Lessons
Class Introduction
03:37 2What Defines a Beauty Shot?
05:41 3Cameras & Lighting Equipment
20:05 4Flash Settings
14:18 5Flash Modifiers
08:32 6Lighting Styles
05:05 7Shoot: Butterfly Lighting
18:13 8Shoot: Beauty Dish Lighting
04:40Lesson Info
Shoot: With Reflectors & Softbox
Now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna pull the softbox out again and we're gonna make a little basically a light tent that's gonna go all around the model. So we're gonna do a softbox up high and I'll probably turn it sideways just to give you a different feel for that and then reflectors all around. So this is basically the ultimate in beauty lighting. No shadows. Alright, it's gonna take me a second to get that set up. So we'll move kinda quick here. We are gonna end up using reflectors on the sides and on the bottom, so I'm gonna keep this one ready to go and I think for this one, I'll use this one down low like that. Good. And I need... Well, we'll leave this one up too. Yeah. I love making decisions on the fly. I don't have sandbags in, so I gotta be careful that these things don't fall over. I should be using sandbags, but I'm moving fast. At the same time, I'm gonna take my camera down so I can move even quicker. So we'll use a softbox here and that's, again, our key light. Key l...
ight meaning the main light. The light that causes the effect. That's what the term key light means. I need the little post. One of the joys of watching this type of class live, is you get to see how much time all of this takes and you get to judge for yourself if you really wanna tackle it. And for this one, just to mix things up, I'm gonna rotate it horizontally. When you buy a speed ring, make sure your speed ring gives you that flexibility. It's an important skill of your lighting equipment. Why horizontal? I don't know. Just wanna mix it up a bit. Okay. I'll pull that one up here like that. Excellent. Something's moving on me. There we go. Gotta tighten that one down. So while you're adjusting them we got a question from Garrett about the small point of light in a softbox, does that ever cause a hotspot or with these like Profoto softboxes, they're pretty good at diffusing that light, right? Yeah, one of the things I haven't talked about, is Garrett, yeah Garrett is that all of these tools, these softboxes, the Octas, they come with an intermediate diffuser inside, so you can choose to use that. And what that does is the light from the flash hits that intermediate diffuser and then spreads that even further to the large diffuser. In today's case, I'm not using that. And the reason why is 'cause I've got all of my flashes set for that really wide angle. I've got that internal diffusion panel out and that causes it to go edge to edge. So they can cause a hotspot, but in this case, I think you can see it's not that significant. It all comes down to fine tuning at that point, Garrett, and I'm happy with the look I'm getting so far. Okay, so now we're gonna pull in this guy down below. Gravity moves things all around. Alright. Yeah, and so there's this other type of light stand called the C stand. And the C stands, they're very expensive and they're very heavy, but you can stack the feet over the top of each other. When you use a standard light stand like this, a lot of times you're just fighting the feet all the time. Fighting the legs. Yeah, we'll do that. We'll bring this up. There we go, thank you. Like I said, you're always looking out for me man. I love you man. Okay, good. Now we need to bring in one more on that side and to do that, normally I would use a light stand and another little bracket, but I don't have it today. So I'm gonna pull in someone from the audience to help me out. You wanna do it this time? And your job is basically just to hold it about right there. Alright, so let's talk about this. Key light here. We've got that and that's gonna cause a nice little catch light in the eyes. And then we've got a little light studio all around here face and all around her torso. Fantastic. So we're gonna light from below, light from the sides and all of the reflectors right now are white. So we're not using any silver reflectors. Everything is just white. Time for a picture. Cool. And I haven't made any adjustments to the flash power. Oh my goodness. Oh that makes me happy. I whispered, oh that makes me happy. That's a beautiful shot. Love it. Make sure I'm selecting the right one there. Sorry everybody. Yeah, look at that. Really fantastic look. I wanna take another just because I think I should take another, but I don't think I need to take another. We'll call that good. Thank you. Recapping the settings I'm at, ISO, where am I at, ISO 200. I'm at F56. I'm at a 250th of a second and my flash power is at 1/8 power. All of this stuff is easy. You all know how to set that in your camera and it's all about just getting your light modifiers, back to your question earlier, choosing and setting up your light modifiers so you get the look that you're after. I really could get that same look using a beauty dish. It would be ever so slightly different, just slightly. You know, the catch lights in the eye would be a little bit different. But the overall look and feel would be the same with a big umbrella with a big reflector as the key light. So that's neat. And this is really what I was after. This is really the look I was after achieving today, is everything has kind of led up to this where you've got basically three panels. Side, side, bottom and then the key light up on top.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Suzie
Practical, informative, affordable instruction that’s easy to understand and leaves you excited to jump into the studio with a single flash and whatever you have on hand .. soft boxes, umbrellas, v flats or even a bunch of cheap reflectors. Mike is a superb instructor. Highly recommend.
user-4cec79
Really good. Superb teacher. Bought it. Worth the money.
Anthonia
Loving this class so far! The instructor is amazing
Student Work
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