Lessons
Class Introduction
13:35 2The Inverse Square Law
06:24 3Shoot: One Light, Single Subject
20:44 4Shoot: Group Photo
14:48 5Shoot: Group with Diffusion
29:06 6Lighting Diagrams
14:48 7Strobox Demo with Chris Coe
05:25 8Softbox Set Up #1: Overhead Drama
13:33Softbox Set Up #2: Beauty Box
09:37 10Softbox Set Up #3: Backlight
07:40 11Softbox Set Up #4: Backlit Silhouette
10:00 12Creating a One Light Playbook
13:02 13Shoot: Bare Beauty Dish
14:47 14Shoot: Stripbank
07:12 15Shoot: Magnum Reflector
11:18 16Shoot: Grids
11:21 17Shoot: Beauty Dish with Sock
08:50 18Introducing Multiple Lights
10:47 19Shoot: Clamshell
17:10 20Shoot: Softbox & Beauty Dish - Main/Fill Lights
27:02 21Shoot: Softbox, Edge Lights/Striplights, and V Flats
30:45Lesson Info
Shoot: Stripbank
Doing great, Holly, doing great, uh huh. You're gonna have a lot of pictures of yourself on multiple modifiers. You're gonna be the recipe playbook, right on. Yeah, uh huh, yeah. (laughs) Great. Am I in focus on these? Sometimes I forget to focus. Is that focused? I'd say yes. Okay. All right, coming way out here to get that strip in there too, all right. Right on. All right, strip, you know, many times, I mean, this is a tool, you see the shape of it, right? It's long, it's skinny, it's one foot wide. You know, I use these as like long edge lights, right? I think you've been using some edge lights, looks like they were strip banks in your pictures. Is that right? Is that what you've been using? Yeah, what's that? Uh huh. Yeah, so, long skinny strip but it's also just gonna fill the space a little bit differently. Maybe not as broad as our giant soft box. Okay and am I sharp on everything? It's just the TV that looks like a painting? Yeah, look at this, look. TV look like a pai...
nting to you? Okay, right on, great, sharp as a tack. All right, so we hit that three ways? Yeah, yup. Okay, cool, let's through that magnum up there. Yeah, for sure. Yup, I'll take this down, you get that magnum. Right on. Actually, before we do that. Show them the guts? Yeah. Let's just look in here. Let's not even put that magnum on because you were asking me about these guys before, right? You were asking me questions about these modifiers? I always like to just rip them up and see what's going on in here, right? So when you're on location, what do you bring with you usually? What's in your bag, so to speak? That's gonna depend on the budget, right? People are gonna what they paid for sometimes, you know? The good part about having your own gear is that you don't need to rent it, you don't need to rely on a customer having a lot of money to make your pictures look good. Because once you get used to lighting stuff and it looking a certain way, it's hard if you don't have those resources to give the same quality of work to everybody. So I'm a big believer in buying your own gear. It hurts but it's an investment in your career that will pay for itself, you know? And I do believe in billing everybody for this thing. Like if I'm gonna work for you, I'm gonna lease this equipment, it's gonna cost me 300 bucks a month or whatever it is. I've leased a lot of gear, you know, I never had $20,000 to drop like this every time. So I'd lease it, like a car payment, just pay for it and my jobs would offset it. You can take this thing off and I think I just wanna, let's just look at this without it. So it's silver inside, silver's gonna magnify my light, it's not gonna work as hard. A little confused when we changed light modifiers, we went from eight to 11, I was like why did that happen? It's because this is silver inside, right? It's gonna kick, make your light work a little less hard, right? So it's helpful. It's helpful sometimes. Also gonna give you good different specular reflections. Let's just throw this on there. Yeah, for sure. Because sometimes I'll tear all this diffusion off and just shoot it like that. Sometimes I'll use a big optibank with no diffusion in front of it because I like a hard, I'm a harder, snappier light. Most of the time, not all the time. One of our students, Chris, wanted to know a little bit about how you chose to have your distance of your beauty dish seeming a little further back than, how do you judge how you find that happy place? Yeah, right now, I'm just doing, I'm just kinda laying out these modifiers in the same way, you know? I don't know that I would use them all in the way that they're here, right? But very often, if I want to see the most out of my beauty dish, you know, it's gonna, can I see the dish? Yup. Yeah, like if I wanna see the most out of this beauty dish it's gonna be like this close. The closer the light, the softer the light, right? And if I wanna see the most beauty part of photography, I'm gonna bring this thing as close as possible, you know? And it's gonna be, I'm gonna be shooting right underneath it, it's gonna be really close to my model. It will work from far away, I mean, it'll light a larger area but if I really wanna see what's divine about this thing, the closer to the light I'm gonna see it. And I don't wanna be the guy that says this is the way it should be all the time because I always had contempt for the teachers who kind of told me that, you know? So this is just my point of view and my opinion and like you might have your own and I encourage anyone online to disagree with me in someway so please do that if you feel like it, right? Yup, okay. Did we read this, Christopher? Not yet. Oh boy. 16. 16, okay. So that's giving us a stop and half more light because we took out one of these things, gonna be about a stop of light, just so you know and so sometimes when you're setting lights in ratio in relationship to one another and maybe you're dialed up all the way. You're like, I can't get another stop out of that light, you can just rip out one of these modifiers. You been there, you done that before? Yeah, have you? Okay. All right. 16, is that what it's at? Cool, can we compare this to the other one that was the same? With the strip bank? Yup, right on. Okay, so sometimes it's not the light that's falling on the subject that you're seeing but look at that shadow, right? Look how different the shadow is, the shape of the shadow, the texture of the shadow, how hard and crisp it is, how soft the shadow is here. That's gonna also apply to when we come, can you see that too? You seeing all that? You got good eyes. Okay, right on. I got the strip in there, okay. Gonna come for the medium. I think it's straight and the tight. Boo boo boo boo. Great. All right can we compare that, actually bring your, let's get that shot, all right? Chin this way just a little bit back, just a little bit. Yeah, perfect. All right, yeah, let's compare that with the without the softbox. So a little bit spicier, a little bit more punch and I know it's subtle but this is like where photographers find themselves in this subtlety, you know, and paying attention to this subtlety and working with this subtlety is really what separates like, I don't know, the toys from the people who really know, who really care, you know? It's like you gotta care about it. You care about it, Chris? I care about it. Okay, you care about it, uh huh.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
KIS Photography
WOW! I was getting ready to go to bed, when I saw this class last night as I was perusing the classes available. Got the notification that it was playing, so I thought I'd check it out for a minute or two. Well, once I turned it on, I couldn't turn it off! As someone who has shot musicians on stage since I was 16, I've recently been interested in shooting portraits of them, so Clay instantly intrigued me! The more I watched, the more I couldn't shut it off, and I stayed up til 5:30 in the morning to finish the course (financial issues, so I can't afford the class right now) This class is amazing! I love Clay's teaching style, his willingness to step outside the box and play by his own rules, and his lighting is awesome! As soon as it is possible, I WILL be purchasing this class! Loved it! Thanks again CreativeLive for introducing me to yet another outstanding photographer to learn from!
Jason Darr
I absolutely loved this. Great instruction, great content and very inspiring demonstrations. I'd highly recommend this course
Gene Tolan
Awesome intro to lighting. I love Clay's teaching style and his personality infused presentation was a pleasure. I highly recommend this course.
Student Work
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