Lessons

Lesson Info

Fashion Beauty Shoot Overview

If you follow my work on social media, you will probably notice that I shoot a lot of beauty style portraits and beauty images, and it is by far my favorite genre ever to photograph. A long time ago, and part of the reason why that happened was that a long time ago, I used to look in the magazines, and I would see all these big fashion magazines, and I would see these beautiful, close-up portraits that had this amazing detail, and amazing texture, and immediately I was like, man, my pictures don't look like that. How do they do that? It seemed like this magical thing, and I set out to learn and try to figure out how are they achieving this lighting? How are they achieving this effect? Is it a post production thing? Is it a camera thing? Is it a lighting thing? Do I need a $50,000 camera to be able to capture these types of looks? And the good thing is, you don't. You can actually use the A6300, the A6000, some of those more affordable cameras, and you can still create awesome beauty lo...

oks. And rather than talk about it, I'm actually gonna show you guys how I shoot my beauty-style images. And so, I'm going to do this by showing you a range of different modifiers, and we actually have a brand new model who is super amazing. I'm gonna have her come out, and I'm gonna show you guys how I shoot beauty images using a couple of different modifiers, actually three different modifiers. We're gonna start with a beauty dish, which you know, shooting beauty, beauty dish, if you think, kind of goes together. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, and I'll talk about when to use one and when not to use one. So we're gonna use a beauty dish. We're gonna use an octa, and we're gonna use a umbrella. So very basic, simple umbrella, for a lot of photographers, they actually start off their off-camera flash shooting careers using a $40 or $50 umbrella, and you could totally shoot beauty images with it, and I'll show you guys how to do that. So first things first, what was your name by the way? Krista! Krista, so she is going to be modeling for us today for these beauty shots. She has her hair and makeup done, it is crucial, very important, when you're photographing these types of beauty looks, we started with the girl next door, where it's like they do their own makeup, 'cause you don't have a hairstylist and all that stuff. We're super lucky at CreativeLive, 'cause we get great models, and we have great hair and makeup people. And so, she has her hair and makeup done in a way that maybe if you had the girl next door type, maybe they can't do this, and so this is one of those scenarios where, above all, the camera's not really super important, the lens, lighting, all that stuff is not super important. What's really important is having somebody talented that can do the hair and the makeup, 'cause that's all stuff that again, you can't do it in post. I guess we could put a Photo Shopped wig on her or something, but it's not gonna look good. So you wanna make sure that the styling is on point. Finding people like that, if you have not already signed up for a website like Model Mayhem, a fantastic resource for you to find local artists in your area that you can collaborate with. Starting out, a lot of the people that I worked with, I was able to find them through that website, and some were great, some were not, but again, it helps you to be able to work through that process. So I'm actually gonna have you stand in front of this backdrop. Once again we have a Savage collapsible backdrop, and in the break that we had, John actually shot a video, two videos which I kind of alluded to them, but I didn't tell you where to watch 'em. So if you go to Cornicello Photo on social media, you can watch, or on Instagram, you can watch two videos. One was me explaining how to fold the backdrop, and the second video was the race that I had with Kenna where she totally smoked me. The cameras were on me, I was super nervous, she beat me fair and square. So watch those two videos, they're super interesting and very fun to watch. But so, this is gonna be our setup. We have a white backdrop. I may end up changing the backdrop along the way, but typically when I'm photographing beauty looks, I kinda like the look of a white, plain backdrop because if I wanna go gray, remember, if I pull her away from the backdrop, the backdrop gets darker. So if she gets really close to it, and I bring the lights in close, we have a nice, white background, but if I pull her away, we can go gray. And if I pull her away from the backdrop a lot, like I bring her way back here, into the camera area, that white backdrop goes black, completely. So you have basically three different backgrounds when you're shooting with white, which is kinda nice. But we're gonna try to go for kinda like a white-ish, or a gray-ish type of look. I'm gonna be using a beauty dish, which, this is kind of like a newer product, and I really love the idea and the concept of this product, because I love shooting with beauty dishes, and oftentimes I'll have to travel and go somewhere, and these beauty dishes are normally, they're aluminum, or they are some other material that doesn't break down. So if you're traveling, or let's say, even if you're not traveling, even if you're bringing your beauty dish from your studio to some location to use, it's like a heavy thing that doesn't collapse. Phottix made what's called the Phottix Spartan beauty dish, which is really awesome, 'cause this thing actually fits in a bag, which I dunno if we have the bag nearby, if we don't it's okay, but actually I have it right here. So the entire beauty dish fits in this little bag. So I can take this bag, stick this in my camera roller bag, and that's basically the entirety of this beauty dish. If you own a beauty dish, or if you've used one, you know it doesn't fit in bags like this, it really doesn't go with you, which is kind of a bummer, 'cause it's a great light modifier. So I'm gonna take this thing off. (Velcro tears) So this is what the beauty dish looks like, and it's basically a little plate on the inside of this modifier, so when the flash goes off, it hits that plate, it bounces the light back onto the interior of this modifier, and then that kicks out the light. The inside of this is white, so that's gonna give you a less contrasty shadow, which is kind of what I like for my beauty portraits. A lot of times people will ask me, if you search for beauty dishes, you'll find some that are white and some that are silver, and that's always the question, 'cause you don't wanna go spend money and you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right. So you're like, should I get the white or silver? Oh I'll just get the silver, and then you realize, oh man, I don't really like the look. Silver could look great, I'm not saying don't use it, but to be honest with you, I have a much easier time with the majority of people, different skin tones, skin types using the white interior. So I'll recommend to you go with the white, but the nice thing about this particular modifier is that it's actually multiple modifiers in one. I'm using this in the beauty dish configuration, which is basically having this little plate on the inside. If I wanted to make this into a small octa, I could basically take this plate off, all of this stuff basically assembles, it's just screw in. You could take that out, and you basically have an octa. You also have an interior diffusion that you can put on, I don't have it on, 'cause I'm not gonna use it, but there's a little fabric just like this that clips on on the inside. So if you want it to soften the light even more, you could put that on the inside. You have an outside diffusion, which I will be using, 'cause I wanna get, even though this is kind of what's considered to be a kind of like a harder light source, I wanna try to soften that a little bit so that the shadows on her face are not super strong. So I'm gonna diffuse this, and there's actually a grid that also comes with it, so if you want it to focus the light so that it doesn't spread everywhere, which maybe I might use it, I don't know, I'm gonna take some shots, and I'll determine whether or not I need it, but you can actually put the grid on this, and that will help to focus the light so it doesn't spread everywhere. And all of that comes with this kit, and the nice thing about this particular beauty dish is that, I think in the U.S. side, I'm not sure what it costs overseas, but I know in the U.S., they have two different sizes, I believe this is the bigger of the two, and it retails for like $100. And the smaller size is like $79. So it's very affordable, extremely affordable, and they make speed rings that work for a variety of different lights. So even if you are shooting with some other brand of lights, some other type of light, say you have Elinchrom, or ProPhoto, or whatever, you can buy the rings for those specific lights, and you can still use that same modifier. So it's pretty versatile, it's pretty awesome. I could use this on location for outdoor portraits, and in this case I'm gonna use it to shoot beauty. So we're gonna go ahead and flip this thing around and we'll get this show on the road, 'cause I am anxious to shoot. Alright, so we've got this thing set up, this is kind of like my go-to setup for shooting beauty. You may have seen this a million times before, this clamshell setup, which I'm gonna actually complete once we get the reflector into this. But this is the, kind of like the traditional setup for shooting beauty. So you'll take the one light source, you'll have it directly centered on the model, and you'll have it kinda facing down a tiny bit, because again, in this case you have that deflector plate in the middle, so that hot spot in the center is not so hot, 'cause the beauty dish has that plate in the middle, which helps a lot. But I still like to shoot the models with the edge of the light from whatever modifier I'm using. So I tend not to point it at them, unless I'm trying to go for like a really bright look. So usually I'll shoot these with a macro, because again, I wanna get that texture, I wanna get that detail, but I shot the last segment with a 90 macro, and so what I wanna do this time is I'm gonna use the 85 millimeter 1.4 G Master lens from Sony, which again, super sharp, very detailed. And we're gonna try this out to shoot those close up looks, and we'll do one without the reflector first, so you guys can kind of get an idea of what this light is doing. I would always recommend to you, before you start bringing a bunch of lights and reflectors, just because you see the end result has a reflector doesn't mean that when you get ready to do it that you also need a reflector. So try with one light first, see what the result is, and then add the reflector if you need it.