Lesson Info
16. Front Bokeh
Lessons
Course Introduction
03:20 2Understanding Lighting Diagrams
12:11 3High Contrast Portrait
12:43 4Finding The Light
12:02 5Subtle Beauty
06:10 6Soft Fine Art
10:46 7Color on White
08:33 8Catalog Shots
06:00Light From Below
07:38 10Fresnel Beauty
05:58 11Old-Time Fashion
11:31 12Superhero Light
09:11 13Simply Stunning Beauty
11:10 14Controlling Shadows
13:20 15Soft Fine Art
04:51 16Front Bokeh
08:28 17Large Soft Light, the Easy Way
06:51 18Creating Motion
07:28 19Dramatic Light Using White Balance Shifts
05:47 20Simple Soft Light
05:50 21Grinder Girl
10:28 22Large Soft Light
07:30 23Vertical Contrast
07:17 24Light Rays
10:57 25Wide Angle Texture
05:08 26Closing
06:08Lesson Info
Front Bokeh
We are now going to do a constant light setup. So no flash in this setup. And we're going to create what I like to call front Bokeh. This is really, really fun and probably the least expensive lights that you'll use in this entire class. And so what I have in my hand here are these little LED light thingies that you get for camping and spruce up things. I got this at a hobby store. Here's another one that I'm not using, it's called touch of lights, 45 little LED screens. I think I paid about $5 for these little things. So when you come really close to this camera, you can sort of see they are this little tiny LED lights. And so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna use these to create some beads of light. And I'm gonna do that by putting these right in front of the lens. Now I'm using a special lens here. This is an 85 millimeter 1.2 lens. And so it's got an extremely wide aperture which means the depth of field is really shallow, and that's what you need to make this work. So if you have ...
a nifty 50, a 51.4 something like that, you need an aperture value that's in the ones. You could probably get away with a 2.8, but wider is better. So what's gonna happen is as I shoot these little lights when I'm dangling them in front of the lens, like this, they're gonna go out of focus. They're gonna be all blurred. So we're gonna hit this really nice Bokeh. But Theresa back here is being illuminated by this light. This is a Nanlite Forza 60B with a softbox. You can use that if you have a constant light or if you don't, you can do this with just the light in your house, just a lamp in the ceiling. Whatever you happen to have, you don't really need any of this stuff or a little LED panel. Whatever you happen to have is probably going to work. Now to do this correctly and to show you what it looks like. What we're gonna need to do is we have to have all the video lights turned off. So we're gonna off all of those lights, and you can see that all of the light that's falling on Theresa is just coming from this little Forza 60B. So the first thing I'll do is I'm gonna use my built-in light meter in my camera. I have my camera in manual mode. I set my aperture to 1.2 and then I just dialed in my shutter speed until Theresa is correctly exposed, and that's at 1/60th of a second. And here's the photo that we have. And so it's just a plain photo of Theresa, nothing really special there. So what we're going to do, I mean, Theresa's special. Don't get me wrong. You're always special, but the photo isn't really special. So what I'm gonna do though, is I'm gonna take these lights and I'm just going to dangle them in front of the camera or in front of the lens. And when I do that and take a photo, you can see that we get this really cool front Bokeh. So those lights are the orange blobs there. And so just by moving these in and out, and up and down at sort of at random patterns, I can create different looks. And so you have to sort of play with this because you can't really control the shape of what you're getting. And once you see something that's cool then you take a photo. And so Theresa let's have you look right at me. There you go, beautiful. I'm gonna have these just sort of come in from the side and I'll take a shot and another shot. This is really fun, 'cause you can shoot quickly. And I got you blinking, sorry. And just like that. And I covered your face. So again, you have to sort of play with this. Let's have you look to the side a little bit, and then eyes back to me. There we go, I like that. Okay, now I need to find a little bit of Bokeh that works for that. This sort of works. There we go. Something and like that, and maybe even closer to the lens like that. Okay. Let's see what that looks like. All right. We had, well, the first one I shot you look like your head is in a bubble and so that's no good. And we're waiting for these to load and my computer's catching up. And once it does catch up-- When I shoot really fast, sometimes Lightroom doesn't keep up. Let's see if we can get there. I think I shot too fast for Lightroom. Yes I did. Okay. But you can see sort of what we're getting here. We're getting these images that are coming in while my computer now is frozen. So let's let it recover for a second and hopefully it will recover and we can keep showing you this. And here it is. Okay. The computer recovered. So we can see these different scenes we're getting and it is hit or miss depends on exactly how you are looking at. Oh, I like that. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. So much better. We're gonna shoot a couple more. Hopefully my camera and my computer will play nice. And we can get a couple more shots. Oh, that is beautiful right there. Brush your hair back like you just did. There you go. Beautiful. Then let's get this a little bit farther away. There you go. Now let's see if we can get this into the computer. There we go. I like that. I'll look at these different shots. I think I like this one best. Yeah, I think I like that one best. The other thing you can do with this is you can then go into the developed module. And when you're in the developed module, you can apply different color settings, you can apply different treatments, color treatments and things like that. When I'm normally, when I'm shooting this kind of stuff, what I would be doing is doing a lot of patient work to make sure this comes in. 'Cause you can see if you don't get it exactly right, it can take a little while. So let's just go into the developed setting here. And then what I'll do is I'm gonna play with a few things. So we can go into this and you can see we have all of these different presets here. So I like that, Adobe standard looks pretty good. We have some of these black and whites which will not look good. We have some modern, Ooh, the modern looks good. 'Cause it sort of adds this blue color cast. I really like that. And then the other thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna crop this to a 16 by nine so that it fills the screen and like it about like that, something like that. Maybe a little bit more of Theresa's head in there. And then even more, I think what I'll do is I'm going to add a tiny bit of a vignette, just a tiny bit of that. And then we'll put that at full screen. And I really like that. We were able to create this really interesting portrait. If we had another 20, 30, 40 minutes, I'm sure you would be bored out of your mind watching me dangle lights but that's how it works. You just take your time, play with it, get some shots that work, get a color profile that really works, and you're gonna get some really awesome front Bokeh. And again, the nice thing is just get a wide aperture on your lens, manually set your exposure. The reason by the way you set your exposure manually is because when you dangle this in front of the lens, it's gonna try to compensate if you're in auto mode for the lights there. And so it could change your exposure. So set your exposure on your subject. First, lock it in in manual mode and then dangle these and shoot all day long, it's gonna look great. Okay. Now that we've done that I'm gonna keep shooting, and while I'm shooting, we're gonna go to our last looks. So let's do that right now. (slow upbeat music)
Class Materials
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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!
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Lighting