Skip to main content

Speedlights for Fill and Flash Gels

Lesson 39 from: Location Lighting 101

Lindsay Adler

Speedlights for Fill and Flash Gels

Lesson 39 from: Location Lighting 101

Lindsay Adler

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

39. Speedlights for Fill and Flash Gels

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Class Introduction

04:42
2

Principles of Light

33:00
3

Speedlights vs Strobes

11:15
4

Compressing the Scene

21:57
5

Location Lenses and Lenshoods

07:41
6

Metering Modes and Back Button Focus

23:46
7

Natural Light Reflectors

20:14

Lesson Info

Speedlights for Fill and Flash Gels

and here is an example of using subtle phil I wanted to take you through a little scene here that I think is really beautiful and show you how you can use speed lights to augment and to improve the light without overpowering it because that's what I often see people do and I think that's a lot of the demonstration that I've done so far is using speed lights kind of at their full power or using them too take over the scene really and the images then look like they're lit by speed lights but instead we're going to make it a little bit more subtle here because I already like the quality of light that exists in the scene but there's a few things wrong and we talked about our goals of lighting on location we want to improve the quality of light the quantity of light or the intensity and also the direction of light when I take a look here in this shot look ahead straight on smooth light is really not bad she's got a little bit across light on her nose it's still really soft it's also little ...

bit green what I want to do is just to suddenly improved the quality of light on her face without ruining that beautiful mood we already have so what I'll do is they put a camera on manual and I go ahead and I set the exposure for what I want the ambient light to be so right now I have the ambient light actually a full stop over correct exposure or at least what my meter is reading because I wanted to be brighter I wanted to look son you're outside right now it's a little bit cloudy so what I can do is I can overexpose it gives you the impression that it's brighter outside okay so now that I've got that exposure that I like beautiful I'm gonna go ahead and introduce a speed light now I know if I want this to not look like a speed light shot I have two heavily modify this life it needs to be defused it needs to be soft and if I just use a plain speed let off a camera it absolutely will not match so what I want to do is to make my lights or soft as I want something like a soft box some kind of diffusion of some sort and I want to bring that light close to my subject the closer it is the softer it isthe so I'm gonna have stephen I would bring you over here and bring that like really close and of course this is ah a little bit of ah bigger modifier we could go ahead and use a smaller one has lowered a little bit and bring it right around to the side now this is an instance where you might want to use manual exposure for uh output of your speed like because then you can control just exactly how much light you want to hit your subject or you can use tl and control the exposure compensation of the flash you might notice that the sunlight just came out and so the andy is going to be brighter so before I go ahead and use my flash I am going to make sure I modify my exposure so here's before I made any changes and it is way over exposed so I'm gonna go ahead and close down my shutter speed one two hundredth of a second that looks much better okay so I'm gonna turn this light on and I just want a really subtle kiss of light so I'm gonna start off with duty detail on I'll see how you like that if it's communicating the way I want so I want probably one in two thirds stop less I just I want a ho a whole lot less like I just want to prove the direction a little bit what have you rotate this a little bit this way and then lean it in that way take a look nice let's see the before and after I came into this office and check with foreign after again look straight at me one more time so yep it's definitely improve the quality of light I think I went a little bit more though so minus one in two thirds was not quite enough so let's just do minus one beautiful and so it's very very subtle but is definitely improving the quality of light on her face and I know it does that can you raise it up just a tiny bit and I'm gonna add a little bit more in what two minus two thirds of a stop for tea tea oh I think that's going to be just where I want it beautiful just like that beautiful so it is definitely not overpowering the state and you could look at this and not know that it was a speed light shot or a stroke shot on location so keep this in mind just because you now have the knowledge and the tools to go on location and to bring your speed lights doesn't mean you should always overpower the scene or make it look like a flash shot so I really like the same so I'm gonna shoot a few more make a few changes and then we're gonna have a great image right that's perfect just like that great and I am going teo put some green's in front of my lens give me a little bit of a blur beautiful nice great beautiful and because of this scene I'm shooting really wide open at two point two I can hold these in front of my lens and they're going to be blurred so it's going to have kind of that voyeuristic effect on give me a really soft frame around my subject of green looks really beautiful just do a couple more and again I'm not using high speed I think right now I'm using just regular flash at one two hundredth of a second because I don't wanna have to worry about messing with bringing my light closer and changing distances if I switched over to high speed sync I could do it all within this camera's think speed good perfect great perfect right there it's beautiful she pretty great and I'm looking at it and I'm glad you like it looks it's really beautiful it's very high key if you're one of those people that see okay that background is way over exposed it's a little bit too much for you okay well there of course always things that we can do I can go ahead and pop it over in a high speed sync if I need to go um if I want to darken down an ambien right now is shooting I s o three twenty so we could also decrease that a little bit good I s o one hundred it's going to make the whole image uh a little bit darker and now I can open up my aperture to make this appear brighter slit me open up my aperture just a little bit good try that good and now I can pop into high speed sync if it's not enough and let me close down tto one eight hundredth of a second opened up a little more shy one for hundreds of a second good and then I'm just going to increase the power of my flash and so what you'll see is now that I've taken down the ambient starts to look a little bit more like a flash picture because the ambience darker and the strobes starts to take over the speed light starts to become more noticeable so it's all the balance as I said before it's all like a recipe you figure out kind of what ingredients make up the look that you want there's no one right answer and one right recipe so wait just a couple more with that background a little bit darker but beautiful good and I'm gonna open up the ambient just a tiny bit good perfect we've talked about how both the ambien exposure and the exposure of the flasher kind of separate but kind of overlapped right so you have the power of your flash as well as the aperture that affects the exposure of the flash on the subject's face and then you also have your shutter speed that controls the power of the ambiance how bright that ambien is but there is overlap and so what I wanted you to notice that you take a look at these photos when I went ahead and I darkened down the ambient light over all in the scene you'll notice that one side of her face became significantly darker stroke was over here the speed light is on this side of her face so this side is well illuminated and then you're going to have shadows opposite well when I had the ambient up when I had it writer when I had a longer shutter speed the ambient light filled in those shadows but as soon as I say okay let's darken down the ambient let's overpower I wanted to be more subtle all of a sudden that side of her face no longer has the ambient phil so they are definitely interrelated you want to make sure that you know that these two are going to affect one another so a longer shutter speed is going to affect your ambient but we'll still also affect the light in the subject's face especially if the subject is not completely separated out from their background so keep that in mind if you're you're playing around with your shutter speed and the light on the subject faces changing even though you're using a stroke it's probably the amount of ambient light that is registering as you're changing your exposure all right so I wanted to summarize what was going on between the balance of the ambient light and the strobe in that scene I get really bored looking at pictures where the ambient light and the strober balanced there's no that's it doesn't have the romance to it or it doesn't have drama so I usually either really I'll really overpower the ambient or I let the ambient show through with a kiss of light I just get really bored when they're completely even which is most of what we've been doing this whole time but it has a very particular look and they look to me is it's almost more technical like I wanted to make sure that this was perfect but when you start getting creative and breaking the rules over exposing the ambient with just a kiss of light way under exposing it overpowering the entire scene then eh it gets more exciting for me so for example just to look at the balance here this is with zero flash whatsoever but I overexposed the ambient by a stop technically this is overexposed these blown out highlights but I like it like that it's it's high key to me I was looking at the photos with the blur the in front and I thought it looked kind of like anthropology issue no has that look if it's too balanced it's too normal sometimes though I do like to break the rules so if you switch over here this is with you and going back when I add the flash though it's minus two third it's not even I have the ambient brighter than it should be in the flash like should be and the flash lower than it should be so it's just improving the direction of light on her face because here if she looks at me she has this weird cross like so it's just a little bit gentler plus there's so much green turned over power some of that green okay so this is that same image here's what I have the ambient plus one and the flash zero you can tell in that photo that there was a flash used I don't mind it but don't the reason don't mind it is because the ambience is up too so it's all high key so just no it's okay you don't have to have the ambient correctly exposed and the flash correctly exposed play around with it for artistic effect eso here is to drastically different approaches in this one the flash is at zero but I have the ambient brought up so it's a high key here's where the ambien is actually under two thirds of a stop it's just totally different look to the two of them and I don't think one is better than the other at all it's just very differently I think this to me is more like it has more mood and ambience to it this one is a little more portrait and correctly done but they're both good photos so I would encourage you to think about that when you're thinking about your ambien and strobe mix I also wanted to cut on a couple flash features that you should know about we already talked about zoom because that question came up before so we've already talked about that I'm not going to go over it again but a couple of the things you should know exist the first one is called the auto focus assist beam and what that is and you may have seen this is when you're shooting and really really low light really low I'd rotated this um really low light situations this sends out a little bit of like an infrared and it puts red cross hairs on your subject what it's doing is it's introducing something with contrast to the scene and then it allows your camera two focus it's basically saying okay all right it's really really hard to focus in the dark I'm just going to give you a little bit of a break contrast pattern your camera can easily see patterns and that contrast so it helps you out if you're not this is just a little tip if you're not intending to use flash or you have your flash way off camera well your flash way of camera might still send out that pulse but you might not be able to see it there is a way to put a speed like on your camera turn off the speed light and only uses auto focus illuminator look it up online there's ways to do it I mean I feel like that's kind of an expensive use of a flash but in a pinch when you can't really focus it could work I'm much more of a fan of like let's just bring out a flashlight or an iphone but it is possible so that is usually automatically set for flashes that capability something that you do have to turn on and this isn't in the flashes on your camera is something called auto focus illuminator and that's this thing right here um and it just puts out like a little head lamp like a little light that in low light helps you focus so that might also be a good option if you have your flash really far off camera and you're just not picking up those little autofocus illuminator across beans are sorry thea autofocus assist beam cross means you might use that it's really dim so it doesn't do too much there's one other thing that you can check out on your camera it's usually beside your lens beside with the lens mount is there's a button that nobody usually uses anymore but I used to use all the time when I shot film um and it's called the depth of field preview button so the depth of field preview but and allows you to dio is way back when I'm shooting film right and I want to shoot at f ate but what I'm seeing like with my eyes is not af eight so you would hold that button and it would close down the aperture for you to preview based on what aperture you wanted to shoot nowadays we just take a picture right it is look and see what it looks like but that was basically my preview in the past it has another function though when you have a flash either on camera or in this case it's wirelessly talking through a wireless trigger in this case it's using pocket wizards in the flex system here when you hold that button you see the flash flash really really fast and you can use that to help you see a flash as a modeling like it will drain your battery super quickly but it does help you to see maybe late at night you don't have to take a picture move your flash take a picture move your flash trying to get the right modeling and shape on the face and said you could just hold that light and then move the flash appropriately hold that button and so it's called the depth of field preview but and usually at the base of the camera near the lens all right let's talk about gels a bit okay so gels let you do a couple things for joe's you could be using deals to be creative like in the instance when I had someone in the audience posing over there and I said I wanted to put a light on the background behind her well maybe to make it cool I don't want that background to be boring and white I could gel that flash that I had zoomed in make it blue and now she has a blue background behind her I could do that for creative effect that's fun but it's not like the core use of jails is used to help you balance color temperatures in your scene um for example I have I'm gonna walk you through an example of when my flashes daylight balanced it matches what you would see outside that's what you don't usually have to gel it in the middle of the day it's pretty similar tone what happens if I come in with those lamps that we shot over there and they're very very tungsten and then I used my flash my flashes very very blue and it doesn't match or you go into ah fluorescent lee lit gymnasium and it's super green um in the shots that I took if you go to the flash on camera section if you look that background looks green uh when I had the light bouncing off the ceiling and off the walls now the stroke doesn't look green with the light in the background does because it's old fluorescent lights in the building where my studio is so there is a way to get rid of that color cast by jailing your flash and I'm gonna walk you through it exactly the steps to try to get rid of color casts in your scene when I'm using speed lights and this is absolutely all these concepts identically applied to studio strokes same exact concepts no different uh when I am using speed lights I usually use these things called rogue gels this is a rogue gel kit and in it there are different colored and this is the color correction one so if you look at it there's all these different colored gels and they easily connect with this rubber band and if you look at them and the camera's not gonna be able to see this close I don't think but these oranges are all different okay these oranges are all different and on the bottom they tell an amount so it'll say one stop cto so what color temperature orange this is what I would put on my camera if I'm shooting in a room with tons of tungsten light and I want my flash to match the tungsten light in the room I had one of these one you know full stop cto as it's called is really really orange and actually tells you what it's how it changes daylight toe what color temperature actually has it on their full cto takes sixty five hundred calvin to thirty two hundred calvin so you could actually say you could actually do those calculations if you wanted so in there there's a half a fourth and a full stop I have found like even at sunset often if I take a full stop cto it's still really orange on my subjects face if I'm illuminating my subject so sometimes you don't really want to like try to match it you maybe just want to make it look a little more similar with like a half and the reason that they have that name the half stopped the full stop the quarter stop is because that's how much light they cut out when you put it in front of your flash so if I'm shooting on manual and right now I am shooting I'm shooting like this and I meet a ring on my subject and it's f ate when I put this fool cut on now the flash is only going to be five six because it cuts out a stop of light so it's telling you what it's going to dio fishermen tl it just does it for you is it doesn't even notice because it's through the lens so it still calculating if you're doing manual you do need to know that or just meet her again but if you know I just took one stop on I could just open up from f ate to five point six alright so yes because I know inside the camera I just remember hearing and they start to talk about this that cannon has it where you can adjust the color temperature is that the same thing is jelling it or okay and nikon has that to just the more expensive ones it's like the more expensive cameras you have you know same thing with the flashes right um okay so what you have the ability to dio is you can actually change the color temperature off your camera the white balance you can set specific color temperatures so what I could dio this is okay tune this out if you get nothing no no it's it's okay but all this like ramble to decide if it's too much but basically what you could do is you could go ahead and try to figure out at what point you actually neutralize the scene because the presets we have our set and every what we usually shoot is everywhere in between so you could exactly tweak in your camera figure out it'll tell you what calvin it is exactly and then you could use these to exactly match the kelvin because people ask me all the time well how do you know how much to use and there's not an easy way to calculate if you need a full cut without having an expensive color spectrometer which no one owns because they're expensive and they're really impractical except for that use somebody who does architectural photography that's when they use that because then they can exactly balance all of the lights in the scene so it's not the same as jelling but it it's setting in your camera you khun set the exact calvin culvert color temperature of the scene so you neutralize the scene and then you would tell your flash so I'm going to explain exactly what that looks like right now um and so I'll walk you through it also you can use these jealous too just warm up the scene a little bit like if this your subject is really pale maybe you add one of these it just warms up their skin tone a tiny bit so let me show you an exact example alright so photographing this girl that room is super super green and terrible lighting it's actually a really old y m c a in brooklyn that we shot it so one of the ways you can go ahead and get rid of a color cast in the scene is by using a great card right you get a great card in the scene I usually use um and an extra passport color checker and what you do is you fix it in post you take that picture and then I can use my eye dropper for white balance click on that gray point and it neutralizes the scene however that only fixes the color of the scene and our goals of location lighting were to improve the quality the quantity and direction of light here the direction is above and crossing so it's not good the quality and there's no pop and it's flat and the quantity her face is dark so we've got to fix it all so I know I need to have at a flash the problem is when you just go ahead and add a flash by the way that's the that's right that I was mentioning if you just go ahead and add a flash what I'll have is if I am shooting in a tongue a fluorescent room I can set my camera to fluorescent you guys may have tried that the preset and it neutralizes the scene sucks out all the green what actually does is it it adds magenta and it it evens it out so you take your picture no flash now everything looks nice I grab my flash and all of a sudden that person looks really magenta because what we did to neutralize the green as we added magenta but this wasn't green to start off with this was neutral so now all of a sudden this looks magenta too so you just have mixed color even if you fix the room the late doesn't match any more so even though it seems kind of weird and counterintuitive you actually need to match the speed light color to the color of the light in the scene so perhaps you would take a green gel and put it on the front of your flash so now when you neutralize the scene you get rid of this green out of the scene and then you can also get rid of out of the flash and now everything has the same color so I'll show you kind of what that looks like here so this is what ends up looking like once I neutralized when I use a green jell and balance off the ceiling now everything matches so we made a huge difference from that very very first image toe what we ended up with here who couldn't we have to make sure that our jail matches the scene so the same thing is true in a tungsten room or a split lip room like this one for instance there's a window right here and there is a tungsten lamp right here so right now you've got window late that's super blue and that's hunks in which is a little bit yellow so what I wanted to do was I wanted to get rid of that tungsten so I put my white balance on tungsten which says go ahead get rid of that yellow and when you get rid of that yellow it's basically adding blue which is why that daylight looks so blue so I moved her we move her out of there and we add a flash nojel this is what happens if I set my white balance on tungsten I said get rid of that yellow well it made the light more blue and so now this trove is going to look really blew so I have to gel it orange to match the light in the background if I want everything to match so if I do that now it's going to match a little bit better the blue you see over here is that window light that I couldn't quite overpower but at least now that I've let her face everything is approximately the same color in the shoot that I did in that library yesterday I did not gel my strobes and there was a time of tungsten like because I wanted a little bit off that orange in the background so it it kind of depends on if it matters it's a bigger issue when your subject or split lip and it's it's not looking nice or you khun gel like your flash a little warmer instead of totally even if you want the background the look a little bit warmer um in another way that you would use it as well shooting it's like late in the day I wanted to look like sunset light but when I add my flash normal just bare bulb it's just really cool and it's late in the day I wanted to have that feel so if I add cto now it warms it up so it looks more like a late day sunlight so these are all different ways to use gel do one more example and take questions take a look here so is photographing her at the very end of the day and this is what the light looked like it has a bad intensity not enough light in her face quality needs a little bit more pop and the intensity or in the direction is also bad so I know I have to add a flash but when I add my strobe it's so cool piece has that warm golden light hitting her hair and so it doesn't match just looks like such a flash picture so what I can do is I can either add a full cut cto is we see hear or this one is a quarter so a quarter just warms it up a little bit it matches it a little bit better so it doesn't look so pale and so blue but it's also not super super yellow so it kind of depends on what you're going for so this was no flash bear flash nojel forthe orange full orange so those air always you can use gels and I am goingto take a moment for questions and then we'll play one video that shows me using gels at sunset for creative effect before we take a break great quick one from klaus how do you gel large soft boxes um so they make gels that in the inside you can actually connect them and they're bigger so you buy sheets instead of little ones and the closer you can get them back the smaller you can have them so I can get him closer you just don't want to put them usually flat up against the stroke because it can overheat so you want a little bit of space now but if you're using a speed light in a soft box you could tell the speed light you don't need to use some thing on the whole soft box itself exactly no absolutely if if you're just using a speed light with one of these apollo's you gel the flash not the apollo and just to clarify for t f twenty two these images are displayed straight out of camera these they're not edited in any way yep all of them are straight out of camera exactly how it looks any time I've done anything I've told you and I think it's been like maybe like five images the whole time it's that so how about you guys I've still got more going on if you guys don't all right great let's keep going one from afro men can you use a gels for bouncing light you can use a jail for balancing light so in this room for example we have white ceilings and let sam photographing you guys there's a ton of tungsten light behind you if I want you to match I can put this this warms up you could actually use your full cut tungsten I put that on the flash bounced off the sailing the color will stay the same as long as this ceiling is neutral if the ceilings a different color then you're going to get a mixed color on your face it's going to be shifted a little bit mary j k forty six actually seventeen other people also want to know the answer to this one when you're going into a scene and looking at it and saying okay I need to figure out the color here do you ever use a great card colored checker anything like that teo help with you're getting your color right yeah so what I do is one of two things regardless I always have my past my x ray passport color checker with me to take a picture and this was in the skin classes well but part of the reason is I get accurate color not just color not just white balance so I always take a picture of that and when I'm in mixed light situations I use an expo disc so when expo disk would be is I'm going over to her if right now you have maybe one color of light from that side and another of color of light from this side I can come over here with my camera put the lens pointed outwards from her face and take a picture and it'll be kind of a greyish weird color picture and I can go into my camera's menus and set that as a custom white balance so it says for this scene like I don't know what kind of light this is it's not daylight it's not tongue stan it's just a weird color it'll give me the closest custom white balance I can get that solves the white balance for the scene but if I'm using a flash I still got to gel that to match what I just did so it's a there's not recently like a straightforward easy way to do it but that will get your picture correctly color balance and then you can always look and see kind of the color of the flash and figure out how you can counter act the shift with different gels yeah so if you were doing it because sometimes I'll see a situation where there's that mix lighting on visit fluorescent you know is it tungsten man you've got that makes light so if you did use that technique then would you just kind of put a choose a color gel and kind of see how it looks and then go back and say well maybe I'll use the orange versus the green or something yeah I've got two things that I'll do if that's actually a mix light situation where I know like there is a window here and tungsten here what I usually do is I pick which one I'm going to overpower so let's say that there's window light on this side well I'm going to overpower the window light so what I do is out if I can move them closer I will if this was tungsten I sent my white balance to tungsten to neutralize this and then I joined my flash to match that or I move him over to the window and I can use my daylight balance flash or try to overpower that tungsten if it just can't tell and I'm trying to give it a test like I'm trying to figure it out it is for me unless someone has a really brilliant I'd love to know what other people d'oh it uses for me is just guessing to certain extent if it is not a clearly defined like that is tungsten that is um fluorescent if it's a little bit mixed I'm just trying to see what matches closest so if anyone knows that sort of let me know when one word one more thing if it's important to like not not an event because I don't have that much control but if it's a mixed light where I can go ahead and take a take a great card picture in one light source and a great card picture and the other light source I can kind of double process and photo shop if I need teo but it it's not a science that I have mastered by any means well and along those lines mdl rabia says what if you want to bounce the light with wall of the room is colored how do I know which gelato put to compensate for that and at that point I said just don't balance it off that wall because it's way too complicated to try to get even close to right and then finally as we're talking about white balance in as says if you're shooting rob doesn't or does white balance even matter yeah so the problem is is that if your weight balance is wrong in it relatively easy and post to fix one wrong color but when there's multiple incorrectly matching colors within that's not something you can just click and six you'd have to double process I have to fix part of the photo and then the other part and then put them together and blend it and who wants to do that that's definitely going to swing in photo shop that's definitely not what I want to do and sometimes they cross so you're not going to be able to fix it um so it's not as easy as just shooting and raw so is it okay if I finish up with this video is exactly what I was gonna ask perfect all right so this is just showing me using jill's not just to warm up but I'm actually going to use it creatively but I'm actually using a color correcting jill to be creative I'm gonna take what we have learned about speed lights to create a beautiful image here so what we're going to do is we're going to get the sky looking how we want it to look we're going to use our speed lights to correctly light our model and then go for really dramatic effect all right so where I'm going to start off isn't manual and what I need to be aware of this since I'm using manual not africa priority since it is definitely getting darker in the sky I'm gonna keep you have to keep my eye on that make sure the exposure is looking how I wanted it too so I look over at my model and let's try I think I want to go really under exposed so I'm going to go for two stops underexposed and I definitely get some of that pink and purple in this guy that I'm looking for I could go even darker but I know the lights going to be dropping so I'm gonna leave it there and I look at my settings and I am out one uh s so one hundred two point oh and won over six forty so once exported to the second which means I already know since I'm above my sink speed I'm going to need to go to high speed sink so I think I'm ready to introduce the flash that I'd like to use and we're gonna use this speed light with the rapid box again and this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to use teo and we're going to use flash compensation because the light's going to be changing and I might want to change the distance I wouldn't use teo and we're gonna start on zero flash compensation I know it's going to be too right I know it's going to be more than I want but we'll see what it gives me here all right so I'm on high speed sync perfect and right there is great okay and actually that's not too bad it's actually not too bright and the reason that it's not too bright is amusing high speed sync so that high speed sync little pulses of light aren't going to be bright enough and in fact I think maybe it's a tiny bit too dark so why don't you just come in a little bit from that and then going to the side just a tiny bit I think it's gonna be better let's test it out no I lied a little bit to split light so I'm trying to control the light on her face I want drama but not too much so I think they're back up just a little bit all right so I think there is good okay but let's say that that stroke is not bright enough and I'm shooting at two point oh and I don't feel comfortable shooting any wider all right well I can use my eyes so so wanna bump up my eyes so from one hundred to five hundred so now that I'm about five hundred I take the same picture guess what happens unfortunately that bumped up I s o now makes the background look brighter I don't want it to be so bright but since I'm shooting with high speed sync I can go ahead and use a faster shutter speed so I can go now to its day one to thousands of a second and now my flashes looking brighter sky is still looking dark because I'm using high speed sink so I can go above my sink speed and I bumped up my I s so so the light I was going to show up more on her face so everything would be a little bit more sensitive to the light alright so that looks great but I'm looking at it now and I think you know what I want this to look a little bit more like a sunset so I could do something but adding gels and uh jealous that I use here are my rogue gels made by expo imaging and if you go through all of these gels what they have is they have a whole bunch of different colors and those of color correcting so they have one step that are orange which is color temperature orange which is going to warm up the shot now this one I'm holding right here is a full cut meaning it is going to cut out a full stop of light it's a full stop of orange that you're putting over your gel I know that this would make her extremely orange so I said what I would have stephen do is he's going to add one fourth cut and that's just warm up the shot a little bit now this is totally to taste depends on if you like this look but it's going to give you a little bit more of the impression of warm sunset light the end of the day that kind of feel so that is what we're going to do here and then I'm just going to shoot a little bit more something that I did mention is that since this gel is a one fourth cut cto it could sound a birth of a stop so it actually does decrease the power of my flash a little bit so what I'm going to have to do maybe if it's not bright enough I'm gonna have to again play with my settings open up my aperture increased my eyes so maybe then if the background gets to write I'm gonna have to make my shutter speed a little bit faster so I was just testing to see how it looks beautiful again beautiful no one other creative effect that I could go for us I can actually news gels to be creative by messing with the white balance all right so let's go ahead and instead of using it to warm her face and look like a sunset we're going to use that orange gel and I'm going to set my white balance in this case two tungsten or what you could do is you could go in and make a custom white balance and basically you're just letting your camera no okay this is warm light what it's going to do is it's going to neutralize that light on her face by shooting it tungsten and the background is going to go very very cool basically what the camera does it says okay that main light has yellow has orange in it so I'm going to suck out the yellow orange want to suck out the warmth which means that background because it sucked out the yellow and orange out of the whole photo it's gonna look really blue and really purple all right here all right so I definitely looking at this I really liked that last shot when I made it really purple and blue ish and that was from joing her tungsten then setting my white balance punks and so that everything went blue so you can definitely get creative and I feel like I think they did that a lot in like the eighties for corporate head shots with a mismatch the jails and the backgrounds would go all crazy colors but I try to use it a little more modern lee than that fantastic and I think we have one final question for this segment that actually leads into some stuff we want talk about before we get to that what are we doing in our last and final segment of this course okay so in the last final segment the first thing that we'll be touching on is going to be photographing groups and then multiple speed lights so how do you work with more than one speed let it once what kind of settings with your considerations then we're going to do some demo and then we wrapped up with a challenge to see which you like better which one wins natural light speed lights or studio strobes I'm excited to see who the winner is it's gonna be a brawl so last question which kind of lead into something that we want to talk about photo maker says any special flash considerations if the subject is wearing a sparkly shiny dress like the model in lindsay's rental company dress which is the one that we're seeing right now yes so you don't have to do anything special it depends on if you want it to sparkle more or sparkle less if you use a soft box which is slightly more diffused it won't sparkle quite a cz much something with a little more contrast will profit but no no other any other considerations and this dress is one of many that I've purchased recently because the beginning of the year I started a rental company it's currently just in the united states that rents av en garde headpieces and dresses and gallons and all of this over the top beautiful things two photographers so if you go to facebook dot com for its last dream shoot rentals you can take a look through the photos and see what's there we re launch like a new website september first but like there's everything from victorian dresses two dresses with twenty foot long trains too beautiful evening dresses the flapper to crazy head pieces so I get to just chomping by cool things all the time it's fine

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Keynote 1
Keynote 2
Keynote 3
Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This class was amazing. Lindsay Adler is a great presenter...I learned so much.....I love that she spoke about natural light..strobes and speedlites. Wonderful information. I purchased this and I am glad I did. Great job Lindsay. Jean

photogirl
 

Lindsey Adler is one of the best and most engaging photography instructors in the USA. I highly recommend this lighting course. It felt more like a 101 and a 102 course than just a basic course. She teaches in a way that makes learning alot of fun and the amount of time & effort that she puts into her video and class presentations are second to none. Her classes are well worth their weight in gold and you will walk away with a wealth of knowledge!

islandGirl
 

Lindsay is amazing , I love the way she explains everything!! This course is filled with GREAT information and helps you better understand natural lighting,strobe and flash. Thank You Lindsay, please keep your classes coming!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES