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Freezing Motion with Constant Light

Lesson 7 from: Lighting with Constant Light

Mark Wallace

Freezing Motion with Constant Light

Lesson 7 from: Lighting with Constant Light

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

7. Freezing Motion with Constant Light

You can freeze motion with a fast shutter speed when shooting with constant lights. However, you need to consider a few things: ISO values, noise in the image, focusing, and the quality of light. In this session, Mark explains all of these things and while shooting a dramatic portrait.
Next Lesson: Working With Color

Lesson Info

Freezing Motion with Constant Light

what's up everybody now, we're going to capture motion. And this is gonna be a really exciting little section. Uh you can tell, I'm not much of an athlete, but Theresa is. So Theresa come on out, you can see that she is already ready to go. And so what we're going to be doing is we're gonna have Theresa running and jumping and we're going to try to capture her in mid air and a very wonder woman superhero esque pose. Get ready for this. Okay, let me show you how we set this up. Come on back Theresa, we have a square right in the middle of the floor that we have sort of figured out everything right here. So I have four lights, lights, these four lights and they are focused right on Theresa. And so that will give us maximum like we're doing a thing, a principle called light stacking. And what that means is you take one light and point it in one thing and put another light on top of that and another light on another light. And you're stacking all of the brightness, the luminosity of those...

lights to get as much light as possible because we want to freeze motion. We need a lot of light so we can crank up our shutter speed. So what will happen is Teresa is gonna go back to our starting point and she is going to be over there. We have a little launching point marked out here on a piece of tape. So she'll run. She'll jump Schum and right here is where I'm going to try to capture her. So let me show you what I've done with my camera and then I'll show you these lights over here. So on my camera I have set this up. So I am in manual mode. And the reason for that is Theresa is going to be moving from darkness into light back into darkness and I want my camera to be set for that point where it's the brightest. And so we're gonna meet her that a little bit later. So manual mode locking that in. My shutter speed is at 1 of a second. That's as fast as my shutter can go. You can see I can go down but I can't go over of a second. That's as fast as I can go. So my drive mode, you can see that little green thing on the left. H plus, that's high speed plus. So I'm gonna be taking pictures really really quickly, just like a machine gun so that I'll track Teresa as she's running around. And then down here you can see my aperture value going from 4 to 55.6. I know that I want to be around F five or six. That should give me enough depth of field to capture Teresa. So I will set those two things and then what I'll do is I will change my S. O. So that my exposure reading shows up correctly so you can see down there right now I'm underexposed. But that little meter at the very bottom negative 321, and then top dead center there is a correct exposure. So what I'm gonna do here also let me show you my camera settings, other settings. So I have my metering mode to matrix metering, I have my focus to auto focus, servo or continuous focus is going to be always tracking and so that is how I've set this up. I'm shooting raw. My camera can keep up just fine even at these high speeds. And so uh that's what we have. So I haven't done much different much more than that to the camera. All right, I'm gonna take my camera and I'm gonna go back here. And what we need to do is we need to turn these lights on. So I have four lights and so I'll turn these guys on their very bright, so like number one, turn on, like number two, Light, # three, Light # four. So, we have all the lights turned on, you can see they're extremely bright. So Theresa come back out to your square here here a little mark and what I want to show you is what's happening behind Theresa back here. So you can see that we have all these shadows. So we have foreshadows 1234 that are behind Theresa. So what will happen is those shadows are going to show up because my camera angle is going to be over here. They will show up as sort of speed lines. So if you're an anime fan, you'll see that we have speed lines added to things. I guess I have to stay in the light for you to see me. And so that's what we're doing is we're using those shadows intentionally. So because Theresa's here, I'm gonna go back to where I'm shooting which is right in the middle of the lights. I'm going to point my camera at Teresa and I'm going to meet her to get my values set. And so right now at 6.3 that I. S. 0. 2500 I am showing a correct exposure. So I've locked that in. 8/1000 of a second. F 6. I. S. 0. 2500. Actually I said 2000. So with this camera is so 2000 is nothing. I won't have any issues with noise. Are you ready Teresa? Alright, so hot back And we're gonna give this a couple of chances and so I'm going to count you in. I'm going to try to track you and keep you wide. Alright, so 321 go. Excellent. Okay, I'm gonna do that one more time. I think I'm gonna get a little bit closer. So here we go. And 321 go. Excellent. I think we have a shot that works. I'm looking at these and I'm failing to shoot wide enough. So I'm sorry. I'm killing your knees. We're gonna do it one more time. All right, 321 go. Excellent. All right. Let's take a look at these shots now. Of course. We just did this as quickly as possible to show you how to freeze motion. But I think you can see that we can freeze motion with constant light. So my camera is hooked up and here we go. So I'm gonna go through these images and you can see right there. Look at that. I'll zoom in and you can see Theresa is absolutely frozen in mid air. Look at those guns That there once I'm going 10 images at a time. Sorry, I shouldn't be doing that. Well, we can see that. We have her running boom boom boom boom, right up in the air. We are freezing motion. No problem at 8,000th of a second. That's what we're getting. And I like those lines Now. I can take this because I shot rah I can drop it into light room or Photoshop I can change the exposure a little bit if I need to. But we can even look at this info and you can see that even when she's behind our light spot. It's not too bad. So, as she comes a little bit forward, our exposure goes up and so we have a lot to play with. We have successfully frozen motion. It's really cool. Well done Theresa. Okay, so what we're going to do now, since we've already played with motion, we've shown that you can freeze motion using constant light. We want to play with color and that's what we're gonna do now.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Tether Tools Pro Kit Discount
Tether Tools Starter Kit Discount
NanLite_WALLACE5.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

user-182390
 

Great course very informative and a pleasure to watch love the way you teach so easy to understand and follow through. learned a lot about continuous lighting ty

Alessandro Zugno
 

This is a very useful class for who want to start shooting video or photo with constant light. Creative Live should make more class on videography.

Student Work

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