Lessons

Lesson Info

Soccer Shoot: Portrait

whenever you guys are like setting up your lighting things like that on these images and you're you've got your background you've got your subjects in the studio it might take a while to get that one shot like for instance we spent all day getting getting our one shot for a soccer player if we want an additional shot like in this case we're going to add a portrait onto that it's really it takes maybe like an extra twenty or thirty minutes here in the studio and even the deposit because we've built the background already and compositing into the background isn't going to take that long so while it might take six hours to get the first shot it might taken additional thirty to forty five minutes to get that second shot so it makes it makes the day a lot more worth it if you can get that extra bonus shot in because it looks you produce twice as much work with just a little bit more time so anytime I'm doing like a big setup like this I always try to get that additional shot in and usually ...

just it really pays off in terms of like actually yield so that's what we're doing now and it's it's not going to take long we're just doing a couple a portrait here um yeah our beauty dish let's go ahead and yeah let's bring that in yeah let's do it yeah we're going to set up all these guys this rims and again we're shooting on green screen so we have the option to composite this as well which we're going to be doing toward the end of day three tomorrow all right this one and this many all right so again just kind of like similar similar lighting here all right lower this power down and now instead of using you know the beauty dish a little farther away we're going to go a little bit more traditional with our yeah we're going to go a little bit more traditional like portrait lighting well traditional portrait lighting does not have four room lights but that we're going to bring a beauty addition and we can actually bring in the fuser which is right upset all right is it you got it awesome thing can be real pain very nice and we'll probably lower that down toe five or so and uh yeah let's see how this looks so our tripod we want to raise up generally I like to take my portrait at about eye level I don't really know how this tripod works do you you know john all right cool so generally I like to take my portrait sat about eye height find if I'm coming from below or above that things if you want to do it for dramatic effect that's totally valid but just like a standard portrait I'd like to be about yeah using for the beauty dish a little bit more shier than because it just looks really news yeah really nice it is usually yeah usually two socks it I guess you can buy these indifferent different amounts of diffusion so this looks like it might be a half or a quarter stopper yeah okay yeah I've got I've got a diffusion for I have ah uh alien be or einstein or possible on dit you can't see through it all so yeah it's um probably let's shoot portrait I think it'll be fine all right she gets conceived with like um so I usually just oh I usually just do it keep it on that guy and I like that yeah um so doing this you guys since he I mean most of her life thinking the same set up we've got another five or ten minutes on set and long they're lighting looks good we're uh well we're good to go with her portrait in just a second so all right and with this I'm not I'm not trying really for like a concept a lot of times when I'm shooting a portrait I want my model to be like sad or you know like whatever it is like that that's the concept is the actual portrait but we've already done the concept shoot so for this this is just like what I would consider it a little bit more of a normal portrait and this is not being able to use the modeling light on the beauty dish james if you want to put your chin just a little more that way there we go a little bit this way here and then we'll see how that looks all right I'm going to switch my camera back into auto focus for this yeah that's really nice and um hopefully that'll just play here on the screen here we go bring your chin a little bit more this way really nice so what we're seeing again with the same don't do that uh we're the same type of like we've got a nice phil going on with our front light here we've got our beauty dish which is giving us are basically let's bring that condition a little bit closer everything john I'm bringing it will no no let's bring it farther away and let's make it harder yeah I want this to be a little bit more punchy um and you know what okay yeah let's see how that see how that looks because this is a sports portrait this is obviously different lighting that I would use it like a you know high school senior or I think that looks good I do wantto yeah chin back this way a little bit there we go all right all right this isn't very nice let's see the okay this light here I think we could probably reduce a little bit yeah and is that that pro furrow there leave this one here okay let's just get down a little bit that way very cool and james you're doing great this is pretty much exactly what we want so it's thiss will probably wrap pretty soon because what that crosses o raise it higher no I'm just thinking it with that one but it may be there we go I can't see it all now um yeah let's let's bring that back is a pointing toward you at all e all right let's raise the power that one a little bit make sure it's firing yeah ok lower the power just a little bit for me john if you don't want I like that ring right I'm just thinking it's a little bit too strong right now all right if you could do chin just that rio all right and have you look a little there we go very cool so it's just a little bit of variation this is I'm sure you guys have all done taking a portrait before um nothing nothing really big going on here just more of a lesson that you know getting a couple of bonus shots here at the end is it is a really good idea just to give yourself a little more variety and then we can composite these in if you want to do you're like come down with your chin a little bit more yeah there we go perfect and that should give it a little bit more of like a I just played soccer look um what's that let's actually spray some water I think that might be a good idea here not not mud free him with not mud yeah let's go with more home okay marina get the hair going way out there you go thrilled in dan's way go awesome a little more this way chin down for me yep chin chin down it's right back up a little bit beautiful really cool so yeah these air just additional portrait and then we can composite these in with our you know basically the same background that we were using before a rim light totally works for this portrait just like it worked for our other their mission zoom in to make sure all of our details are showing up like we like that's awesome yeah so for this we can really do quite a bit of work in in postproduction making sure like this is b it would be a composite but a little bit more of a retouched to doing like dodging and burning and really bring these out yeah upon underneath the oil are so what did use used on top of the oil than s so it's okay to just because I when I've used oil on top of make it before it has just eaten the makeup and I'm just wondering what you can put on top of makeup on the fingers dab it wasn't like taking hope so but which can create the effect but if it's on top of makeup is just a little tiny bit yeah and that's that's an awesome portrait composited into the background a little bit of retouching some dodging burning and we'll really get a ton out of it so yeah it actually went quicker than I thought it would but again like the big lesson here is if you're going to spend all the time shooting on a green screen setting up all your lighting creating the background just you know throw an additional portrait in there and you get twice the yield with just an extra couple of minutes um so that's that's pretty much it yeah james awesome job all right thank you okay so you know these were some general questions you crack me up there's a general questions from the day so first of all one of our students would like to know how do you find models for your work without breaking the bank without breaking the bank ah great question I really use any any resource I can find one of our big tips when it comes to finding model without breaking the bank is doing photo shoot that are a little bit mohr alternative if you guys remember like my image that's all I can see why we use james um like the image that I have the dark force image with you know the person like covered in covered in cloth and things like that a lot of the times we don't need a traditional model for that sort of thing there are a lot of concepts that can be done really really well that don't involve like you know it doesn't have to be the world's beautiful person or the most in shape person or whatever like you couldn't make amazing photos with quote unquote regular people on dh a lot of the time that's going to be like friends or friends of friends people you find even we've put ads on craigslist we put ads on model mayhem I've gone for just you know model mayhem things like that you really wantto there was a lot of you know kind of questionable people on there too I find that whenever there's at least a little bit of money involved things tend to get more serious so generally I tryto toe work with anyone like just for free for free even it's fifty dollars people tend to take things more seriously like your model show up they actually show up usually even if you're paying on like fifty dollars I just got a friend of mine lisa town has been here before she's actually set up a group photograph photography shoot and because we started at six a m that really helped kind of weed out people that weren't interested in you know she had professional models that were interested in working with lots of photographers but sitting like a high call time you know really early call time or something that's like just out of the ordinary might help weed out people that aren't really serious about it that makes a lot of sense yeah doing things like that you know early call time involving even a little bit of money on dh usually working someone if if you can work with someone who's signed with an agency and you could give them images that they can use in there book a lot of the time you khun do what's called like testing and you won't have to pay oftentimes it's completely free but with that you might be more limited on what you can actually shoot with that person like if if they if you're going to be trading a model for their time they're going to want something they can put in their book and like an image like mind of like a dark force or something like that there is a model can't do anything with that there's no value in that for four models so if that's the case make sure you compensate models but historically really you know working with agency models I would say maybe one out of uh you know one out of every six or seven photo shoots I worked with an agency model everything else from that we work with usually a lot of times people we know friends of friends great and then do you ever use interns in your particular studio yeah we've had we've had a series of interns and we just hired one of our interns on full time as well so I love working with interns young bringing in young people who are like really excited about what you're actually learning is it's huge it's a really important thing because like I've been doing this for years and I still love it but like that day today there's something like the energy of like a you know really a young person who is just getting into photography taken bring that energy in and I find it it's kind of infectious that makes everyone kind of a little more excited about a photo shoot I would say that any advice to a person who's fine going to find an intern um really make your selection process almost like a like a legitimate job interview just don't say yes to everyone out there on the street because while someone might be really good is your friend in a work environment they might not be good you know they might want to play around all the time or they might not have the same work ethic you do but they might have different expectations things like that so generally you want to find you want to find someone who can fit into your work environment who can kind of like you know spend the first week or two kind of just keeping their mouth shut and learning what everything is and then after that time like figuring out how they can add toe whatever is going on and then kind of like bringing that to you that's that's a huge value for an intern you know someone who is just going to kind of come in and you know act up and kind of be really needy and you know there's not a whole lot of value that they're providing a lot of the times it's it's more work on the team or the photographers of the production team to have that extra person on because they're they're having to take care of them rather than it working around the other way so little advice for people who want to intern you know it's okay to stay quiet in the beginning especially if you're you know five ten years younger than everyone else kind of learned the vibe of what's going on in that work environment and then figure out a way to add add to that awesome great and we've been getting this question a lot of the few days so I want to throw it at you and it's I know it's subjective how long does it take to create one of these masterpieces and I mean what's the longest you've ever spent on a piece of work good question I think the longest I've ever spent on a composite was maybe thirty to forty hours and that was an image that I did a few years ago called sarin getty and it basically I brought in fifteen different people into our photo studio and I built a giant set a table it was like a twenty foot by twenty foot seven tables with all these holes cut out and then I filled it with sand so I had fifteen people up to here in sand and then I basically photographed them from a bunch different angles using different kinds of lighting and I cut them all out of the background and I built I could clone them over and over and I can show you guys in just a second on my website but basically I I made like a sea of people so the end image has over like ten thousand people in it and I had to cut them along individually so millie maybe we can show that up tomorrow yeah we'll show it tomorrow morning fantastic fantastic mr I would like to know do you use a lot of hdr technique I do a lot of what I would call like manual hdr I definitely bracket like if if I'm taking pictures in in you know a location that's got really high bright highlights and dark shadows I'm going to be bracketing but generally I don't do any like you know merged hdr pro and I don't really use any of the hdr like plug ins or tools I'll just generally do that on my own with masking because you do want detail in your shadows and in your highlights if you could possibly get him but and a lot of the time the look that those programs and toe like spit out is a little too like faith for me maybe I just don't know what I'm doing with it so I just do it manually most of the time it works pretty well cool also from darryl what's the difference between photo manipulation opposed to a composite photo um I think compositing is a part of photo manipulation and photo manipulation you know that's that's basically just editing anything about a photo I mean even bringing in a photo and a little dodging and burning I guess I would consider photo manipulation um I think compositing is just it's a huge category and I'm happy to see that it is growing in popularity I think more and more people are seeing that it is accessible it's something that you can actually do it's not something that you know one time was reserved for hollywood studios and then it was just like on ly the pros know how to do this stuff but these techniques are being taught you know more and more and it's becoming more accessible so what I see happening with compositing is just awesome I see photography being integrated with video being integrated with three d modeling being integrated web and different interactive you know basically like multimedia environments online you know one tablet displays doing interactive things between like you know a phone scanning a q r code in a brochure and something interactive flowing on you know playing on your phone that's composited into a background and I'm seeing all kinds of really cool things so it's I think if you really think stop to think about how many times you have like something over here and something over here and they get stuck together it's all around you cool last question before we head on out for the day how are you going to put the icing on this cake way doing tomorrow night tomorrow we're going back into photoshopped so all those questions on photoshopping like green screen and compositing those are all going to be answered tomorrow so that's going to be like taking taking our background image that we have and that we showed earlier today that we kind of built on we're gonna be taking that from the ground where you know all these photos going completely separate I'm going to bring that back up completely from scratch so we're going create that stadium we're going to create a couple different variations of it is well and kind of like you know decide during the creation process how this is gonna wind up looking and then we're going to take all of our different elements today I think you know a total we did like five or six mini photo shoots today we're going to bring all of those things together and create a composition that it's goingto look lifelike it's gonna look real and more importantly it's just gonna look really fun