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Lesson Info

Shooting Complex Detail Scenario

and apparently I have resting bad face when I'm shootings. I look, I'll high look very unhappy all the time, but I swear, it's just my thinking face. Um, you know, we're gonna go through some of these nice and quick. Uh, we have the same kind of set up we've been talking about before with shooting little details. You can see where the light is. You can see right exactly where I am, and you've got this same things We've been talking about 105 millimeter F nine working with your exposure compensation. So I got this image and then I decided I wanted to keep going. I had a few extra minutes. I wanted to make something a little different. So I started off with a mirrored table. And that's I mean, that's since, Okay, it's not great. If this was all I was able to shoot, that's fine. But not gonna change the world with this. I found these two weird, glittery like cones in a You know what it was? It was those. It looks like these, um they were bells. They were like a little bells that had glitt...

er and little pearls on them and they were like hanging on the bottom of a balloon. I sort of stole them on Guy put them on the table and I kind of moved them near the near the ring and I shot it. And I'm like, I don't like that. And the reason why I don't like that is my background is too close to my subject. So I backed the background off and I'm like, OK, now, now we're looking a little bit better, So if you're having trouble with making an interesting ring shot, bring your background in back your background away. Those things will start helping you kind of define or non define your subject. Then I just still wanted to make something a little bit more interesting. So I took the bride's earrings and I took the bells away from the background. I put her earrings in the background and I moved the bells into the foreground and I shot through them. Now I got it, so I tried multiple different things. This Isabel, that's a bell there together. I'm shooting straight through them, those air hearings in the background so it goes to show that you don't always nail it on the first try. Keep trying. Keep moving. Perception. Crazy packed dance floor. Not a lot of interesting light going on. Difficult light happening. This looks like every reception everywhere, and that's the exact same scenario, just with better lighting and better decisions. 28 millimeters 1/60 of a second to allow in some ambient light. I s 0 1600 again helping with my ambient light F four. So everything on him is in focus. Manual on camera. Flash on auto. A nice slow shutter speed brings in my ambient light. Yet it's still freezes my subjects because the flash is hitting them. And for something like this for Jewish weddings, for ahora, I'm gonna be flash on camera. Flash off camera is too hard for something like this. They're moving. They're spinning their jumping there, leaping my assistance crazily running around in the background. It's a war zone out there. It's craziness. I get wounded all the time. I'm gonna run out there with an on camera flash and go, But be mindful of your shutter speed. Be mindful of like let's say you look at this image and you see that it's blurry and there's some ghosting your shutter speeds Probably too low. You're picking up too much ambient light. You're not freezing your subject, So practice with it and you'll start finding your sweet spot in situations like this. Uh, yeah, I know. Sparkle Uggs. But it was a winter wedding. The bride was freezing. She needed something warm on her feet. You're not going to see her feet. Any house issues work wearing sparkly uggs so you can see the ring down here. It's on the first hug. You can see how close we are to the second Ugg. I've got a window at my back and here we go. The only thing that is wrong here, my ex. If data is wrong on this one right here I was using my D 1005 18th of a second. That's all right. F 11 not F 28 So ignore that tiny little typo. But everything else is the same. But after I shot that she had a bracelet and I thought, What if I put the bracelet in the same spot right there? The only thing that I changed was I changed it over to F five. It changed my I s O, but it allowed me to use the light and the the foreground background thing that it was sitting on in the same way. And then I just adjusted it and shot it at a different angle. So don't be afraid to play around just because, you know one shot that you think is super great, move it a little bit more. Maybe there's something greater that you haven't even done yet. Serious face ponytail, same sweater. It's just ridiculous again to show that when you're shooting a ring, you don't need a ton of space. You don't need an entire football field. You don't need a whole room. You don't even need the width of a kitchen table. You need six square inches. This is a sparkly table are sparkly pillow. I punched it to give it a little dip. I set the groom's ring in the depth, and there you go. Same principles and settings as you go along. It was that exposure Compensation Zero for that one. Yes, sir, Geoff, Cold flesh was asking, Do you ever use anything to secure the rings like museum wax when you think that, or is it always just balancing? Usually I just balance it. Guys. Rings are easier to balance because there guys rings. Um, every once in a while, I'll stand a woman's ring up directly on. And if I do that, I do have a little museum wax. But I'm talking like twice a year that I use the museum wax. It's really not all that often. So what if you don't have an assistant? What if you don't have a video light goose neck lamp on the side of the table? This is the Radisson Blue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Um, the window sucked. Pardon my language. It was a little too high. The light wasn't that great. I didn't really have anything to put the details on to get them close enough to the ring. And then I saw above the lamp that was on the side of the bed. There was a goose neck lamp below it, like a little reading lamp, like maybe about yea big. So I turn that light on. I aimed it directly at the bed, the bride's beautiful wedding out that was laid out on the bed, and I used it as my background, and I used it in several different ways. I used the light directly onto my subjects. You can see the light is coming straight onto the subjects. I started with the ring. I shot the bride's ring by itself, and then I lined the band's up and shot those together. If you look at the settings, there are no surprises here. It's the same types of setting the same Lynn same shutter speed, same F stop principles that I've been talking about the entire time. I just played with the scene. Ah, little bit to find slightly different compositional scenarios and to show it in a couple of different ways and setting up all of these different ring shots took me maybe all of three minutes. Grooms ring by itself. Brides Bangles stock together, and that's different. Why is it different? Instead of shooting with the light directly on the subject, I went around to the other side. Now the goose like goose neck lamp is behind the subject, and it's coming in at a different angle. But the principles of shooting are still the same. It's the same lens. I went to 32 because I only wanted a little bit in focus still on aperture priority, so you can see the way I shoot stays fairly universal, even as the situations change. And then I put her shoes in there. And when I put our shoes in there, I made a change 85 millimeter now at F 14 because I said, if I'm gonna use my 85 I love it at 14 No. Could I have shot the 105 millimeter? Macro it like 32 and maybe had it looked like this and sort of. But I really love that. 85 14 I liked the angle of you. I liked being at 85 millimeters for that, and I shot. I shot at once, and then I backed up just a little bit and let more of the frame in. It was a very subtle difference between something a little tighter and something a little looser. But when I loosened up, I feel like you have a little bit more that leads you into the image. And all of this is done with the goose neck lamp. I did shut off the rest of the lights in the room because otherwise the light from the other bedside tables and whatnot in the overhead lights would have been competing with that light source. It was also far enough away from the window. The window really wasn't helping me out at all. It was also overcast. So is distress your modifiers for your off camera flash? And they have to lots of questions about what you're using. Realism. Um, do you think you have a better example coming up? We're going talk about? I sort of think about it now because I only have two of them. It'll take me two seconds. The road Flash Bender The large sized road flash bender is on my flash when I shoot family formals. And otherwise I just used the little stuff in Omni Bounce that comes with the flash when you buy it. That's it. Super simple. That's it. Again, If if anyone wants to delve into any of my other classes, I do spin, especially 30 days. I spend on almost obscene amount of time off camera flash. You actually see my assistant, and I put it together, and this is how this goes on. This goes on. This goes on this and if anybody out there I do have ah photography education block. It's called the dynamic range I actually talk about This is how you put together an off camera flash, have a free YouTube video on This is how you put together an off camera flash and it's out there. One of the questions were getting from a few people Dana each June S and a few others. How long is Susan leave for shooting all the details? It looks like a lot of trial and error sometimes and give you run out of time to finish all the day s not a lot of trial and error. It's I want to be very clear there. There is not a lot of trial and error. I'm not setting up things and seeing if they work. Working through a scenario is different than trial and error. When you saw me putting the bells all out there, it took all of 30 seconds to do all of that. It was click and click and click. OK, I got it. The end details. to 10 minutes. That's it. If even that long, sometimes you just have to throw it and go. And I'd like to kind of pull back just a little bit as we're looking because we're going through a lot of different scenarios into different just situations. How do you analyze and determine whether a situation is something that you can work out a solution to or it's just not going to work. You need to move on and find somewhere else. Does it ever optional, right? Like if I try a scenario, I want to do a scenario with a ring and it doesn't work. I just pick up and go to another room. But if I'm going to do something like a family formal, I have to be dead on certain that I've made the right decision before I even get started. So some of it is I have to decide right now, and I have to decide right here. And some of it is I have to decide right now. But we could maybe move to another room. And some of it is, you know, like the ring shots. Just not working. Now. We'll do it at the reception. Um, yeah. Like for example, what I'm looking at right here. The bride getting ready. I had about 30 seconds to decide where I wanted her to get ready, and I had to just look around and be like here, right here and where maybe 14 years ago, that would have taken me 10 minutes to figure out. I can decide right now, but I still, you know, in my assistant who's out there watching. She still sees me get stuck on occasion. We're all just stand there and I'm like, I can't do anything here. And she's like, Okay, that's not like a non option. You can You can just, like, tap out for this when you have to come up with something and I'm like, Fine, so I'll figure something out. But for example, here, you know, I was looking for somewhere for the bride to get ready, and it was a small home. And she had all of her bridesmaids in her family getting ready with her, which is absolutely amazing. But it took up a lot of space, so I found a window, a very pretty window. But it was at the bottom of the stairs, and I was like, Do you mind getting ready in the bottom of the stairs? And she's like, Sure, so I tried one scenario right here I didn't love it Compositionally I tried something else compositionally where I used the blinds on the window upstairs to get to my subjects. And I didn't like it because the blinds were too distracting. And then I went with a nice, simple composition, and that ended up working best. Working my way through each of those three was a simple as here, here, here like that. There wasn't a heavy thought process in between them all and a couple of other. You know, I don't want to go too fast through these detail ones, but because we have done a lot of details bringing in elements that are important to the clients, I found my light. You can see where I am. You can see the light is coming through and hitting that his spinning thing. I'm not a knitter, so I don't know what to call it. But it was pretty. And the bride is a knitter. So I knew that when I was shooting her invitation Sweet. Not only was the light perfect and everything there worked really well, but propping them up on that would be meaningful to her because one of the things that she made for herself for her wedding day was her own little shrug, So I used it to shoot the invitations. And again, same principles. 85 millimeters at 45 I'm at 45 so that all of the data here is in focus. But when I put her belt on it and shot it, I went toe 14 instead. Different. Look, I could have shot the invited It wouldn't have all been in focus again. You've seen me do this before. Window macro set up. Set up what is blurry down here at the bottom. I was shooting through the lattice on the side of a glass tray. So it was one of those trays were like the sides raise up a little bit. Kind of like a little filigree. I used the filigree as a texture at the bottom. This exit data should look familiar. Same types of principles over and over again.