Lessons

Lesson Info

Incorporating Flares with Flash

Incorporating flares with flash this is kind of the ultimate balancing act when it comes to ambient versus flash exposure and that's why we're saving this technique towards the end of this chapter because it's a complex one okay, it's going to be complicated, it's going to take you several tries to get this right, but it's a really cool technique and hey, who doesn't love flare? I mean, star trek showed you just how awesome flare could be in literally every single scene and it was awesome. I was thinking more flare bell at the end of that kind of, like more cow bell, but more flavor. Okay, so let's talk about the same. We're out with event in the desert again and what we're trying to do, what we're trying to achieve here is having her back towards the sun and going for this lighten area. Look what we have this flare kind of blooming into the camera that kind of makes her and her face a little bit less of a priority compared to the dress and compared to the necklace and everything else ...

in this scene. So easy enough to kind of envision not very easy to pull off, so let's talk about the composition and the attributes for this particular shot. Now, again, our desired background is the sand dunes, and we want this sun flare to kind of bleed in from the background and kind of washout yvette's face a little bit so that the final image becomes this very lightened area kind of image where we can see of its face, but it draws attention away from the face and kind of into the dress limits are focused. The contrast is the necklace and the dress and so forth, so that's the final result, and it sounds easy enough to envision, like the envisioning of it, is like, oh, that's, easy to do, but then when you start doing it you're like, man, this is kind of complicated. Why? Because it becomes a balancing act between having just enough flair versus just in a flash versus just the right ambien exposure and so forth. So when it comes to our composition after beats were going to be using the aperture to control not only exposure, but then also the amount of flare and the shape of the flare. So what you'll notice is when you're using your aperture to shoot images of flair wide open after creates a blooming effect were basically the flare just spills and bleeds, and it doesn't really have a refined shape to it. When you start closing the apter down the flare gets more circular and it becomes a smaller effect and a smaller fact over the image so not only even and that's that's to say even with the same exposure okay, so if you're adjusting the air so with each stop is you close down the aperture you'll notice that flare starts to get smaller and starts to take amore defined shape in the image so we need to balance that out so we're going to be using our after to control both exposure and to control flair we're going to leave our shutter speed at one, two hundred second because that is the highest weaken get with our sink speed and because we're shooting on a sony a seminar okay, so we're shooting all these images on the sony a seven are we also had the eighty five millimeter one point for zeiss lens that the name amazing lens that we had on loan from being h and so we're testing that out and the lens has such a gigantic you know front opening that we had no nd filter that was going to fit that we also didn't have anything the only thing the only radio trigger that we had that would work on the sony was just a standard pocket wizard so we're using pop quiz which means that we don't have a full feature control there so we don't have high speed sync and so forth we don't have an md filter, so we need to keep our r shutter speed at one tenth of a second, we need to use eso of fifty to control the exposure again and then used the after were varying the after now to get to the right balance of flash to ambient light exposure to flare exposure. So that is the balancing act here, so single synchronization is controlled by again. We're at one hundred second at fifty, and we're using our appetite to control everything else about this so sink is okay, we're on the pock wizard, and we're fine there, amin exposure. So what we can see here is we have various test shot exposure's, right? So this is ambient light on lee. We're at at the eighty five prime we're at five six s o fifty one hundred second, five thousand degrees kelvin, I'm leaving the kelvin moore neutral on these because I wanted to have a very cool and neutral look to the overall shot. I think it looks really nice, but look at five, six, you can see how much the flares kind of blooming in, right when you drop the f or not only does everything brighten up, but the flare blooms to the point where her face is basically blown out, part of the face is basically cut off and that's not what you want it was actually very difficult to shoot this image on the sony a seven are and the reason why is because the e v f and the viewfinder on the back the camera on the seminar when displays the image you don't see the image in like full you know, sixteen bit color detail so what ends up happening is that I mean you might see it that way but it just doesn't visually present it to you in a way that you can really interpret it not like on the cannon fire demark three aren't nikon d a hundred so forth so it's very difficult to tell just how much of the image was actually blown out versus how much was retained because in this image it looked like everything up to her body right here was blown out and in reality you can actually see part of her face and this image it looks like her face is completely blown out but you can actually see partner face once we got the rod into post so that's just something to keep in mind in those types of situations you really need to rely on your history graham to get you where you need to go because you know obviously the viewfinder has its limitations in that kind of a situation so that's f force we're getting too much flair bloom at f four at f eleven we're getting not enough right it's kind of strange. Where? F eleven. We kind of cut down the ambient light and so forth. And by the way, these two are just and being light on lee. These two are combining flash now. So this we have the profile of the b twenty two it's firing at around one half to full power with to phoebe, twenty two's on the pro photo. Ah! Oh, no. Sorry, this is on the rapid box. Octa, actually with the diffuser. Okay, so we're holding it very, very close to her. And so we actually have only one of all the b twenty two. I misspoke on this one. So it's one bowl baby twenty two at probably around full power. So it's roughly two fifty one seconds of power or three hundred watt seconds the same as a profile toby to just directly over her. Well, we have a good exposure for her in this shot. What we end up seeing is that the flare looks more like a mistake than something intentional. It's not strong enough to look intentional, but it still has this kind of wash over the image that doesn't look necessarily good. It doesn't look like it's supposed to be there, it just looks like a mistake, so at eleven we're not getting enough flare, so we back it off to f seven point one. So now we allow the back on the go a little brighter. We have this beautiful flare coming in. We can see just enough detail in her face. We're firing now at roughly. So this is probably one over one power in this kind of shot again. It's going to depend on the distance of the subject, the closer you are, you might drop the one half further. You might be at one of the one here. We dropped by about a stop because we're bringing the aperture down by about a stop. Okay, maybe a little more. So now we get a nice bright exposure on her. We can see that flare coming in and we get a good balance over. Also, this is kind of that ideal shot, but it took us, like, four, five attempts to get here. Because we had tto just balance everything out. Now, what's the difference now, between these two. Okay, roughly the same amount of flair. This one has a little bit. You know, this one. The flare is slightly different in each of these. But this one does not have any flash added, wears this one does, so we end up seeing here, is that we've added, essentially we've added light direction to the image because up here the image looks very flat, right? We're out of that light direction to it, and it lets her pop and stand out on the image would get much more detail in definition in her her dress, her necklace and everything, and we have the flair on top of that. So, yes, this is a cool image of here to shoot it with just ambu light on lee, but the problem is that, you know, it just doesn't have that extra extra kind of, I don't know that added feel to it, as we would have with that additional light. All right, so that's, how we have to get there now for these, you know you're going to be essentially testing and analyzing every single shot so after each shot, you're going to probably do like five, six test shots until you get to where you need to be. Now, once you are where you need to be, then you're going to basically get her into a right pose, get your subject in the right post and shoot and just analyze the details from shot to shot you're gonna have to vary the angle of the camera. With that flare to kind of get the right amount of bleed with every one of these shots and that's going to mean that with every shot, every frame that you're taking, you're doing a little bit analysis making sure that you have the right amount of flair to the right amount of, uh, flash exposure to the right ambient light exposure. Okay, so key techniques here to combine us to. And, by the way, here's, the final image, all we've done is he taking this image, we refined a little bit that color on the skin tone, just so we have a little more clean skin tones, just a little bit of photo shop just to clean up color really that's that's all that was necessary for that image on deacon do a little bit dodgy. Bernie, if you want to. I don't think we did really much to this other than just refined skin tone color. We do have a little bit reflections right here from the necklace, which you can see. We talked about that earlier whenever you're adding light and they have reflective items it's going to create reflection so we could re types that out we wanted to we left it in the shot, though, just out of the way, because for the sake of leaving it, okay, I think the one thing that we did do was we brightened the eye's just a tiny tiny bit just to make them stand out a little more and the image but otherwise you can see there's very little change between these two now the key tips for this type of technique remember what happened or does in controlling flares it also controls your starburst effect remember that so with a flare or a starburst effect you're after is going to control the shape of it. The smaller the aperture goes the more of a starburst pattern and get with your life source the more defined a flare is going to become the smaller goes the way wider you're after the more you opened the aperture up the mohr that light source is goingto bloom and kind of create just a ah wide shape of light in the scene that's less defined overall, so use that in conjunction with kind of that exposure setting to get the right balance once you get the right balance in the flare and in the background and the ambient using the after then dial in the power setting that's appropriate for the flash power that you need to get your subject to kind of stand out to where you want him or her all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully all enjoyed let's go ahead and move to the next image now