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Adding to Existing Light - Part II

Adding two existing light part to now, this is again one of my absolute favorite techniques to employ with off camera flash, and we give you a demonstration this earlier in the last chapter when we did it with bearable. But guess what we do with bearable it's, a great technique and all, and I still use it, but I like it this way because now we're going to do is modify. So what we're doing here essentially is for the competition attributes were shooting event, we're shooting our model in this beautiful desert scene. We have these piles of rocks behind her and really cool location that we just happened to kind of come across when you're driving on the freeway, and what I've done here is we've placed her essentially facing the direction the sun. Why? Because I love the sun, the sun as a as a you know, direct light is absolutely fantastic, especially when it comes to mohr kind of fashion and editorial type shots and here's, the thing is that placing the subjects back always to the sun, it ...

gets boring. I mean, I don't know, I don't know what to say other than just it gets boring and it gets overdone, and I want you to try things like this because it gets you out. Of that groove that sometimes would get into the photography we keep shooting the same images over and over and over changing the way the view light is going to dramatically kind of effect the overall tool kit and the way that you approach each scene is going to really open your mind so you're not just repeating each you okay? So processing tips so I don't want to start with is competition attributes? The first thing is starting with our subject facing the light direction that I want, and for this we want her to be facing directly into the sun. Okay, so she's looking right into the sun here I'm shooting an f two eight why? Because I want some depth of field separation here I'm actually on the sigma fifty millimeter one four but I'm not shooting at one for I don't want the background is to be smushed away. I want to able to tell what's in the background I want some decent sharpness on her, I just want to shoot it to wait. So we have a good kind of mixture of sharpness and background at the field without going too far because I think if we were to go to like five, six or f a giraffe eleven in this background, the background would start to get overpowering this is what I'm talking about with certain scenes that can be too busy it's just a pile of rocks behind her right? So if I shoot at a deep depth of field on this lens, we're gonna end up getting a very busy background in my mind that's the kind of background is going to detract from our subject so I'm gonna avoid that by this shooting it a little bit more shallow okay, so we're at two eight were mid day sun no clouds in the sky so we require at least ah three stop neutral density filter wise if three instead of five because remember we already reduced to stop by shooting f two eight if you're shooting at one four yes we would need a five stop andy filter but here a three stop nd or again if you want to use agent says you can come down to your preference of what you prefer to you for neutral density and shoot a full flash power or do you prefer hss and kind of deal with whatever flash power you might get after that hss power reduction okay and be light exposure we leave it fairly neutral so we're at one one hundred of second and is a one hundred so all these shots right here so one one hundred to eight, one hundred all these shots are the exact same power setting that's the final image actually so you can see that the amulet exposure is left pretty neutral. It's not too bright, it's not like light and airy it's not dark and dramatic. Just kind of a very neutral exposure. And what we're doing with light direction is we have our big boom stick. Right, arben big boom stick has are too bold, baby twenty twos on it with that pro photo three foot or if I october ox and the speed ring attached to it. Okay, so we're using that and we're placing that again on camera, right? Were booming it up so that's matching the direction of sunlight coming into her. What you want to be careful of is that you don't cast a shadow. So if you put this, if you put that that boom stick just directly in front of son is going to cast a shadow on your model, and then of course, you're not getting the existing sunlight right? So it needs to be just a little bit out from where the sun is at. So you let the sun shine through and the flash basically right over and check this out. We're shooting, basically with a the two boldly be twenty twos were at roughly around one half toe one power one of one power again, this depends if you're using the pro photo, be too then you're going to probably be around full power. If you're using the bolts with two of them stacked, you'll probably be around half power. Just kind of depends on your set up. Remember that when you're using pocket laser plus threes to trigger the bolts rumor they get that splitter cables that you only need one pocket wizard and you can split the cable into both bolts so that we can trigger both in the same time without having to buy another pocket wizard. Okay, check out what we get here. Basically. So with that set up here is the original shot, right? The original shot is great, but what we talked about before, in part one, we basically talked about when you shoot a scene where the subject is seems tto blend into the background that's the perfect type of scene. Teo, add to existing light where you just follow existing light and you add to whatever's there. So that way the subject kind of just pops a little bit. What is this? This is in camera dodging, right? We've essentially just dot ter following the existing highlights and everything. We've dodged those highlights. We've dodged the shadows toe lift her up to bring her out, so essentially we've done dodging and burning without even touching. Photo shop and once we get a photo we can kind of continue that process but we've already started here which is going to give us that much better result later on so you can see just by comparing these two shots straight out of camera how big a difference that light makes that pop with the light just makes her just stand out from the background brightens their up to that point where it just it lifts her off but in a natural and beautiful way now let's talk about this so test shot at half power on both between you two showed a great light quality nicely boosting the shutters, brightness and filling shadows like color white balance from our test shot was great we're at five thousand degrees kelvin I'm leaving in a little bit more in a neutral side so we're not warming up is much because I want that slightly more cool kind of tone to the image so it looks great right there we don't need to do any jelling or anything now let's get to the posing in the framing the shooting I want to mention this as far as the opposing side ghosts do you? I see on the pose that she's facing the sun and her eyes are closed right her eyes in the shot or closed because I don't want the eyes to be you know the eyes are very much a a drop attention, right? If the eyes are open, if they're looking in the camera, then is going to pull attention into that. What I want this shot to be about is to be about the clothing to be about the appeal and kind of just that beautiful look that she hasn't and just be all about her and her form and her figure and everything and not so much about the eyes in the face. So we closed the eyes, she's posing the way that we don't get any strange shadows from sunlight. That's the on ly the only trick to using hard versus soft light is just making sure that your shadows are in the right places because shadows from hard light are that much more defined, so you just have to be more careful where they're placed in your scene. Shadows from a soft light are not very defined, so you a soft light you have a lot of leeway. It could be a foot too far to the left or foot too far to the right and it's still gonna look good because it's soft light and it tends to rap, but with hard light that doesn't have any rap, you have to perfect the pot's perfect, the direction and everything, otherwise you're gonna get shadows and highlights in the wrong places, okay, so the other thing to know what her pose is the number of triangles basically what I'm trying to do is reveal her form revealed the dress revealed everything about this right so I have one leg up we're showing her sexy legs off by bringing a leg up and we're bringing one leg down again both of these make a triangle right there we have one arm out that kind of brace yourself again another triangle right from the hip another arm up that kind of cradles the face and draws attention right into that beautiful hair is that kind of flows and the makeup on her face and again another triangle right there everything about this is designed to draw you in triangles are pleasing shapes toe look at so when I pose I'm thinking of creating these pleasing shapes with the body that really draws in overall into the end of the image okay we even have triangles in the background look at these mountains right there another one right there right here so we have a very cool and interesting image to look at now where we talk about when you're shooting with the wrexham let you analyze this scene you make sure that those shadows falling in exactly the right places because simple modifications simple angling of a chin up or down just a little bit is going to dramatically change where that shadow is falling on the neckline so just remember all those things you need to slow down further when you're using direct light and hard light, you slow down things a little more, you watch closely, you analyzed to make sure everything's good, okay, one thing I want to say is that since our light is following the existing direction of somebody, use sunlight as a natural modeling light to pose and watch the shadows hide. This is the most beautiful part about this is that in that slowing down process, you know, normally when we're in the studio, we're using modeling lives, but when you're out on site, you don't have that opportunity. You have to pop a shot to be able to see where the flash is landing, because even if you have a modern light outdoors, it's not strong enough to see, but the beautiful thing is, when you're using direct sunlight as the same direction of light as your life source, the sunlight becomes your modeling light, so essentially you can do all your pose and everything with that. And as long as your light sources matching where that light is coming from, you're good to go your golden you not to do any additional posing and anything once you pop your flash your set, okay, so kind of treat the sun as your modeling light in this type of a scene. All right, so that's, how we get from this image to this image and you can see the difference in how dramatic and how great it looks when we take it to the final image. Now again, one thing I want to mention is that almost every single shot we've shown you on this tutorial siri's is straight out of camera. Or we have a basic, like, grand prix set that just tell a graze the image. Okay, very rarely are we photoshopping anything, the only images that we photoshopped or the ones that we told you, which were the shots of event, like the fashion types? Just this one is a photoshopped image. What have we done here? Look, look how close these two images are. What are we doing? We're doing certain things like we're nipping and tucking in certain areas where basically, like the shoulder here flared out, right? So we pull that in a little bit. We pull the hair out that kind of created mohr exaggerating. Look to it. We kind of create straight lines on the legs wherever necessary to kind of enhance that form and figure. And then we dodge, like, right along this highlight right there, we dodge right there, just tow kind of flatten out the skin and to create a beautiful highlight in shape. Right there on the leg that's really it we're just doing a some basic cleanup again ten fifteen minutes in photo shop to get to the final image is completely adequate if you're gonna be printing this they're putting in a magazine maybe you'll spend an hour on the tops but the point is is making sure that from this to this is not a dramatic change because we want to retain image quality we want to save time and we want to arrive at the best final result with the minimal amount of effort in the process and I know that sounds like we're being lazy but it's not being lazy it's being efficient and I want you to think that way going forward so adding to existing light is one my favorite techniques it's one of those techniques that's gonna pull you out of just that standard oh find some shade put their back into the shade and face them towards light find the light and put their backs to the light and add light it gets you out of these lake just photographer grooves that we get into we start shooting the same image over and over and over so I want you to see things differently shoot things differently and with every one of your shoots approach it that way so you're always arrived very interesting and creative results that's it for this tutorial it's head on to the next one now