're at two to hear any at least four stops, but either way, we have a five stop nd on there to cut down our our ambulance exposure so we can bring our six feet down. So what? We end up with the ama nexpo jher? Well, we're exposing bright. Okay again. I want this to have a sort of editorial lifestyle kind of feel to it. I don't want to darken this down where it looks like it's a depressing day I wanted to look happy, I wanted to look like a bikini shoot should kind of look with that beautiful brighton area kind of look so we're leaving that exposure fairly bright. And what you can see here is with ambient light on lee. So these air ambulance only shots where at one, two hundred a second f two and is a one hundred were at fifty, eight hundred degrees kelvin and five stop for our neutral density filter. Ok, so we kept that the same through all the shops, the only between these ones is that's, where we have added our light are added our flash so you can see on the left side that we're giving this scene a very bright and beautiful natural look to it. I'm not minding that so my highlights are blowing out that's totally okay again, shoot with intent and purpose, not with technical stuff on your mind, okay, the technical stuff is just to help you to get to the desired result, nothing more like direction and quality, but this is where I want to analyze this shot because we're adding an enhancing existing life direction, right? So when I pop off my test shots, which is these guys, I'm looking at where the existing light direction ists what I'm doing is I'm either adding to that existing light direction or enhancing it, okay, what I mean by enhancing is that we're following that kind of existing, natural like direction, but we might be amplifying its brightness. We might be enhancing it by making it more soft and giving it a better diffusion. So that's kind of what we're doing. We're following these natural kind of rules that this scene is giving us and adding an enhancing the existing light. That way, we're going to get to a beautiful and natural result. Now we're gonna get to pose in just a second. But there's a very specific reason why I have her posed the way I do let's finish talking about our light direction quality. So we have our two v b twenty twos in our r if I soft box again, we need about two, fifty two, three hundred watt seconds of power. So either the b two at full power or the to bolt maybe twenty twos at, like, half to a quarter power should be adequate again. It's all gonna depend on how far you have that soft box from your model. I have the soft box currently boomed out on a mon a pot and is held fairly close to the subject, so we're not running or we don't need to run at full power, okay? So what are we doing? We're lighting from you can see that existing direct right there so the soft boxes placed right here and what it's doing from this image to this image you can see that we're following existing light but we're enhancing it we're adding light so we're amplifying that existing light and we're giving it a beautiful quality we're enhancing the quality of it and allowing it to wrap around her body just a little bit more but we're preserving the natural shadow that was already in that scene right so we get this beautiful kind of overall natural look so again take that ambulance shot and study it and look at it take your test shot look at where the light is and where you want to kind of add your your additional light to it like color again this is a scene that I love to keep warm and beautiful a fifty fifty, eight hundred two, sixty, five hundred degrees kelvin is a perfect look for this kind of a scene I chose you know kind of the cooler end of that range but you can choose really whatever you like based on the colors that you want to go for so fifty hundred degrees kelvin was great I didn't need to do any jelling or anything like that of course when we get on to our pose frame a shoot right so watch this watch this let me tell you something I don't know, I'm trying to say so what I did here was knowing that I want to highlight her form and her figure I placed her, her basically facing away from so basically the sun is directly behind her right she's facing essentially the sky that's kind of in front of her. So her side, her right side, is what is etched out by the sun. So look at the rim light. Do you see the rim light, how it catches her knee and her leg right there and how it goes up and we get a highlight right on her hair and kind of back, and we get this little edge light on her arm and on her back, right here and on the other leg that's. Exactly what we're trying to create. Now you're only going to see those areas of highlight when you place those areas in front of something that's darker, okay, what that means is we can't see the rim that's around her body when it comes to the highlights in the sky, see where her chest is all that to her head and hair. We can't see much there because, well, the sky is so bright in and of itself. So what did I do with the framing of this? I shot a little bit top down, I'm okay with leaving, you know, her body and her her chest and head is already in front of the brightest area. That scene so it's already kind of drawing attention in that part. What I wanted to make sure was that her leg didn't fall into that same bright area of sky, and if I shot it from her height, it most likely would have. So I got up a little bit higher when I was framing the shot to shoot down, or so that we could place the darker rocks right there behind her leg, and then you get that form and that silhouette around in that shop. So that is light number one in the scene, like number two is to simply add and enhance the existing light that we see right here on her shape, on her form, we're adding in a way that it just creates a beautiful soft wrap around the legs. If we were to put a flat light in this scene. We would kill every bit of her form and her shape and so forth of a real light at um or, you know, angle that's closer to where the camera's coming from we would lose all that we lose all the looks and the part that makes everything about this beautiful. So what we've done here is with we have two shots, one shot where I've angled her chin towards me chin's back kind of looking down the cameras shows kind of kind of a sense of I don't want to say cockiness it's more like a sense of power when our chins up looking down I mean that's what it essentially means, right when you have your nose up in the air, we always say like, oh he's he's stuck up right he's got his nose up, but it basically in a picture it signifies that kind of power and presence and domineering effect over the camera, so we have one shot with her turn towards us. We get this beautiful rembrandt light panel face I have one shot where she has looked straight ahead where again, all where we're allowing the viewer now do not do not focus on her eyes and her face, but just on her form and her figure, okay, as far as the post goes, rember the triangle thing right we have one leg up. We have one leg down. We have the arm right here. We have all these different triangles and different things were creating in every part of the body is doing something different. I don't have both arms in the same place. I don't have both legs in the same place. I'm using those features on her to create that form and that kind of elegance to it. I'm having her archer back, so it kind of sticks or back out and creates that curvature in her spine that works so well and kind of bringing out her figure and bringing out her her button, everything like that and making it look sexy and curvy and so forth. Okay, so analyze the scene again when we have the existing light kind of there, we can use it to give us an example of as a kind of modeling, right? Right. So I can look at this shot. Just make sure that with the existing light there's no shadows and everything and unwanted places and when I just amplify that light, I should be good to go because I've used the existing light as our modeling like I'm gonna set us up once we have everything set up again. My tip is to always use different camera angles. Switch out your lenses, get up high shoot top down one. My favorite shots in this scene was when I got up high on a different rock and I shot straight top down on her. And we had this beautiful look where we kind of feature the necklace and the bikini. And we have our looking towards the camera. All we have to do now is just photo show about these little lights, the little highlights from our octa box and everything which we'd have to do in the other shots too. But you could see how beautiful these images are just directly out of our camera. So what have we done in the siri's? We have created a beautiful natural kind of look to the image it's, a very brighton area lifestyle. Look, we've used our flash to amplify and to enhance the light quality of the existing fill light that we saw on her body, while also using the existing sunlight as our secondary light to basically reveal and bring out her form. Okay, hopefully you all into this tutorial we're done so let's, head out to the next video now.