3 Simple Steps to Using Off-Camera Flash with Zach Gray

people love it candidates death watching life online hey I'm live hey welcome everybody we're live put your cell phones away put your attention right up here on me you guys going to learn a ton hopefully unless you already know more than I do which is very possible about Flash I'm gonna be teaching you guys something that I've been teaching I probably talked to about 50,000 photographers at this point through online camp classes about 1,300 people in person like coming up come over to my house in groups of 15 over the last eight years I've taught some of this content to you guys are gonna get some stuff that I haven't taught in a lot of places before as well which is exciting come on into the front row so my name is Zack Graham one half of Zach and Jodi the way better looking half and this is my family up here that's my wife Jodi my son Jackson who is the love of my life don't get me talking about him or I'll start crying while we're sitting up here but he's amazing he's four and a half my little daughter London rain who's the one at the curly hair no one in my family has curly hair and she has this insane bouffant and she always tells me to touch it and that it and that it feels squishy she's like feel my hair if you are spliffy my hair's puffy and then my newest one amber hope and she is a doll all my kids are the easiest kids of all time to raise they're super chill super amazing and I'm very very blessed to have this many kids this close together which has been super easy but it's great so that's my family but I want to tell you guys really quickly before we get started a little bit about my background where I've come from has anybody ever heard me teach or speak before nobody me no nobody awesome okay yeah this guy's you've heard this guy before hopefully hopefully we can stay on par with this guy what we'll coat each together the two of us so I'm from a small town in northern Minnesota called Keewatin of a people I grew up without a dad no education believe it or not the last time I've been to school is three weeks into the third grade didn't go to school growing up and some people say how was that possible I don't know I just experienced it but I grew up in a very depressed place we didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid we moved around a lot when I was a kid we used to open up the oven and turn on a fan sometimes they eat our house in the middle of northern Minnesota because we just didn't have money to pay the heat bill sometimes and there was a lot riding against me ever moving out of that because everybody I knew was sort of in that similar kind of situation and I felt like I was the lowest common denominator out of all of those people and thank goodness one day I used pasture for my church said Zach what are you doing here why are you working at a tie store for seven bucks an hour sellin ties and I said because I don't know what else to do nobody's given me any leadership nobody ever told me what I could do they said I believe you could do something more and it was the most amazing I was twenty-one years old I just got my GED and somebody believed in me and it was life-changing and ever since that day which radically changed my life an hour at lunch with a youth pastor that I didn't even know that well radically change the trajectory of my life and that put me on a path to go if I ever do anything that's noteworthy I hope that I can pass that on I can help someone else to achieve something to do something bigger than they thought they could do even if it's just a little bit if it's be a better dad or a better parent if I have a little bit of experience with that could I help somebody with that I don't have a lot I've just got a four year old but I do have experience and what it means to overcome loss my wife and I lost three children before these these three were born and so I know what that's like to keep believing that something can happen even when you've been told it may not even be possible to believe that you can start a business which I never thought I could to start a business and have $30,000 come in in six months and only make $4,000 profit and to try again even though you think you're a complete failure that's what happened to us in 2007 when we started our business to have my wife look at me and say I believe that we can do this again I believe you have the skills even though you don't have that edge I believe that you can read enough business books and that you can do this we can do something more and then the next year to to listen to people that were successful instead of listening to all the people I used to listen to which are the unsuccessful people or telling me what to do and it wasn't working I started listening to most successful people I could find and before I knew it two months in a 2008 relaunching our business we netted a hundred thousand dollar income and it blew my mind it opened up my world to thinking if I can do this what is what anything is possible and immediately I started to believe that what I wanted more than anything wasn't to make a lot of money or to to build a big house or to have fancy cars or any of that stuff because I had all that stuff and none of it made me happy I was worse off than when I started having all that stuff but what I wanted more than anything was to make my wife happy to be a great father to be a great husband to be a great friend to be vulnerable to be available to people around me and to pass that to the people that I get to see you guys are some of those people right now you guys listening online you guys sitting right here engage with me I love this and I hope that I more than anything teaching off camera flash it's great and I hope it enhances your photography it makes your clients happier I'm going to show you how that has worked for us it's it's it's helped our photography a lot but more than that to inspire you guys that whatever it is that you decide that you want to do as possible I don't care who hasn't done it or who is doing it now if we see I noticed for myself I grew up very poor and I used to say things like this all the time man I wish I was lucky like that guy I wish luck maybe one day and I realized that was such limiting beliefs in my mind if I thought maybe I could do something then maybe I would but if I said I haven't done it yet but I'm going to do that and I started recognizing that the people I was reading these business books by millionaires and billionaires and some of those successful people on the planet that were never used the kind of language I was using they started saying you know what when I do this I'm going to do that and as soon as I create this even if it fails I'm going to do it again and then I'm gonna be a success at this and those people did it and I sent out I started thinking and believing like that so I did that in business for a long time just in the last few years I've been focusing that kind of attitude on my personal life my relationships my friendships putting myself out there even what I'm doing with you guys being really really open is really hard for me it's the last thing I ever want to do this is not my nature but all that you say my wife and I are very fortunate to make our business very successful in wedding photography for about seven years and then we started transitioning that into education for photographers we started building an email list it's about 65,000 photographers that listen to us every week on the email list about 65,000 photographers on the Facebook page that we get to have conversations with thousands of people that have come to our events over the years we've been privileged to speak all over the world it's been an amazing journey and now we transitioned into how can we help you with your business so you'll hear about that a little bit the end I got a free giveaway for everybody but we create a piece of software that runs your entire business for you and it takes 30 minutes to get it working and it helps you convert more leads while your customers and do it without burning out in the process and that's what every photographer wants I want to do what I love without having to focus on the stuff that I hate in the business who and Ear wants to make a bunch of money in photography half of you okay the other half just loves photography that's totally cool too so just shoot and don't don't ask for money just do it for fun because you're gonna be way better off but if you get serious about business come find me and I'll help you I love I love business so that's what we're gonna talk about today is how do we use off-camera flash in an effective way and I was talking - tell me your name again Craig is that do I say right okay I was talking earlier and I said this is what I believe about flash and when it needs views it doesn't matter who you are what kind of photography you do whether it's weddings babies portraits photojournalism in the front row right here shout out no matter what it is we need to use flash when we need it because the image just can't do what this sees right what we see in our eye or when we want to create something that's it so we shot weddings for a long time I still shoot weddings here and there on occasion and when we shoot a wedding I go does the image that I'm about to shoot need to be better and can I do with flash its flash gonna make it better or am i shooting something that I just can't possibly capture well without flash like the reception some receptions you can very rarely some of them it's like a living nightmare trying to take a photo journalistic shot out of reception where it actually looks good and it's sharp and you can see what's happening so that's another time when we flash quite a bit so today I'm gonna talk with you guys a lot about that stuff I've got cool free giveaways for everybody as well I'm gonna give away a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff to people sitting here everybody here and online is gonna get something for free that's worth money which is awesome but anybody can go to this link bitly /zj flash guide about forty thousand photographers so far have downloaded this free guide this is going to be a recap of what I talked to you guys about today in a short little 10 page PDF and it's really cool it's how to start flashing your your clients the right way and it's basically my three-step system that I'm gonna talk to you guys about today and I'm not gonna hold anything back by the way sometimes you'll see educators nice to do this where I go yeah exactly like really where I go here's the you're the three keys to my system and I get key three go by my eCourse I'm not going to do that today I'm gonna show you guys exactly what to do to get the shots that you're looking for so don't worry about that because I'm not interested if you go by my flash course which I do have one but I don't care what I care about more is that you feel inspired and empowered to do what you want to do and I see actually our amazing model is here I did say her name right then I get her a yes I told everybody to remind me in case I forget I get into my wife calls it photo photos a core photo mode where I literally can't pay attention anything about how to make the shot look better and I forget everybody's names and my wife's memorized everybody's names from the whole bridal party and the whole wedding and she's caught and I'm like you on the right you don't look right you know okay so download the free flash guide and now let's talk about some before-and-after examples some demonstration of what flash can do for you I've had the privilege like I said to work with West got a lot so some of these images are from workshops over from real weddings and I'll say when and some are from demonstrations that I've done video shoots where to use particular piece of gear this is from a video shoot we were out at these amazing mountains in Colorado and we were because of the shooting schedule of the day we were there at high noon and anybody that she's a high noon goes man cameras don't work great for this expose for the highlights the shadows are super dark you can see in this shot it's the worst of both worlds because it's just a behind the scenes photo blown out highlights dark shadows and nothing looks that great but if we use off-camera flash the right way we can sort of create that into whatever we want it to look like it's amazing it's amazing what flash can do and it can look stunning and beautiful and a lot of times I feel like the push back up sometimes on flash on location is people saying my clients not going to feel natural in that moment well in my opinion the naturalness of that client is based on your relationship with them right it's not about what gear you're using and whether you're minimalist or you have a lot of gear like you saw in this shot it's about that connection with your customer or the connection with your subject if you're not a paid photographer either one it's fine but I've realized if you think back I don't know if we have a camera anybody got a twin reflex camera laying around probably not but back in the old days so I'm gonna grab my camera really quick the worst thing that ever happened in photography and canons not gonna love me for saying this is this how comfortable do you feel right now you're like holy cow get that out of my face right but back in the old days when they had twin reflex cameras it was like this yeah blah blah blah blah blah click totally you look at one of the best photographers of all time Richard Avedon right what did he do all the time he had a twin reflex he leaned on his camera with the click shutter release in his finger and he just had a conversation whether it was manipulative or not because he used to manipulate the daylights out of people to get emotion or if it was real it didn't matter but the point was is it was going this is what was going on and then he was capturing moments right beautiful sitting in front of a giant camera with one big huge flash in the 60s and he's leaning here having conversations with his clients amazing like oh so amazing so the challenge is always this right so how do we have that great conversation with our customer get them to feel relaxed I've notice if I'm not as close to people they feel relax in the beginning and then I can move closer as they trust me so that's something we do quite a bit the first shot we always do is with my 70 to 200 at 200 millimeters and I just have people walk whether it's flash or not just walk walk and talk my friend Mike Larsen needs to be the salt I me to walk up to the client he'd say hey we're just gonna start the portrait session this would usually be on the engagement shoot which is a great precursor to the wedding to see how things are gonna go they say I want you to do something real simple you guys good at walking yeah I made laughs okay just hold hands turn your shoulders towards each other and just walk walk towards me but what I want you to do and he would say this you'd say groom you know Bob I want you to turn to your bride-to-be and just tell tell her that you have a huge surprise for her and what's something that you love and she'll go shoes and okay you bought her her favorite pair of shoes but she doesn't know so just talk about that try to get her to guess what it is it's something they already have in common something she loves something he knows he's having fun with her and they walk and as they're walking they're smiling they're engaging he's not even in the picture he's like I don't even care if the photos look good all I care about is that they feel like photography is natural it feels good so all right this is not in any of my notes I'd normally never talked about this but I just wanted to say all that with flash okay let's get back to where we were what I also love about flash is you can be this is from a real wedding that my wife and I actually film the entire wedding of shooting it live which was crazy I don't recommend ever doing it but it was amazing and we worked with this couple this bride is actually my nanny to my kids and we love her we love her husband we've done a lot of stuff with them over the years and we said we'd love to photograph your wedding and film it if you'll let us and we they love the off-camera flash stuff because they just are really into it so this is literally just at the top of the hill by my house where their wedding was and it was amazing to be able to shoot this really stunning portrait this is in the middle of the afternoon right this is like two o'clock in the afternoon and we're able to shoot this stunning portrait using one off-camera flash similar to the one you're seeing right here today a little bit smaller version of it and create this outstanding portrait for them and now this is hanging up in their house which I love I love all my clients love a photograph and they want to put it up and there they happen to be really beautiful people so they're really like stoic look is like totally them to school what I also love about off-camera flash is I can go find a simple background that I think is interesting maybe it has some cool light on it but the ambient light for my subject the portrait light isn't good so it doesn't look good at all but I can bring in a flash and I can paint light in exactly where I want it to and make it look outstanding so I'm still using the light in the background but now I'm painting this beautiful light on to our Brides face that makes sense love it say that again that one was a just like this yeah and I'll show you guys how to take like even a big light and feather it and paint it in if you want to or blast it at them and light everything up a few if you so choose are you looking for a seat my dear there's one right there feel free to grab it no that's totally fine I'm happy there's a lot of people here this is great same thing out on location in the mountains shooting again can't control the time that we get to shoot all the time so we have really really brutal lighting but I want to say me you notice I'm using these quite a bit this is a rapid box from Westcott I love this because it opens and closes super fast that's why they call it rapid rapid box instead of having to put it all together it just pops open like an umbrella and pops close so it's very quick and easy to travel with so this is using the rapid box and a little strip bank in the background behind it was these beautiful mountains and the background looks great in high contrast if we can tone it down a little bit and control the highlights and this is what it looked like before and I was like this is not awesome can we make this look better and then I photographed this using those two lights and by the way I forgot to mention this 99.9% of my stuff has never seen the inside of Photoshop it's only lightroom and it's very minimal adjustments a little bit of retouching I'm not replacing backgrounds I'm not doing any weird color gradations or anything like that this is pretty much how I shoot it in the camera and that's kind of been a big thing for me as I don't want to photograph something and then have to spend hours upon hours working on it because I was a wedding photographer and when you deliver 700 final photos which brides want it's hard to do that - 700 photos I could do the entire wedding in about two and a half hours flat all the editing and thing and I can teach you how to do that to you it's another workshop same thing here taking a location that may not be incredible but if we add a little bit of light to it this one has too little speed lights in the background lighting up the top of that salt barn and then a flash on the front and then another flash on the back there's four lights on this to make this effect you have the little speed lights are just light line up this was late in the day the Sun was setting but incredible it seems complicated and hard but it's really not I'm gonna show you today how to do one light here right here in the studio and hopefully it looks awesome and then how to add two or three more lights to it make it super easy to do I'm all about simple and easy I like that same thing with the groom getting the groom to trust you and to love you because you made him look cool sometimes that's really important I remember there photographing a wedding one time and the groom refused to let me come and shoot any getting ready photos he didn't want any any I think it was just too intimate or too something he said nope I'll show up dressed we'll take a few shots and then I'm gonna go get married leave me alone he was very much that attitude which is not normally how we work with people and I remember he showed up we're at the location I'm waiting for him he got out of the car and he goes so are we gonna take a few photos or what and I was like what am I gonna have to do to make this guy trust me below am I gonna some I'm bantering with him I'm trying to chat with them he's sometimes people are just there headspace is so far somewhere else he's about to get married it's a big deal and I'm just like what am I gonna do so I'm like okay I'm gonna do a flash shot it was exactly like this 45 degree lighting which I love on man I'm gonna make him look masculine he was a very masculine like look like he drove a big pickup truck kind of guy you know I lean him up against the wall and I got down like this put my flash to the sidewalk yeah I got down to the side like this and I said just look look at me like you want to hurt me and he goes no problem I swear that's exactly what he said and I went click and I turned the camera around and he goes oh I look cool he thought he wasn't gonna look cool whatever that meant to him and he started laughing he let his guard down I shot a bunch of candids that the bride is gonna love it was amazing so flash can do that as well like it can get you out of a sticky situation as my point sometimes if there's great ambient light I use it right but you can also take that ambient light and create something like this just one flash off to camera left feather it off so I can capture everybody's faces correctly exposed they can do both they can go from this to this and I love that about flash as well for this you know this was a very important portrait abroad sorry the groom his best man and his brother it was very important for me to have this very cool photo of the three of them together he this was actually on his list he said I want a very stoic portrait of us looking like men it was whatever that meant you know okay we can also use off-camera flash to create really outrageous cool looking photos that are different atmospheric or straining short for what I sometimes call anti lighting right the opposite of correct lighting and I'll show you guys more of that coming up you can shoot the bride as well when we have these brutal high noon times you can see that's the same flashes you see right here the same modifier and create just really beautiful looking photos of the bride as long as we have that good connection we can get that that nice expression coming out of it she doesn't feel forced or awkward it can look fantastic same thing here you can actually make flash look more organic as well so you can have that beautiful light coming in from the background if we know how to blend that light together but then still put beautiful light on the front you can take locations like this I was here just a few weeks ago in New York I'm from Nashville by the way I was here just a few weeks ago and I was we were doing a video shoot for what Wescott and elinchrom showcasing some of these new lights and I was just walking around and I saw this they look great I was like that looks cool we put flash on you can see with me there it's terrible right if we put some flash on this this could look great so we set up the flash we put one flash as you can see in the background to sort of warm up the background and give it like a nice gelled color because there's an orange tungsten gel on it and then what we did was we photographed that in that simple location which is one light in the front one light in the back this is what it looked like with no flash on it and by the way the exact same retouching is on both of these photos you can see with beautiful soft light it fills in all my new flaws and it makes them she doesn't have a lot but it makes them look that much better and then here's one where we add it and I'll show you guys this coming up the highlighter and it wasn't this particular one but it's just a little reflector underneath to pop some light under the eyes so you can see it really well in their inner eyes right there okay and by the way for those of you watching online for those of you sitting here this is really cool the Wescott has teamed up with adorama and they're doing this amazing thing if you buy any other products right is that right Dave any product Dave any any Wescott product you will be entered into this drawing between February 23rd or now until May 23rd and one winner is going to win let me read this correctly two round-trip tickets to Nashville from anywhere in the United States which is an amazing place two nights in a hotel two days of meals and transportation and eight hour intensive workshop one-on-one with me and $1500 and Wescott free products so you could buy you know well it's the cheapest thing to have a reflector did they make keychains yeah I mean you could spend 30 or 40 bucks but go spend a thousand because their products are great and you can be entered to win this they just did one with another photographer and I guess it was really cool so you get to come hang out at my house we'll go shoot if you want to shoot if you want to talk business and blow your business up we can do that I've consulted a lot of photographers from zero to even the seven-figure mark if you want to get to anywhere in between I can help you do that I can point you in the right direction I'm been doing it for a long time this is really cool by the way if you want to enter just go to this link bitly /a win a day with Zack Wescott sent me another link and it was a hard one to remember so I created my own but go to that link bit dot Lee slash a win a day with Zack and we'll get to do this but you'll be the one shooting the whole time and I'll be looking over your shoulder or will look at your pricing structure and your website and your branding and marketing and will will work on it for the whole day it'll be and normally I charge I'd do these quite a bit I talks about $5,000 to do a one-on-one for eight hours so that's my normal rate and I do them quite often I have a couple of coaching clients right now that I'm working with but I'd love to do that for free with one of you guys and and help you do whatever it is you want to do business or photography everybody got the link sweet okay let's get into it right let's get rockin and rollin and as we go we're gonna bring Ashley up and back just to do some demonstrative stuff and then we'll have a specific time where we're gonna shoot a live demo we're gonna shoot it up to the screen so you can see what's happening in the camera as I shoot and if if what I tell you is true the first or second shot or third should be pretty darn close to money if if we follow my system correctly okay and that's the goal we don't want to try to I like having a great baseline this is exactly where I wanted to start from and then if you want to tweak and finesse from there you can instead of like starting somewhere and it's terrible and now we're trying to forgot to fix it I don't like that yeah exactly I'd like you front-row like feedback like this is great a lot of nodding and smiling awesome okay so key number one oh and by the way you know if you see a link pop-up that's because I'm giving you a guide to all the gear that I use or although something there's something free there so if you go to bit dot ly /zj gear guide you can get access I have a whole page built of all the equipment that I use with links to adorama of course to go by any of those products or check them out or find out more information but i have descriptions how I use them sometimes videos before and after examples of those things and then you can make a decision on that's right for you and your photography so key number one if you're taking notes and I see some of yours is awesome because you only retain 7% of what you hear if you write it down you'll retain closer to 20% which is great but key number one is the right light and a lot of people go if I'm doing flash what do I need and really my opinion on the right light is knowing what's out there and then what is it that I'm trying to accomplish so when I say the right light to me it's about what's right for you so we've got a photojournalist here who in here does likes to do portraits anybody shoot any Street approaches number of you big difference on what you might or might not need right in a studio setting I might need a 7-foot octave bank and a little snoot if I'm shooting photojournalism I might not need a speedlight with a little modifier on it when I happen to need a little extra light coming from camera right and that's it because you're a minimalist right so it's really important to figure out what is it that I need so a couple of pieces of gear that I've used a lot that you've seen a lot of the photos that I've been showing you this is a Westcott 24 by 32 softbox about 140 hundred 60 bucks depending on the promotion at the time this is a really good bulletproof simple tool it's about this big and it looks outstanding I use the Westcott rapid boxes a lot now these days these are a newer product from Westcott last few years and when I'm looking for when it comes to a softbox is quality write that down quality of light what that means is it doesn't mean the light is necessarily soft it means it's doing what it's supposed to do right so with the softbox the light should be coming out evenly so therefore it's soft because a large light source equals soft not diffusion diffusion has nothing to do with softness has to do with size the bigger the light the softer it is the softer the transition from high light to shadow if it's at the right distance so that's the goal softness with the softbox some soft boxes will specifically say if you read like the like the little details on it the fine print it'll say there's a half stop fall-off from Center to edge does that mean that means there's a hot spot in the center of some kind which means even though it looks this big it's actually about that big all right so that's what's key here and what I've found by using Westcott product for ten years is that the light comes out especially of these these are designed to come out very evenly they come out very soft the cool thing about these these boxes and I'll show you guys this really quick so if you look inside this and forgive me for stepping back out of the light here for a second so I can raise this up they have a couple of ways that they achieve this one is by diffusion rate diffusion is just kind of scatter the light and help it to come out eat more evenly out the front two layers of diffusion helps to do that better but what's really cool about the rapid box is one the design does that really well the way it's an octa Bank it helps the light to come out like this and wrap around your subject it forces more light out of the sides so it comes out more evenly a little bit less in the center if you use this cool thing which is called the deflector dish so this it basically turns it into a beauty dish so what it does is it instead of that direct light which is still only this big it's not much bigger than a speed light using this big powerful flash it comes out hits this and pushes the light around like this so there's a little bit of a dead spot here a little less light here a little more light here and it wraps around the face so it looks amazing right what's great about that is instead of the light coming out flat and hitting you here and then getting darker as it tapers back which can create a hot spot on the face if it's really close this helps wrap that light around your face so the times what I'll actually use something like this deflector dish is if I'm moving it really close and I'm doing like a beauty shot that's further away it's an added on item for like 20 or 30 bucks or something like that but if you're doing anything from this distance I don't use it because the light does come out beautifully evenly and if it's moved a little bit further away you don't have to worry about that tapering of the light so that's what's really powerful about this particular setup and like I said it's a rapid box so it's just like an umbrella there's a little magnet piece on the back you just go from and it pops close and it's you can be ready to rock go somewhere else with it I'm gonna close this up so it's not a big eyesore hopefully that's not totally in the way that will get the logo in there let's got it like that okay so what's the right light for you so here's an example of that light it's not a huge light this is really old this photo by the way is like nine years old so there's my wife shooting as you can see using an old-school like battery and Berger from we don't use this stuff anymore super heavy now you can get now this does the exact same thing it's like it's like a purse right yeah yeah yeah that's literally a battery from like a car battery it's crazy but here's the effect right that one little flash can create this beautiful light over our subject that's amazing okay now if you're on the other end of this minimalistic and you want soft light you can use something like the rapid box these come in twenty and twenty six inch sizes so this big in diameter very very minimalistic we use these a ton for reception lighting for low-light portraits indoor portraits that kind of stuff phenomenal for that so you can see here we're photographing a wedding the bride and groom decide to get married right as the Sun setting perfect the lights gonna be awesome guess what happens the whole weddings thirty minutes late go figure so now the video guy is off to the rut camera right here shooting his orange light up their nose and the background is getting epically dark and I'm like I can't photograph this but of course I'm thinking ahead and I'm going this might happen so I have my rapid box set up and two little speed lights in the background like this the shot you just saw was when my flash happened to not fire lucky shot and then I instead I was able to capture this so we even though it wasn't what I wanted which was that beautiful sunset romantic glow we got something that they loved and it was beautiful and I could shoot this all night even if the Sun was gone completely gone which happened later and still get beautiful shots and some of them have the lights in it like that so let me have the lights in it so that's preferential yeah those are just little speed lights in the background on the stands yep so key number two once you figure out what light you want you want harsh light you want soft light you want big lights you want small lights make sure they're good quality that's doing what you want them to do and go to my link that I sent you you're going to find a lot of options next is the right ratios of light because there is no right ratio when I say ratio I mean the flash are using and whatever else you're using so using a flash and maybe you're using other flashes or using the flash and you're mixing with ambient existing light the ratio of light that you choose to use is going to define your style you like natural and pretty and you just want a little kiss a flash to open up the eyes or do you want a ton of flash and a background really dark and it's edgy and you're shooting album covers and Rockstar photography or whatever that's totally up to you I'm gonna show you how to get those ratios a click of a button you're gonna love me for this but here's an example here's a shot and this is a series of images from the exact same wedding similar time of day so you can see this is what's called a three to one lighting ratio what you see here is the light that's on them is just a little bit brighter than the light that was already there so even though this is clearly a flash shot it's not create it could be a reflector right it doesn't look over the top flash heavy the background still looks pretty you still see that beautiful ambient light back there but what that means when I say three two one light is just a flash on them as twice as bright as the existing light that's it and we can get into ratios and I can get super nerdy and technical but that really doesn't help anybody if you really want to know I can answer any super dorky lighting tech Oh technique tech techie questions but just know the flash on them is twice as bright as the flash in the background very simple ratio and you can do the reverse of this you can have the ambient light be the dominating light source and just have a teeny bit of flash in there as well but I don't really shoot much of that so I don't have a lot of examples this on the other hand that you saw earlier this is called five to one lighting where the flash is now another stop brighter than the ambient light so that ambient light is two stops dark and what happens is they start to look like I inserted them on the background right starts to look a little fake I love this look this this is something I really love the trick with these is being careful where the fall-off of light is if there's a lot of light hitting the ground and you see that it looks like a lot of flash and if you don't like that you got to be careful for that so sometimes you have to feather the light or adjust the light so it doesn't happen I'll show you how that coming up but I love this look it's a different look it's more dramatic but it's very cool and then this this is called nine to one lighting so the ambient light is now three stops underexposed and the flash is filling in the difference and the light that you actually see coming in from camera right that looks like sunset is actually another flash because the Sun had already set so it would have just been really dark on this but I wanted to look like kind of mimic what the Sun would have looked like that was hitting the sky and hitting them at the same time now even though it's not hitting the trees in the background which kind of gives it away if you're real techy you would notice that but you see a little bit in the background so it looks like the Sun was kind of peeking through for a second and that's that's that effect so you can make these decisions do I want a teeny bit of flash do I want obvious flash - I want it dramatic or I do what do I want to hyper dramatic like this and anywhere in between all right we're all ready to key three this is where it gets easy and then I got a after this I'm going to show you guys this will we'll do an example of setting all this up with Ashley we won't shoot just yet I may take a few shots but we won't tether it I'll do that at the end and then I'm going to show you guys a bunch of cool tricks okay what if I want to do this or what if I want to do that what if I want to do this once you know the basics everything else gets super easy and there's a few seats for those of you in the back of you on this too here and there's one there if you want to come in don't be scared or they can pull seats from right there if somebody if Dave wants to grab some seats and let these guys hop in the back okay key number three the most important part is the right system so how do we make this just work every time so before we get into the system we want to talk about three elements like I've been mentioning already one is that quality of light what are you trying to replicate specular light daytime light at the right angle soft beautiful window light what are you trying to replicate what quality of light are you trying to emulate key number two is the right height people get confused about this a lot there's technical right and then there's I'm experimenting heights so an example of this would be if you have a softbox or a light source of any kind like this some people go where do I how high do I put this thing where should it go and the easiest thing to get it in the technically technically correct place is to take the center of the light source and put it just slightly about the center of the eyes because we want the shadows on the nose are really the tell-tale sign of correct lighting where they falling but when the light is just above the center of the eyes we get these shadows falling right into the lip correctly where they're supposed to be and then we can experiment from there what we don't want to do is have it too low and we're lighting up someone's chest and their face is dark or have it too low yeah question yeah the shadows part is that what you're saying yeah so if the light is in the correct place the shadows will fall down into the center of the lip correctly and I don't have examples of all this because we don't have my eighth hour of class that I do on this but there's lighting patterns called like butterfly lighting it looks like a little butterflies under the nose right or loop lighting where that light is looping off to one side or 45-degree lighting where as we move the light this way the shadow then connects on this side and if it connects through the lip doesn't look right if it connects sideways it looks like strange if the lights too low lights shooting up their face and we call that scary movie lighting right it can look cool if we have a lot of light up here and a little bit of light down here but if we shoot it from down here they're gonna look terrifying and if that's the goal maybe you're shooting Halloween photos and you want them to look like that that's when we break the rules but technical portrait lighting we want that shadow and in this range right and we do that by making sure the center of the light sources above the center of the ISO center of the eye right because we want that catch light just above the pupil right if you're using a small light source that means the light has to go higher you're using a large light source that light source would come down a little bit lower does that make sense well because a tiny tiny little light source the center of it is going to be here and it's gonna have that more chance to shoot across the center of the across the face like this if I have a light source this big some of the lights gonna be down here some of them here but the majority is going to be in this range so we're still going to get the shadows falling in the correct places that make sense versus where the Phils coming in does that make sense and I'll show you I will demonstrate this and I'll show you how incredible it's going to look just using this simple technique usually would I do a lot of if I'm standing right here to have an average medium size softbox I'll just raise it up and I'll get my eyelet line in line with my subject and I'll raise it up till the bottom of the box hits their chin and that's about money every time every single time if I'm at the same height and I get to the to that point it's gonna look phenomenal doesn't matter so if I was photographing you and I have my softbox right here I'd get down here height I'd raise it up to the bottom of it hit your chin and boom it would look perfect you don't need the model a and C outside if you're shooting on location turn a modeling light on and it's high noon you're not gonna see it anyway so that's useless exactly as long as that center of the light is above the center of the eyes slightly it's gonna be perfect so I don't even use modeling lights in the studio I never have you can and they're great because you can go oh look there's the lights perfect right right there exactly well you can turn on a modeling lamp on any of these lights and we'll just put on at like a constant light and then you can see what the lights actually doing as it's coming out but if you just use this technical way that I'm telling these scented lights are slightly by the Sun of the eyes it's perfect looks awesome I'll show you last one is direction okay what direction of light do we want the light to be coming in from now there's a lot of directions of light based on what you're trying to accomplish I'm going to talk about four of them really quick if you're taking notes write them down number one is glamor light so tell me your name and get my dear tell me your name again Angela and if Angela Ann was my model or my subject and I was photographing her and I want to do glamour lighting the lighting would be straight on right and I'd be right underneath my light glamour lighting or butterfly lighting because it creates a butterfly effect under the nose because the lights coming straight like this and it's training a little shadow like this the reason they call it glamor lighting back in the 20s is because they use it on glamour models super beautiful people it's very flat you can move it a little bit higher and it'll create some rounder features under the chin but it shows the entire face and the entire body if they're standing straight towards the camera so you have to keep in mind you want to have somebody with great skin probably pretty probably skinny because it's not gonna thin them as I'm gonna do them any favors if you know what I'm saying okay so keep glamour lighting for glamorous people a lot of the time then we can move the light about 30 to 35 degrees to one side and we'd get what we call loop lighting so if their face is still straight to the camera and move the flash this way now that shadow is going to loop off to the side this is great for just about anybody especially women because it creates a highlight on one side a shadow on the other and we can highlight and hide right we can make people look thinner by twenty to thirty percent depending on the ratio of light and it's phenomenal then we move into one of my favorites which is called 45-degree lighting we simply move the flash to 45 degrees they're still looking straight at me what this is going to do is it's going to highlight a smaller section of their face and body and the shadow on the far side as we move the light that shadow is gonna go like this it's gonna connect over here create a little diamond effect over this so the far I what's great about this is it looks masculine on man and it creates this smokey mysterious effect on women depending on the ratio have you heavy ratio five to one nine to one like I talked about earlier it's gonna look really dramatic if it's just three two one or fill light it's just gonna look Pleasant right the last one which is my favorite and I use on women all the time is called short lighting so this is one of the best lights to use on women hands down it's pretty much my go-to lighting so what short lighting is is if I have my and I'll demonstrate this with you know what let's bring Ashley up here real quick if you don't mind my dear big round of applause for Ashley everyone isn't she beautiful I only work with beautiful people so hey nice to meet you okay so if you don't mind standing just right here and turning towards everyone else so we'll demonstrate this again using a small light this could be like a speed light or just a small modifier the first one we mentioned was glamor light right straight on like this scent of the light source just above the Sun of the eyes can be any of these distances depending on the effect you're going for then we have loop lighting right like this and if we turn off all the lights in here I could show you the effect but for the purposes of streaming and the studio we can't do that 45-degree lighting the light would simply be here and it would create that diamond effect over this side and then the last one which is my favorite and that I'll use on Ashley even though she doesn't need it she's already skinny and pretty and beautiful is we keep the light similar to this effect 30 to 45 degrees off to one side but I have her turn her body that way lean on her back leg always typically other way perfect and then have return or face back to me what this does is notice from your guys's perspective we have a broad side of the face and a short side of the face that's what they call it technically least most well we just light the least side we'll have a little bit of light on the this side but most of the light is on this side hence the term short lighting the reason we turn the body away from the light is so that spin the other way for me turn towards me and then keep your face this way if I lit her this way and say she wasn't super thin or didn't have a small waist I would showcase the whole front of her body with the light if she turns away to do that again for me that turns her face back now I'm just lighting this part that the camera doesn't see as much and this if we're trying to minimize this is going to go into the shadows and it's going to take tons of size off of her and I'm gonna highlight the best feature right that's a photographer I never say oh you don't look good I'm gonna try to make you look better that's not that's not I'm trying to I'm trying to highlight the best part of you right so we light her like this most the lights gonna be here some of the light here some of the light here but most of it back here and now we have short lighting and I've got some examples coming up with short liner to show you but it's phenomenal thank you I'll bring you back in a minute that makes sense everybody so just Jerry keyonnah says this all the time body away face towards the light and then lean in a little you know it looks amazing okay so here's some examples so we've got a good quality light source this is a candid series of photographs at my wife Jody shot during a real wedding the bride came out of her bridal suite she had lost like fifty or sixty pounds for the wedding she was stoked she looked amazing she still had some of this going on in her from where she had because she had lost a lot of weight fast but she looked beautiful she's beautiful skin beautiful futures so we wanted to go how can we showcase the best parts of her the bride happened to walk out of the bridal suite was walking down these stairs and there was a window just like a softbox like this shooting light down as you can see right there and notice that lights coming down at a 45-degree angle that's the light does when you when he launched it off it comes down like that so as she started to step into the light we notice we have soft beautiful light but this is not a flattering photograph right you see the light on her face you see her arm see what's going on there not good she never saw this photo by the way she's maybe seen it now that I've been teaching about it for like five years then she takes another step and now we're kind of lighting her in the stomach chest area the lights getting a little better on her face but it's not perfect so we have a good quality light we have good direction actually even though her body's into the light her face is short lit right because we're lighting the least amount of her face and their shadows on the side that's closer to the camera but now we just need her to get into that premium spot now watch what happens when I go from this image to the next one when she goes into the Primo spot it trims her down look at her arm she happened to just move her arm back candidly if we were posing her we would have done that on purpose move it out of the light source so it doesn't show right that extra stuff that was going on it's hiding all of that stuff and all of a sudden she looks stunningly beautiful this is this is how we saw her she looks slim she looks trimmed it's the right angle and we photographed her most of the day like this as much as we possibly could and she just was stoked she was one of those Brides who said I know you guys trying to sell albums everybody I'm not buying one I said okay I'm gonna build you one anyway you're gonna buy it she was like we'll see so she came over to the preview session I built her like a 40 page album she bought it that day but it was because of this it's because we knew how to do this really well okay we're getting in the system in a second so now we got the quality the height the direction we got that in our heads how am i doing on time here sekonic light meter is my best friend with off-camera flash yes you can use e TTL and TTL yes you can use high-speed sync I'm still a little old school and I like consistency there's some flashes out there that can give that to me and there's some that aren't and I'm not going to just say hey buy this one which costs $2,000 and then you can do what I'm going to show you I want to show you what anybody can do if you never use the meter they're very simple you just need to know what your metering and that's the metering mode which is are you meeting ambient or flash and we're gonna be metering flash since we're using flash we set that to flash next is shutter speed just like your camera 125 means 1 125th of a second simple right this is the f-stop the flash will tell you how bright your light is based on the other two readings the ISO reading it's going to tell you how how much flash is coming out they're reading this one says five point six three and some of you go my camera only says five point six you can change that setting in the meter itself so it just says five point six this is reading intense instead of thirds like a lot of us have our camera set up too then the last one is the ISO we're gonna set this manually and it's so easy it's gonna blow your mind what this is gonna do the last one this is radical like when I found this out years ago this changed the pace at which I was able to photograph on location stuff and what this is is it's called the flat and I keep looking over here which I probably shouldn't be maybe I should be looking that way this is the flash percentage what this does is anytime you take a reading say you're outside and this is for outdoor on location right you're outside you take a flat you put the flash up the right height you got a great quality light the right height the right direction for your subject now you want to blend it with the ambient light and you go this is where everybody gets tripped up because I got to do math take an ambient light exposure it's 2.8 at ISO 400 at f56 at 1/100 of a second and now I need my flash to do what again it gets confusing right it gets confusing even for people that are really good at it takes time so we want as a faster way to figure it out or to get close and then modify from there so what this does is you put it on flash mode you take a reading flash goes off and the meter reads the ambient and the flash and tells you the difference the ratio it's amazing when it says 50% of saying 50% flash 50% ambient it's an equal mix yeah yeah a great question so the question from the back was if you have your Flash setup and it says 7.1 or 5.6 which one is more flash power is that correct is that what you asked so 5.6 would be less flash power 7.1 would mean you'd have to close down your aperture down to 7.1 to let less light in because more lights coming out does that make sense okay cool so what you need to know with ratios are just three of them really quick the ones I showed you earlier 60% 70% 80% that's three two one five two one nine one if you want minimalist flash just a little bit of flash 30% or 40% anywhere in there what that means is if it if this goes from 50 to 60 so if it said 50 and I wanted to say 60 I just turned my flash up twice as bright it would say 60 on the next one and now I would know I'm 60% flash 40% ambient or my flashes twice as bright as the am you every time every 10% is one stop of power twice as much or half as much make sense very simple so if you're like I'm dramatic I like drama go to 70 or 80% every time power that flash up or down until it reads 80% or 70% whatever it says on that thing on the meter put it in your camera take a picture and it'll look epic every time it's just a minute just reading the light and the big difference between this and what's in your camera is your camera has what's called a reflective light meter it means it can only read light bouncing off of something it doesn't read actual light an incident light meter which I happen to have of course this reads actual light it reads the light coming out of there and hitting this so it's hyper accurate and it works like magic every time you're like I don't want another piece of equipment this will save you tons of time it's amazing okay so here we go here's the process this seems like a lot of stuff it's not it's stuff we've already talked about so first pick the lighting pattern what's gonna work best for my client set up your strobe meaning the height the direction all that stuff right now set the meter ISO to 1/100 of a second every time put the ISO on your meter to 1/100 I don't know why it doesn't say that on here it's supposed to say that fixed it sorry set your meter ISO to 100 which is your best quality setting if you're a Nikon shooter that's probably 200 because that's their base ISO set up to 200 we want to talk about bass is OS for a while we can but we don't have time set the shutter speed on your meter to 100 and don't worry about why I'm gonna show you why in a second they take a meter reading so if I turn my meter on at any time it's always 100 a hundred right this is for manual flash this is not for auto flash or TTL any of that stuff then you just check the percentage on the meter where do I put the flash right on my subjects chin right right where I'm trying to meet a light from point it right towards your camera or towards the flash that's totally up to you if my flash is really dramatic all pointed towards the flash if it's not so dramatic all pointed towards the camera okay now power your strobe up or down until you get to the desired ratio 30 40 percent or 60 80 90 whatever you like whatever is your thing okay then set your camera to that reading take awesome photos literally it's that easy I'm telling you now this is a cool thing you can now adjust your shutter speed this is why we set the shutter speed to a hundred to a preference of ratio and you don't have to worry about like high-speed saying settings and any of that crazy stuff this is the easiest way to do it this is what I mean here's an example the shutter speed does not affect the flash exposure as long as you don't go too fast on a manual flash which means your shutter went so fast it can't see the flash coming out on Canon that's usually around two hundredth of a second on Nikon 250th as long as you're not hitting that you can do a lot of adjustment right on the fly in the camera to make the background change and this is really cool and that's why we set the shutter speed to 100 because now we have the ability to go up in speed or down in speed if you started up the highest sync speed if you wanted a darker background you'd have to change everything let's start over so here's an example all these are shot at ISO 54.5 this is at sixtieth of a second 1/100 of a second and 1/2 hundredths of a second see the background see all the differences you can do you can slow the shutter speed down and make it less dramatic you can speed it up and make it more dramatic but the flash exposure stays the same on the face the shadows get darker but the brightness of the flash stays the same that makes sense very cool place the meter there right right there on that part of the face okay now you guys are going to see a quick video of me doing this in real time so you can see how fast it is can you show a video here go oh hang on hang on let's try that again I think this video takes a second to start there we go so this is me shooting a real wedding and photographing in real time I went up took a quick meter reading I got it to 60 70 % because they like drama these guys are more dramatic pull back photograph my first image check the ratio I made a quick adjustment sped up my shutter speed for a little more drama and then I shot the next image yeah I'll talk about that as well and that's exactly what came out of my camera right there that's simple right height right modifier right angle slightly off to camera left/right ratio a little bit of drama boom that fast and now that I've got it set as long as my flash to subject ratio stays the same I can go shoot anywhere as long as the ambient light doesn't change but if it does I can just adjust my shutter speed to control it very cool any questions about that yes yes yeah you're exactly right so it goes both ways so we sent it to a hundredth of a second so the question was the what what what I'm saying about ambient light and the shutter effect right so if you're at a hundredth of a second and you take a shot and you go man this is cool but I don't want as much drama a lot less contrast slow the shutter speed down yeah you're exactly correct you're gonna absorb more ambient light twice as much as if you go from say 100 250th of a second and you're gonna have less of a ratio so yes more light will come into camera if you want the more drama the background to be darker you could go from 100 to 200 speed it up and then create more contrast more darkness in the background yes make sense cool all right so now we're gonna talk about some studio lighting techniques and then we're gonna do a demo okay so a couple of cool things I'm gonna I'm gonna speed this up a little bit but you guys can all get a copy of my slides if you want them as well so one light source in the studio this is just like shooting right here which we're gonna do we don't have an outdoor studio to shoot in today so we're gonna I'm going to talk through this to show you how to apply the same principles in the studio and add more lights if you so choose and the one benefit is we have to deal with the ambient light we just have to deal with the flash itself which is actually easier so one light source what can it do if we move our flash closer to the background we get the effect on the left if we move it further away from a background we get the effect on the right very simple or you can feather the light off to the side what I love about basic backgrounds like this is you can create a lot of different effects on one color just by simply adding light to the background or moving your subject away from the background and not having as much light hitting it or by adding different color gels and stuff that I'll show you guys how I do in a minute but a lot of different effects and looks that you can do from one simple technique just moving them away from the background yeah the first one the subject is closed they're both lit identically but the one on the left the subject is closer to the background so lights bouncing off the white background and bouncing light everywhere it looks brighter and more Airy then I moved her away from the background by five steps and then we got that effect I could have also just feathered my light off which I'll talk about that coming up how to do that yeah yeah another question in the background yeah cuz she was standing on a white floor on when she's close to the background if the floor came out it was white that's when the light came out yeah so when the light came out it changed all of the attributes of the entire image so depending on what's around you too like you could have a white wall over here I'm trying to get a dramatic shot when the flash comes and hit that wall it creates all this fill lights right so you have to watch out for that stuff too this is tricky a lot of photographers struggle with this if your studio photographer and you're trying to figure out if I have somebody wearing white and I want a white background how do I get them this be separate right this is really really hard to do for a lot of people but I learned this from my amazing photographer in California named Jerry Avedon who shoots like diesel campaigns and amazing stuff he says this is very actually quite simple you need a lot of light on your background so it's even notice I got that big umbrella lighting the background that's it looks like it's closer but it's pretty far away from her an actual shot then you light your subject however you would like and all you have to do is whatever light is hitting your subject so say in this case we're at ISO 100 one hundredth of a second and the light comes out of the front light and it's at f11 when I turn on the background light and light hits the background and evenly lights it and then it bounces light back towards the camera the light hitting her in the back of her back just needs to be one stop darker than the light on the front and you get perfect separation so f11 on the front f8 on the back which is exactly how I did this shot and you get perfect separation so you see pure white background and notice she's wearing white but it's not blending into the background so white on white now depending on the screen you're looking at it could look that way but trust me and on a calibrated monitor it does not look that yeah so I would meet her her front where support I put my meter so I me to the light hitting on the front if it says apt 11 I put the meter right here on her back meter the light bouncing off the background and hitting her if that's at f8 that means we have perfect separation between the two and the background will always be pure white every time now we just turn up the background light so it bounces off and hits her at more or less light until we get to that one stop separation perfect every time so now how do we add more lights to create crazy cool photographs with all this crazy stuff now that we've got the basics down you got the front light on the right angle of light the right power of light how to do it now we can do all kinds of cool stuff with multi light techniques so when you're shooting with more than one light in the studio so say we have a main light and a fill light to fill in the shadows because now we don't have ambient light to fill in the shadows for us when you have to use another flash to do that say we want a light way over here we have a light over here filling the shadows the key with this is we have to meter the fill light first because if I turn on the main light and it's at f11 and I want this one to be a little bit darker at f/8 how do I know what's at f/8 can't so you meter that fill light first to f/8 then we add the main light until we get to epaulette that's that's the best way to do so we meet of that key light to one stop writer if you're doing say three to one lighting or you could have the fill light be at f56 and this could done meter this up to f11 and then you have a to stop ratio between the two if you want more drama I know some of you are nodding your heads because you're very dramatic that's cool and then we meter our background lights after that to whatever you want but I prefer them to be one to two stops darker than the main light there's a reason for that because when light comes in from the background and hit someone and bounces into the camera it's perceived to be much brighter than it is so if your front lights always say f11 and your background light was hitting your subject right here at f11 this would look blown out it would look really overexposed so we want to turn it down and make it way more subtle so here's an example of that this looks crazy right here Mike oh my gosh look at all this crazy stuff going on just like here I've got a seamless background I've got a light on the front I've got two lights in the back just pointing at the back of my subjects at 45-degree angles I put a black negative fill on the left because a lot of light was bouncing and I wanted drama in the shadows because these guys wanted an album II looking shot that's all that's going on here very simple and then we just added a light to the background that one on the bottom right there so the front lights at f11 the background lights are at f56 they have orange chunks and gels on them and then we just have that front light kicking in that cool dramatic light to the side and here's what it looks like when I shot it in the studio aka my garage right at this time this is shot many years ago and then I inserted the background from a Photoshop file which is really easy to do and we get this so you get this cool drama the reason I add those that orange tungsten gel in the background because it matches what's that fiery look so even though it looks like a flash shot looks like I created it it has a little bit of more of that ambient for that natural feel to maybe maybe he shot it on location maybe he didn't you don't know and I could have shot her on location now you can take that technique anywhere so look at this crazy location with these weird you can see right through those gold things in the background but if I just overpower the ambient light enough add that front light those two kicker lights just like I said this is the first test shot I took of this subject right there it looks like we're sitting in a studio but we're in an office space you know looks rad reflectors and grids so what do we do with these bad boy so you can see you've got a typical flash right like this and I'll show you this really quick this is what the flash actually is just this tiny little bulb right this is a reflector dish a little five inch reflector dish you put that on and control the light a little bit but it comes out pretty much everywhere still and the grids are great for just controlling that spill of light so they come in two degrees this is a twenty degree grid I use these a lot which just means the light's going to come out at a 20 degree angle forty would be a little more sixty be a little more 20s real tight pattern of light this is great for background like some photographers use these that's front light and they look amazing but you got to have people like epic skin and be ready for a lot of retouching which it's not my thing if you want to follow something that does that epically well Lindsay Adler is God at this like she uses these little snoots to paint a little piece of light right here that blue fill light that's the risk ridiculous she's amazing but I'm sure the post-production is not fun all that stuff but this is the effect that you can get you can get this beautiful light on the front and I notice that sliver of pain and light down fetching him out in the background this is shot my garage on the same background you saw earlier sitting on my motorcycle and I wanted something that just painted light in little spots and looked you know James Dean style right same thing here for a wedding photograph light on the front but a little bit of kicker light on that background a dreary nasty kind of day it was like raining and didn't look good but if we added some cool light we could just use the background as a backdrop instead so that's what we did and you can see here is the behind the scenes and you don't have to use flash as that big by the way you can use you can use a speed light to do this you know what's a modifier this big a little teeny rapid box and they look pretty similar I just love big lights because it makes me not have to try as hard the bigger the light the less good above photographer you probably are just kidding okay so a grid technique what do we put the grids if this is a background light where we gonna put this bad boy let me throw this exactly in terms of the subject so hitting your subject where should it be pretty much always so if I have a if I have a kick your light and I'll bring this out here so you guys can see and I was photographing myself one the height usually I like it to mimic whatever's going on in the sky so if I have Sun kind of back there or High Noon I kind of want to coming in from a higher angle I don't like them really low in the studio that can look cool if they're cascading across a bit but I like them high and angled down at a 45 degree angle and then hitting me at a 45 degree angle from my back that makes sense like this if I put them over here what happens is the light comes in and ice the light strikes the front of my nose and it just creates this nasty spot always even if the lights are really tapered down I don't like that I prefer like this alright keep it from hitting the face right keep it back here yeah so as long as they're just moved out slightly and they got the grin on them you won't get any flair coming into the lens if you bear ball these and don't have the grid in there you have the potential for flare so you can move them a little further away if that's a problem you use a hood on your camera that will help it's a high tangle and then the power just remember subtle two stops one and a half to two stops lower than your main light is a good place to start and it looks great fill light like we mentioned having a filling the studio's can be critical because then you can do these really dramatic light patterns you can put light in this really crazy angle so it just looks dramatic but then it doesn't look like there's no light on them at all so you can bring a fill light in and fill in those shadows and still have this bit of drama going on as you can see so you've got like this the light technically is way too high but it looks cool on these guys who are you know we're doing an album shoot here and then we've got that fill light filling in those shadows so it doesn't look overly dramatic and you could of course can adjust those ratios based on your preferences so feathering for softness and control this is really cool so you can do two things with feathering one is you can light a whole bunch of people evenly with one light without having to move it further away because everybody remember this my friend whose name I forget says this all the time light and close gets dark quick the gym Schmelzer writes dad stuffs it says it ooh and what that means is that's the inverse-square law if I move a light really close to you it's gonna be bigger and softer but it's gonna get dark really fast that's like the bride holding her flowers leaning into the window and the windows right here it's like blown out perfectly exposed flowers and pitch black right here you're like what's going on it's because the light is getting dark really fast every time you double the distance from a light source it gets four times darker so if I have four people lined up and I want to photograph them all from the side so I get some nice high light and shadows how would i light them all evenly without moving my lights super far back and running out of power well I just have to feather it right I just turn it so what you do if you're shooting a group of people like this you point the center of the Saab two-thirds of the way through the group so if I was photographing you guys up front I and my light was over to this side I would point it two-thirds of the way through you you can take a quick meter eating and check does it all say the same reading or pretty close they're ready to rock and this is the effect so this has actually done the light notice the lights very close it's very soft but everybody's evenly lit so we did that because the flash was and when they point on this side the flash was over to this side but it was pointing right here so this girl the flash wasn't even pointing at her like it from her perspective she just saw the edge of the light source because we needed less light to hit her because she's closer to the light source that makes sense and it creates this amazing effect so powerful if you're in a studio photographer you have a small space like we're in today feathering your light between two or three subjects can be the difference between crappy studio photos and epic studio photos huge difference you can also feather it for softness so this is a shot that we did with Westcott where I said I want to create a really soft beautiful subtle image how do we do that so here's a quick short video showing you guys how that works and I think this is a double click one yes so there's some talking on this but don't worry about it maybe going out to the the World Wide Web on Facebook here but essentially what you're seeing here is I'm taking the light that we're using this giant Zeppelin in the studio and we're gonna angle it we're doing glamor light but we're gonna angle it forward and then move it away from her like this so just the edge of the light is hitting her not the direct light right the indirect light what that does and you'll see it here in a second so there it is and then we did some with the fill we did some without the film so it looks like a crazy angle like how you gonna get a shot that actually works doing that but what that does is if we were using it on the side we would have feathered it like this a way to just catch the edge light I'll show you guys that coming up if you're doing it glamour lit we turn it this way to do the same effect and it just catches the edge of light it's tricky to do with glamor light because you have to have it on a boom you have to angle it forward it's a little bit tricky but it can create this amazing effect now in these shots it looks like the front of her face is overexposed it's not on my screen trust me but it looks it looks amazing it's a great technique here's some other effects doing that the lights tabletop and this is for drama it's not for pretty light in the eyes it's just for cool dramatic effect and there you can kind of see the background of what I'm doing a little cork board on the floor and a fill in a little bit of light yeah we're gonna bring Ashley and shortly here so large lights what can we do with large light sources here's the Wescott parabolic I use this quite a bit when I want something incredible looking like insane looking but I got to move the light away so I need bigger light if I move it further away so here's a shot we did out in Vegas in the desert we wanted this really beautiful painted on light effect at high noon like when the Sun was just blaring as you can see and this is the effect that we were able to get from that flip that one light it's beautiful that's sunlight hitting her on camera left and it's also short little Sun short lighting her and I feathered it so I feathered it off to the side like this to just let the edge of the light catcher the problem with feathering is you lose a lot of power because I'm not pointing it at my subject I'm kind of pointing it that way and so you need more power to do the same effect I think this is a video but we're not gonna don't need to show you this this is a actually no I'm not I'm not going to show you this particular one because we're just gonna I don't want to run out of time but this is using another large light source when I'm shooting multiple subjects and I want the light to look painted on so if I'm doing a studio shot style shot outside or an album cover and I want just insane light this is using the Zeppelin this gigantic light it's huge I want a big big big light source like that to be able to create the shot and here's that effect of that huge light up close it just looks amazing looks outstanding there oh there it is in the background so you can see the size of that light source a little bit of fill light and it looks looks really really cool same thing just more demonstration than just some big lights and what they can do they just have this really great effect of painting light on okay couple more things indirect light so if you want indirect light beauty dish is the way to go where it's gonna create that dead spot in the center beauty dishes are great cruising they create this amazing specularity like this kind of like I just like to think it was like starlight on your face kind of just creates all this like texture to someone especially a silver beauty dish so I'll use this on men white on women silver on men and it creates this effect that's sort of grisly chiseled look to their face and because this is such a tight spot of light if you put a grin on it I have a 20 degree grid over the front of it it just pops light and literally it was like just outside of the camera it was barely barely away from his face to create that hyper drama on his face remember if you move it in close to get start quick and we get this amazing effect on their face so if this is the kind of style you want beauty dish might be your best friend and they're also great if you shoot in windy places so people that like shooting Hawaii they're like I can't use a softbox it's like you know blowing in the wind all the time get a beauty dish they perform much better that way that one was like straight to the side just like this I kind of broke the rules a bit shot it right across his face for dramatic purposes clamshell lighting this is cool I'm going to show you guys this in a second here with Ashley clamshell lighting is where we have a light coming in from the top and we bounce some light in from the bottom and it creates a very glamorous on the face and it just looks really pretty yeah fills in these shadows down their looks and it makes that cool effect in the eyes and this bad boy when I'm going to show you this in a minute this does it automatically in the perfect placement and it's really rad it creates that that amazing effect in the eye light replacement this is very cool sometimes I'll take a speedlight like I found this cool prop and I said this would be great to have a light in here but it didn't actually work so I rolled it in we had light in the background this is just a rapid box and a speed light sitting up there so simple little set up putting some light on her face and then I stuck a speed light in there with an orange gel on it and just fired it off triggered it and we get this effect Boop so it looks like this cool movie lights on her but it's fake you know 100% fake but it looks really cool looks glamorous and beautiful so I just metered the light coming out of it on her to make sure was a stop below the main light BAM that's it oh yeah yeah well I kind of hit it back there so in case you could see some of it but it was so bright when it came out you wouldn't have seen it anyway and it totally hit us I didn't have to do any trickery but yeah this is cool too this is something I learned from an amazing photographer in Nashville named Jeremy Cowart this is called ground glass photography this is where you take some other piece of optics and instead of shooting your subject with your camera you take your camera or you take this other camera like a old twin went lens reflex you pointed out your subject focus it and then you take a macro lens and shoot into that instead and it creates a really cool effect now I have a video on this but I'm not gonna show you the whole video because we're running a little short on time but there you can sort of see I'll just show this to you briefly you see I've got the twin this is a handmade one it's a little lens element on the front a focus screen inside a cardboard box that's all this is so you push it in and out of the cardboard box to focus it and then I put my macaron I shoot it in the back light my subject on the front and then whatever's coming through is what you end up seeing which is this exactly it's really cool so depending on what optics you're pointing into it can have all kinds of crazy effects I know people that like you know do a long shutter speed and run a light in front of the lens after the shots been taken or Jeremy coward shoots lasers onto the back of his and creates these wild effects or has his subjects shoot lasers back at it it's crazy and it can also create you know this kind of effect this is the inside of the camera and the light coming into it that little piece of cardboard and you can see like the dirty little elements on the lens and how it looks like there's fingerprints on it's just really wild looking so this is if you want to get really outside the box do something really different it's fun even though even if your clients don't love it it keeps your creative juices flowing it makes you feel good that's a photographer doing something different I like to show my lights in some shots sometimes I'll take a big light and just use it as my backdrop it looks cool like there's all kinds of crazy stuff you can do or put your lights in the shot like it can look really really dramatic you can create haze and atmosphere I recommend doing this as often as possible because it creates more texture so smoke machines or smoke bombs or all kinds of different stuff anything in the shop to create some atmosphere I really really love here's an example of just using a piece of frosted glass and having my subjects move towards it to create a different looking shot it's not a beautiful portrait it's just different and sometimes people love this stuff looks great as an album cover or in this case we're standing outside and there's a lot of dust and dirt on the ground so I had my assistant grab a handful and with a shovel and just throw it in the air so it look like it looks like something cool is happening when it when nothing cool is happening you know so you can do all kinds of cool stuff with that a couple other things gels I love using gels I'm going to show you a quick example here this would be the last video that I show you guys and then we'll get into some demonstration with that last bit of time we have so this is a video I shot just a few weeks ago here in New York and we went out with a friend of mine Jenn and we're doing all the same techniques I showed you I underexpose the background and this two stops because I like the light coming down the stairs and I wanted to add to that and create something cool so it's really easy to do in my head I went that light traping down the steps looks cool that's dark in the background so when I add the light you can see it right we have to have enough contrast I feathered off the light on the front turn up the background light until it looked cool and then we shot those photographs and here you can see there's the effect beautiful two simple lights one of the Norns geologists for a little atmosphere feeling to it what's that yeah that's that's exactly where it is no not not far from here very cool effect there you can see the before and after when there's no light on it and what it was doing and then when I added that little bit of subtleness to it and how much cooler it looks same thing here now this is just taking the light and pointing it at the background so instead I'm pointing it here and making that two stops underexposed instead of the back of my subject so I put a light on the front and then I just pointed as you can see that orange circle of light in the background is the same light just pointing at the background same thing here there's that texture and color instead of this being silver is now that warm orange color because I just shot a light at it and it's very cool love love the look on her face and it's behind the same shot this is the same thing here but it was like a tight close quarters so we just boomed up the light and shot it in the background it's on a grid so it wouldn't hit her in the top of the head and then we're able to create that cool dramatic shot by painting that light into the background very easy to do this is one of my favorites Wescott has this hanging up at their offices I love this this was shot in a bathroom hallway in Vegas we were walking through the hallway and I said they have this amazing wood lined hallway and I was like if we put a strobe back here and put it close enough to where you see the cut-off of light like that it's gonna create a black backdrop for her orange light shooting up on the sides and we just put one flash on the front small flash this is just a medium sized softbox and boom we shot it with really really cool ND filters some people asked me about this already in the front I use what's called the Lea filter system this is a piece of it you just buy this little piece for the front of your lens and then there's a bracket that just clamps on the front and all this does I won't use this today but all this does is allows you to buy a filter an ND filter which is like putting sunglasses on your camera so if I go on it's really bright and I have to shoot it up 16 and I don't want my shots at f-16 I want to Matt say f/4 I can just put sunglasses on my camera and then just open up my f-stop and the image will look exactly the same just with a wider aperture you can also do this with high-speed sync so you can you can go that route if you have a flash that can do high-speed sync that's one of the ones that I have here today this one does high-speed sync the other one doesn't I forgot why this images here oh this is this is using an ND filter so normally this shot would have been at like f/8 or f/11 and I shot it at 2.8 with my ND filter on does that make sense everybody I've got videos on west Scott University where you can watch me use an ND filter this also has an ND filter on it you notice they image on the left and they image on the right got that shallow depth-of-field this also has an ND filter on it for that gosh blurred background effect so does this all these have ND filters on them I use it quite often because I like shooting at a wider aperture with flash double exposures as cool stuff you can do this most cameras do this in the camera all you have to do is just make sure you have dramatic lighting where you have shadow and then put your second subject in there you can actually actually have a blog post on Zach and Jodi comm showing exactly how I created this but Canon 5d 3 has a double exposure mode you take one put it on a light on a make sure you put it on a stand take the first shot then line up your subject you can see the shots in overlay mode where you can see the first shot you can put your second these are actually twins these are two brothers that are identical twins and I shot the first one once I got that shot looking cool with all that dead space in the background of the all those shadows that I moved the second brother into the opening and I photographed him one guy was really close one guy was really far away and you can create a double exposure just like that very simple and easy same thing here where I had him take one shot with his face to the right one with his face to the left but don't move his body make sure your camera is on a camera stand or a camera tripod which I never used so I don't remember the name of it not a tripod and then you can create like just wild looking photographs that look like weird you know and I really loved it and then anti lighting I do this quite a bit where I'm not actually intentionally doing portrait lighting on the face I photograph my friend and he said I don't want any portraits I just want something cool for my website he's a filmmaker and he didn't want pretty portraits he just wanted anti portraits I said okay so we shot this kind of stuff for him same thing here here's an example of using hard light and soft light as a fill in the wrong position down low so it's weird dramatic but cool it's just different you know you can do a lot of different stuff this is literally using this right here as my main light with there's a grid on it I believe yeah cuz it's not hitting the background it's just hitting him so it's a perfect grid in and then light mimicking this is really cool I shot this in New York a couple years ago where it was a cloudy day we photographed her it looked okay but I said man imagine that the Sun was coming through so I had my assistant run back there with a boom and shoot an orange gel through the background and I said put it up high no so it looks like the Sun you can actually see him in the shot I never even took him out of the shot cuz most people don't notice it but he's standing right there I I can take that out pretty easy but yeah it's a great way to mimic the Sun you saw that other shot where the Sun was already set but we put an orange gel and to make it look like the Sun was still in the shot easy to do environmental lighting I do this a ton so I love this angle we were shooting a real wedding here at the Boston Public Library I think this is in Boston or this isn't st. Louis that forget but I love this angle this is the only place you could see this angle but there was all this window light coming in from the side I made it flat I wanted light coming in from this side back here not over here so he put a flash on this side a rapid box a speed light in the background and just light this up and I overpowered the ambient light by two stops and then we photograph that so you get drama contrast all this cool looking stuff in the bride-and-groom loved it same thing here where we can create that light mimicking effect which I've already showed you guys this this particular shot and here where I can add this is another behind-the-scenes at that same location notice you can see see the little speed line right there and there's the other one they just have little orange gels or pointed up until the exposure that was on my camera for the background brightness I wanted I could just see it so I just turned them up and down a couple times and then in Photoshop or in Lightroom I just clone them out really quick when I was done with the shot and created that final image or crop him out so you can't see the ground and we get this really cool really cool effect and there's the behind the scenes i I think this was la long time ago alright I'm gonna bring Ashley up if she doesn't mind hopefully she doesn't because that's why she's here yes yes yeah say that again kill the ambient light typically yeah typically in the studio ambient light is pretty dark and if you're using studio flashes of any kind usually they don't go low enough in power to even compete with the ambient light unless your shutter speed is open for a long time so in this case the lowest setting I think this we'll get to at this distance is like f6 3 and that's going to overpower the ambient light and hereby I'm guessing a couple of stops so yes typically I'll overpower the a me it's out of complete control so we're going to do we're gonna do two setups for you guys I'm gonna pull them straight into Lightroom so you guys can see them up on the screen in real time and we're gonna see if all this stuff I've been talking about actually works so I'm gonna switch here to mirror our displays open up Lightroom you can actually sit right there my dear put this light back so we're gonna do is we're gonna use our little gray background I'm gonna put one light on the front I'm gonna hook up my camera tether it straight to Lightroom so I believe I always make the mistake I've turn your can't plug it in and then turn your camera on to make sure it works and then we'll start our tether capture so if you ever shoot in the studio tethering is great because what allows you to do is see your images on a real screen instead of on your tiny camera screen which is not the best yes you can actually see what's really going on so if you have the time it's great what's also really cool is when you do this I notice I've already pulled out my Canon 5d 3 this works really great notice here it says development settings this is rad so what you can do is you can go in and go what's my favorite adjustment that I always use like say my color punch and as they come in at all it'll kind of add that too because I'm shooting raw and raw means it's zeros the photo out it takes contrast out it takes color tones out it kind of puts it in the middle and expects you to add them back to your preference so this is a great way to do that as I'm shooting live out of the way ok so now what we're gonna do how's it going thanks for coming you're the best move this giant beast out of the way so it's just not my shot and I was gonna check these background lights tighten this one back up so what I've got in the background lights is just an orange tungsten gel inside each one of these 20 degree grids really simple I'm gonna angle them so they don't hit the background but they just hit Ashley at that 45-degree angle one on each side now this is not supposed to mimic a natural-looking shot this is a studio shot intentionally so that one looks pretty good this one looks pretty close he's gonna make us late adjustment here bring it down just a touch and now for our front light I'm gonna bring this in I'll keep it on this side so it's easier for everybody to see me I'll try not to hit this giant monster that's here and I'm gonna turn this one on I'm using by the way the elinchrom he'll be five twelve hundred flash on the front and the elinchrom you'll be five hundred on the back there's just one power pack powering both of these lights what's cool about this setup I use all elinchrom is with this Skyport pro controller which is this as soon as I turn this on there's no triggers to turn you know to figure out inside here no receivers they're all built-in it's scanning for whatever's active right now and on the top of my camera actually actually says you'll be 500 lb 1200 and it tells me what power settings they're at and all I have to do is just press this little select button and if anybody can look down you can see it just powers these up and down automatically and I can do the same thing and power up my background one as well which is cool and then I can of course trigger them from here as well which is great okay awesome so now that we've got those on we're gonna walk through the process we don't have to deal with ambient light so we don't have to worry about the percentage on the meter we just got to get the height the angle quality of light all that stuff set in the right position I can also trigger all my flashes from here and power them up and down individually from this this is the second ik L 478 dr4 elinchrom so it's got an elinchrom transmitter built into it which is awesome because now you can see I can just trigger all my lights from right here and I can also press this little button right here it's saying under because I didn't get much flash power yeah yeah I got you yeah I'll usually have it in a pocket or my power packs have a little bag piece that they just slide in there so if I have an assistant they've just got to kind of hang in there not pull it out when I need it but what's cool is you can also like I said you can adjust it from right here if you want to which is great okay so I'll just kind of do it all manually so you guys can see what I'm powering up and down there why so we'll do first years we'll take our main light and we'll short light ashlee bring this light up anybody remember how high that's right that's right so you notice right about there some of the light sources just above the set of the eyes what else do I need to do the bigger the light the more leeway we you have with not having it perfect the smaller the light the more exacting it needs to be if you have a video light and you're shooting a wedding and you're holding a video light up in a dark hallway that lights got to be in a perfect position otherwise it's going to look like a nightmare okay so you know I'm gonna see if I can actually get this guy out of you here sorry move it I want to make sure everybody can see just put it back here okay that's a little better correct okay all right so we got our main light set right here let me yeah oh that's awesome let me put the light on correctly okay I've had this happen so many times it's my biggest complaint with elinchrom that they hate when I talk about it is their mounting system there we go helps when you lock it into place okay now we got our main light set we're gonna shoot it nice and straight ahead like this and we're just going to feather it off and normally I don't use these stands this big but because we're in the studio and I want to make it fall on anyone we're using kind of oversized stands do we have a sandbag that I can put on this yeah normally I go light and flexible and actually one of the best things to do is to get an assistant and to just use this as a monopod they just carry around like us and goes and a lot of times people go how do I get an assistant there's out whoa yes Pam is a great idea but if you can't afford an assistant what is it that another photographer wants that you might have experience knowledge information you there's always something that knows less than you so I highly recommend and there's always somebody knows more than you so I always be assisting if you can whenever you can because I still do that I still go out and watch other photographers work and then anytime you meet people that go man I would love to be able to shoot more weddings and you're shooting a bunch weddings go well give me your name and I'd love to have you come out you can watch and you can help me out and I when we first started shooting I create a list of like 20 people we used to tweet it out put it on Facebook and I just create a list and anytime I had a gig coming up four or five days ahead of time I just hit the listing go hey first person respond gets two guests to come and I would have somebody at every single wedding just walking around my flash or carrying your camera bag yeah you want to add here we want to be on my list why what's got prodding I'm come and I'll assist you for the whole day okay so if you on our main light setup we're gonna back it up just a little bit so it's not insanely dramatic you bring it down just a touch excellent so notice we're feathering it off as well so when we feather to the side instead of pointing it right at our subject we can sort of turn it this way I don't have a ton of space here can we actually move I can move whatever I want sure okay I'm kind of destroying the set here but it needs to it needs to happen here we go if you're in a small studio space use smaller gear I recommend that okay so now we got this nice feathering notice the lights kind of shooting this way and the edge of the light is hitting her more this way so I'm gonna have you you want to stand or sit what do you prefer Stan what's the heavy Stan because I got a feeling you look really cool Stan Lee and I don't have to move the light much we'll move it up just a tad more okay so now and we'll adjust this as we go to get it more and more feathered because this may come out and you may see like Oh a little bit of light was hitting here let's feather a little bit more does either one I hit the background or not hit it one of the two okay so now he's got a meter it find out how bright it is and you're actually standing in a perfect position right there so all we got to do meter our front light it's at the lowest power setting it goes and if I point it right towards me it's coming out at f8 or if you can see that or not fAA at 100 100 now the shutter speed is irrelevant because we're inside so it doesn't matter notice it also says a hundred percent right there might be hard to see on the camera but if there's a hundred percent because that means we're completely overpowering whatever lights in here so so that's that's that's not that big of a deal so now that we got that at 100 now we can meet our background lights and where would I want these this is at f/8 that's the lowest this goes because it's really close and we're a small space if I wanted it less power i could move it further away at this point we'll feather it off even more which actually let's just do that for the sake of argument and see now we're down to f7 so that's fine and I can put my ND filters out at this point if I want you to lower the aperture but let's not worry about it so we'll shoot at f7 now my background lights I want those one two two stops under the main lights so where would I put those once anybody yeah three five f4 somewhere in that range what's cool about these background lights is when I power them up and down they'll go up and down simultaneously if you set it that way which is really cool so a meter just this one and it's key kind of in a studio then lights bounced around you don't want this light to affect that light to just kind of block it and that lights actually not out even going off so there's gonna double check that it's upon which it is but it's not firing for some reason so let's find out why it's not firing let's see den tanana huh there's some reason this whole this whole thing is telling me it's locked and it's not working correctly Hyper fail when in doubt or under pressure just take the batteries out let's start over so I'm powering it back up here does it has to be set to also all the flashes trigger at the same time which it's not doing at the moment and I don't know if what I did except all the time group one you know how to unlock this thing it's like when in a lock mode and I have no it's never done that to me before okay so we're gonna yeah so we're gonna switch over I just got this meter from elinchrom so or from psychotics this is the first time I've used it as standing in front of all of you guys so I'm gonna do instead is I'm just gonna power it up from here or powered up and down from here oh it's set to off that's why there we go oh no that's just the the modeling lamp okay Zach knows what he's doing don't worry everybody holy cow okay so we'll put this to uh holy cow we got to unlock this thing otherwise it literally doesn't work Oh God we might need a tech expert here I literally cannot figure out how to unlock this thing anybody got a meter you guys have a meter I can use I don't know why this is locked I want any light meter on the face of the earth someone needs to tell me how to unlock this thing somebody google it I took the battery out and it reset and it's still locked so here I am standing in front of everybody not knowing how to use my light I use a manual meter for 10 years it's that l 478 how do you unlock it there's no button to unlock this thing the 358 that's the one I've used for 10 years okay yeah 100 100 technology is so amazing okay so how do i how do i oh there we go okay at three six yes that's about where we wanted it so now we'll just make sure both of these are coming out at F three six we'll make sure this is telling us the front one is the same oh no not even close so this is telling us the front lights at f4 big difference between the other meter so maybe something's totally goofed up at that one so we're gonna turn this so that's at f4 the front light these are at f3 six this is way too bright we want to get that these background at least down a two point eight or less so we're gonna power them down so I went down one whole stop which should be around 2.8 we'll see 2.5 but I like subtle on the background ice will go a little bit lower 2.2 so that's pretty subtle we'll just double check that front light f/4 perfect with that all right we'll see so we should be pretty good shape so I'm at f4 iso 100 one sixtieth in a second i sped up my shadow just a little bit just for camera shake purposes so now what I'll have you do is I like you kind of turning this way slightly but then body this way but then face back towards the camera yeah or face back towards the light oh yeah put the trigger on I don't think so alright here we go so lean in towards me just a little bit Ashley yeah you look amazing my dear and bring your face over this way just a little more chin that way a little bit more - perfect yeah beautiful and now I got to make sure I'm setting my mode on here - all because I just got my front light on the first shot haha there we go hold it one more here we go on a bang so here comes our first shot through where everything was set up bingo I want to make sure that both lights are going off simultaneously beautiful so that's a tad underexposed for my taste or just it's pretty neutral which a meter tends to do that to you up quite a bit it tends to give you a pretty neutral effect bingo notice how bright that background light is especially on the specular part of her and it's at F 2.2 and the front lights at f/4 so we can actually bring it down even a little bit more analysis and notice how feathered off the light is like it's pointing that way now let's see what the difference is if I pointed straight a turn and you'll see the effect squeeze in here it should give us a tad more power so we'll just double check the brightness thanks for Gavin get this meter yeah f5 now so I'll just adjust her f-stop slightly same thing as before beautiful and now check out the background difference you'll see how much more light it's cranking on the background there's no fill light on this this is very dramatic right and notice the background see how that light tapered down even more now it's like two full stops under the main light and you still see it separating and they're really beautifully okay so as you can see the very first shot I took what everything was working correctly all the lights were on really cool looks great looks really really beautiful now let's add something a little more dramatic to it what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring an eye lighter for a little fill light and I'll actually probably move her a little bit further away from the background so you'll kind of step up to here what we're gonna do and maybe I can have some help just putting this light on here really quick I'm gonna use this guy to move our light Oh I hate these bones what I mean oh yeah that'll work a lot better I'm gonna go to the baby pen I'm gonna wash my face yeah so I want to boom it out so I can shoot straight at her without having to sit under it I mean I can just go underneath the light but it'll look a little bit better if I do it this way oops please oh this is awesome can you raise that stand up for there just a hair oh that's actually perfect thanks buddy okay how do i tighten this now so it's not spinning on me like that perfect so when you do a clamshell shot which is we're gonna do you have to have a little we have to have the light angled for it a little bit so that the light will hit this and reflect back up into the shadows it's very important so we're just gonna now raise this up a little bit higher than normal because we're gonna be adding a lot of fills that's going to make up the difference and the height of this this is a little modifier called the eye lighter from Westcott eye lighter yeah I've got a silver interior it's I cut my finger that's specifically designed to bounce light at the exact right angle back into her face and it should be just if she puts her hand straight down like this it should be just at about that distance or about I think it's like 35 inches 30 inches from her man I cut my finger feel like I'm falling apart here alright so now we'll meter this light which is now just a tad bit brighter it's @f 6-3 the great thing about having background lights that are high quality is if I turn them up or down a stop or two it's accurate they're going to come out very accurate this is incredible I cut my finger moving a light and you guys give me band-aids so I'm not bleeding in front of everyone it's gonna be it's gonna be worth it perfect thank you guys so we were at f5 on the last shot now we're at f6 point three so we're just that little bit of a difference so I just adjusted my background light to the same amount I just turned them a little bit brighter that's all I did very simple thanks for hanging in there Ashley all right so for this one just lean into me a little bit we're gonna do a very straight on shot see how far I can actually back up here yeah that's perfect super cool that's coming in dent and and I see how it fills in all those shadows underneath if you look at the middle screen for those of you here in the studio that one's a little more accurate it feels like and now of course because we're going directly into the computer we can come over here and go you know what looks best on the shot what kind of adjustment and I think that one does and if i zoom in and you look at her eyes see that effect that it has it creates that beautiful catch light on the top and that beautiful light around the bottom of her lights it's very beautiful for up close portraits let's do another one right here a little bit closer shot I'm gonna chin down just a touch perfect excellent feel like that kicker on the right isn't going off well it's just too subtle check out her eyes that amazing effect that has on the eyes yeah it's firing it's just missing her that twenty degree grid can be really really subtle so I'm just gonna move it slightly to make sure we got it hitting her I think it's just a little little bit to do alright let's try that one more time beautiful there we go oh I'm not tethered hang on get it to sink back out we go let's try that again it's busy it's trying to reconnect here see if it does let's start our tether session again lightroom can be really finicky if you use it for tethering with this kind of stuff if you accidentally unplug your camera or something like that camera there we go all right here we go beautiful awesome let's do one more chin up just a touch that's great it's very cool see just how beautiful it is he got that subtle kicker on both sides beautiful light on the front that beautiful fill light underneath so when you walk out on location they're the only thing that you need to do as long as your meter doesn't lock and I'm gonna figure out an unlock it today obviously it's just check that ratio that's 60 80 70 % 40% whatever it is that you walk so before you guys leave I don't want you to leave just yet switch back over so I've got some free stuff for you guys let's see if it holds Flickr settings is it correct right it's right so if you guys have a business card or a write your name on a piece of paper pass them in I'm going to give this away to somebody sitting right here hand them all to me throw them in a little bag if we earn my hat I've got my hat yes free stuff throw them in throw them in pass the hat back I feel like I'm begging for change or so I probably can't see anything anybody else everybody else put my own card in there oh yeah pass it up pass it up Oh another one well not with you throw it in yeah I want to create that specularity yes yes say that again you want to not yet not yet this is gonna be the best part okay so really quick one I'm gonna give away we have a five hour live wedding course I'm gonna give that to somebody so the winner of this just come up to me afterwards and I'm gonna show you how to get it cuz it's an online course I don't have a physical copy oh so the winner is what a pic close your eyes close your eyes Trevor when you grab first oh she got a piece of paper Jaime Reba River yes okay so hold on to this come up to me afterwards so this course is really cool it's Jody and I photographing an entire wedding live and we walk you through every step of the process how to connect with your clients how to find great light and any lighting situation on who's off camera flash practically how to shoot the entire reception how to capture outstanding photos throughout the wedding day how to get everybody cooperate with you how to organize a wedding day it comes with like free PDF downloads on how we start organizing the wedding for months in advance and all this crazy cool stuff so it's a really really cool course I'm also going to give away my in-camera light course to one winner right now and actually have a physical copy and you can get a eCourse copy if you want so the winner of this one is Ben ha yes so Ben wins that one nice so here's actual we don't have a lot of these left actual DVD copies but if you want the eCourse version which is cooler it's the same thing but just in an eCourse format just come up to me I'll give you a link I'm gonna give away my reception lighting course which is right here this is brand brand-new one winner is come on the tiny one Craig Craig Louis yes so then if anybody wants to get any of those come find me you get one for 97 bucks and it'll come with a bonus business course and a bonus natural light photography course then the last thing this is a free thing for everybody watching here everybody online can get this for free you all have a card and some of you gave me that card but you can get it back if you want but shoot flow is a way to run and manage your entire business without burning out it gives you our entire workflow system for building a six-figure photography business and it's incredible and my phone is chirping in my ear so it's really cool it's an online piece of software that you can use you can try it for a hundred percent free everybody that's here gets a 30-day free trial of it here's an example like you can send a questionnaire to your clients it does contracts payments tasks emails everything is all built in you can send this wedding questionnaire to your clients and a click of a button building your attire your wedding day timeline in five seconds you see take us four hours to do this kind stuff it's crazy cool so anybody can get this it takes 30 minutes to set the whole thing up and includes our entire contracts wedding wedding work flow all of our emails everything that you need can also run your entire portrait business with it as well it's it's crazy cool so just go to that link bit dot Lee slash shoot flow 30 days free and you guys can get access to that entire thing any questions before we close out from anybody that might be relevant to us or the online audience about anything bring them yes if you want my slides shoot an email to studio at Zach and Jodi comms the ACH and the jod why I didn't put a link up I've ran out of time studio at Zach and Jodi comm and I can send you a link to all my slides from today's keynote all for free any other questions za c h IM DJ o dy calm yep good question anybody else well right at a time well reminder about the contest yes by any Wescott product from anywhere or just from Wescott any any Wescott product from adorama online or here at the store between now and May 23rd and you can win yeah you'll be entered to win into a drawing to win two round-trip tickets to Nashville from anywhere in the country $1500 and Wescott products an eight-hour masterclass with just me teaching me anything you want to know we've got a location shoot I promise you my light meter will be working by then lock it and yeah you guys have to two nights in a hotel and meals for two days it does country music in Nashville it's amazing so you'll come hang out with me my wife you might might get to meet my kids unless you're a creeper and yeah just buy any product from Adorama I'd love to have you guys but with that being said I'll stick around for questions anybody else but thank you guys for having me [Applause]

Channel: Adorama

Views: 74,732

Keywords: photography, video, adorama tv, adoramatv, adotv, adorama

Id: wOdrWQuS94s

Length: 122min 23sec (7343 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 24 2018