Lessons

Lesson Info

Soccer Shoot: Lighting Test

so what we did over the break is we separated out or crash pads here and we've got a couple of apple boxes here and basically these they're just going to use a cz props while we get our lighting figured out so we're ready to go ahead and start whenever whenever we feel like bringing in this is our model james and how we're going to start basically is over the break james and I looked at some reference images and it's got a pretty good idea yeah yeah what what you're going to be doing and just like just like this yeah done but before we get into the actual like jumping and things like that we want to make sure we get our lighting right and yesterday we got our lighting right it was it was really pretty simple because rachel was able to just stand there and do this and in this case we're unable to do that because james is basically going to be sideways so what we did is we brought in a couple of apple boxes and basically the ideas we want to test the lighting as close to the final as pos...

sible so the idea is to have you know basically james is going to be doing something like this for just a couple of minutes while we test our lighting and we're going to be taking those images and we're going to bring them into our image in photo shop so these you know the crash pads there you know the way don't want him to have to do this for hours at a time jumping and falling on the ground so we want to make sure that we're able to spend as much time as possible actually getting everything tiled in so we're not you know injuring our model of trying to get our lighting figured out for an hour wait so yeah we're gonna go ahead and start off with that I'm just getting back to my camera up just a little bit and let's go ahead and start off with just our our red lights so lets them we're gonna pop right into my room and everyone already is pretty familiar with the background that we're going to be we're going to be providing here yeah let's do it let's do just rim lights it's at this point this is uh our tests you jim you did awesome job ok and with this I want that I'm trying to you know basically get the height of the camera about the same height as what the composite is after the fact so you can see the cameras that a lot lower oven angle I wantto uh photo rap game from pretty much straight on all right there we go and james you can go ahead and relax again all right so this is going to go ahead and pull up into into light room for us and see what we've got all right cool so from this shot we concede like already there's very little effort going on on stage which is exactly what we want and we're going to just talk about our lighting and for those of you guys who were let's go ahead and bring this to half size for those of you guys who are curious you know earlier when I was talking about rim lighting and what we want with this like cool lighting effect like this is exactly what we're talking about and james if you want to come over and you can actually see with these looks like from straight at the camera already so if it looks this cool straight down a camera without any adjustments chances are it's going to look amazing in your final composite so this is exactly what we want c's room lights really do a good job separating out our subject from the background so we can see each of these lights they're hitting the fabric and they're outlining basically everything that we need to about our subjects so we can see light on you know light on the top of the shoes on you know the shorts and basically all along the body so at this point what I'm doing is I want to make sure a couple of things I want to make sure that we're not like to overexpose so like here you know in the skin like we're shooting it f nine and this looks pretty good in my opinion this is it's a little bit on the overexposed range but it's these air sports portrait so like having that super like high key really high contrast really look is generally okay with these types of portrait so I am going to change your aperture a little bit I'm going to change our aperture from f nine we're going try f ten and then f eleven simply because that's a lot easier than changing the the actual light now put on all four of our lights including the ones that are up there s so what I'm doing when I'm kind of looking at this image is I'm looking for any areas that I think that we may have missed you know like is you know is there a port portion of the image that is not how we wanted on def there is I want to make sure that I can take care of those things early on and in this case I think it looks really nice now are green screen you'll notice we have a question in section one about lighting that the green screen to you ever liked the green screen and if you guys remember from yesterday the green screen was way more even than this because we did we set up those be flats and we lit the green screen to make it a lot more even so we see these shadows and things like that that's one thing we want to keep in mind we want to see if we can even this out so they're a couple ways to do that we might be able to like pull it a little tighter to eliminate some of the shadows were also going to yes and john just mentioned we're going to be bringing in fill lights from the front so that's going to help us out as well we also have a plan to add a beauty dish is well and that's going to help at a little bit more directionality these two are lights on the front so let's do about the same thing and this time let's turn our front light on and I think I can control my camera from the computer like a wizard very james all right wizard alright that's really cool so for those anyone who has questions at home we're using the ceo's utility that's built in teo built in software with the camera so theo's we're using a cannon five d mark three and you can actually see our our camera settings here on the screen which is great might help answer some of the questions at home for sure ah folk a couple folks were asking about the green shirt well that cause any problems really great question so we are going to be bringing this into photoshopped kind of doing a live composite so the green shirt it's it's a different enough green toe where hopefully it's not going to cause any issues but we will find out shortly oh and we're still enough nine which I think I can change right here too I don't know if I actually can't change this but okay I couldn't change this oh using the right and left key this is the who have never done this before all right let's shoot it at eleven and see and see what this looks like james if you wantto yes the same thing again all right and we'll take a picture at eleven this is amazing all right we're good to go all right so we're going we're going to zoom into this in light room so you can see what we've got here basically our front lights doing a good job and because we've changed our aperture from f nine eleven basically the effect on the room lights is going to be much much less in fact including the front lights so just kind of like looking this is our shot at f nine and then this is our shot at f eleven and it looks more properly exposed at f eleven what do you guys think yeah ok let's keep it with f eleven end yeah let's bring this up a little bit in s o this is this is our fill light remember earlier when we were talking about how how light bounces around and it reflects on can everyone see this bit of blue that's on james skin it's reflecting from the blue on his shorts so if this were really close to the green screen you'd actually get green reflecting on people's skin this is the point I was trying to make when I was like rubbing up against a green screen way can actually see it here in in place so this this color caste obviously we want this because it's accurate it's going to be reflecting what's going on here in his shorts but if if it was color casting from the green screen we could choose to select out that green and then change it to whatever color casts we wanna pointing at the end all right james let's give it another shot and I'm going teo there we go we're going to just take another out of the picture awesome right so a couple of things we're trying to kind of keep in mind here I'm trying to get this relatively close to the the angle that we want to do and you know having three apple boxes stacked up that's about the height that I think he's going to be when when he's actually jumping as well so I'm just trying to get all these things figured out before I have you know actually start started job and I know probably less exciting for those you guys at home but I've had to drop on crash press before and I know like after five or six times doing it it's no fun this looks really really great actually I'm going let's go ahead and bring in our our beauty dish and see if we can make this like just a little bit better we want to make it pop a little bit more so with that usually I'm looking to add a little bit of directionality to our subject and make you know make our subjects usually I'm aiming a beauty dish towards someone's face I find the sweet spot is usually around two to three feet away from the subject's face and in this case because we're dealing mostly with rims I want to keep this generally coming from from the side so I don't want this to be too much from the front so we're thinking maybe yeah maybe from about about this side there that looks pretty good so we're going to do a couple of test shots like this and way haven't done this force what I don't know what it's going to look like I'm just imagining in my mind right now but if it doesn't work out here we can always bring the beauty dish and we can put this behind our subject as well so let's do a shot like this all right here we go go waken see what this looks like here all right so really not not much of a difference there yeah let's bring up the power a little bit on that thanks john and can we bring it more from the side as well like there we go pretty for a question yes of course this is from uh w nagy with the stadium lighting will there be multi directional shadows and will you try and capture that during the shoot let's bring it more from the back yeah that's a really good question so yeah the shadows are going to be well we're basically capturing the light from from behind with these four lights and each of these lights is going to light our subject you know from a different angle which would be casting different shadows on the ground so if we are going to basically replicate what's going on it's going to depend on our final composite on how high we make our subject from the ground some of the times like you know the higher you are from the ground you might not actually see those shadows on the ground but if we do need to capture his shadows on the ground there's some really amazing photoshopped techniques we can use to basically use cut his body out use that as a silhouette and then transform it to make it look like it's flat on the ground and then use that to create some shadows so we need to do that in photoshopped weaken we could definitely take care of that in photo shop in this case I want to basically hit james from as many like directions as possible to imitate the safety of leading all right let's give it a shot maybe we can take off the diffusion from the beautician and we'll go a little bit higher with that um just there we go james you can rest if you want all right very cool I mean used to go a little bit higher um let me just see yeah it is firing all right let's try it again james all right awesome oh the intensity digging it all right so just kind of like a side note on personal preference so when I'm lighting my subjects generally I prefer to I really like it when the light kind of like grazes around you know like their face kind of like almost like rembrandt lighting if you if you guys are familiar with that and basically what that would usually mean is the light would you know kind of coming across his face and you know kind of hit a cheek on this side and kind of fall off on the other side so if we want that lighting on james we might want to bring our beauty dish around the back so this is at this point it's it's a fairly it's a fairly low cost to change around our lighting right like we haven't even spent that much time in our photo shoot everyone's pretty comfortable at this time so I really want to get my lighting dialed in perfectly so when it comes time to actually do the action I'm I'm really really happy with my light at that point so let's go ahead into that let's maybe we can try to bring the beauty dish around around the back all right so I'm thinking like if it was right here shining on his face he would carve his face out a little bit better all right and then they're going to be some questions about hey but what about now you're gonna have a beautician in your shot and you're gonna have to cut that out and the answer is we will have to cut that out maybe a little bit more manually but as long as it's not the whole beauty dish probably won't be intersecting with james's body it'll probably just be a little bit of a light stand which really won't take long at all to wind up cutting out from from the background and if we can angle that down a little bit beauty dishes huh really in prime shape in it sumers fine actually yeah silver is a little bit more like punchy for those he has abused peter dishes before which in this case the sports portrait that's that's what we want so I'm I'm happy too happy to use the silver all right let's give it a shot and james you doing great fire it is all right take three shots is to make sure james oh now that okay I did it for my seeing reflection all right let's do one more there we go that fired for sure all right um james I think you're cool relaxing from little everyone all right so we're kind of seeing that now we're seeing a little bit more that like rembrandt style lighting where we've got we've got this light this eye here is actually being little little bit let's just kind of show you guys the before and after so this is the before where this is just the room light and now here in the after you can make out more of his face you can see that detail in his face a little bit more and in my opinion it just helps still kind of like ground the image out and gives a a little bit higher for however quality in terms of in terms of lighting all right that looks great and our exposure is looking pretty good now we're going to see a little bit of flair coming in from our from our beauty dish so um okay perfect um even like senna foil my work if we want to use that yeah so just a like a quick note on flagging because it looks like we've got two areas here let's just bring this to the quarters in all right it looks like we've got two areas that are you know need flagging so any area you see like this the reason you want to avoid these players is because they will they affect farm what far more than the area that you actually see so like a flare like this you might think okay this only affects this area but what that actually means that the light is like getting into the camera lens and it's going to be bouncing around so it means that our black levels are going a lot of time be a little bit messed up like our blacks won't actually be black so it's going to completely throw off the contrast in our image from what we want so we want to make sure we eliminate this stuff as much as possible so I'm just gonna go and maybe adjust this sin if oil in the background of here while john ticks here the beauty dish we can actually move these crash crowds a little forward if we need to all right and then we're gonna take another picture and make sure we're good with this all right let's give it a shot all right and let's just bring this up to half a zoom all right that looks pretty good job and I don't see a I don't see a flare from the southern light but john's head is maybe the thing that's blocking out that way did it just stay there all right all right awesome let's give this a shot as well cool now you'll see oftentimes in like movies and production and things like that will actually take these light stands and they'll wrap them in like green gaffer tape so they can chroma key out light stands and other things in the background as well we're not going to do that because we can make most these selections but like if I have to go in here and manually just select with lasso tool and cut this like little bit out manually that's really not a big deal this will take you know ten seconds or so I wouldn't want to have the entire you know I wouldn't want to have like the entire flag or something like that right here but just a simple light stand intersecting his foot that's usually not not really a big deal all right maybe you know I think I lost a little bit of the rim I'm just gonna look at his foot and kind of compare being blocked by the beauty there's some way we can move that a little bit yeah okay cool let's try it like that all right this may be bumped the power upon that one yeah I'm not really seeing a lot of rim here on his all right yeah you can go down a little bit too that helped bumping the power up helped all right so we can see that was before pumping the power up and there's there's after all right you have to be kind of anal to really sort of thing which most photographers most of the really talented photographers I've met are also some of the most anal people I've met so I think that goes in and head all right cool this looks good and I don't mind this shadow here and I think that really does a nice job carving out having out james as well