Controlling the Light: Beginners Guide to Off-Camera Lighting and Control

thank you very much for having me guys and thank you Dave for uh you know bringing me down and doing all the things that you do so if you guys want to tweet anything about this while we're here screenshots anything like that that's my twitter name up there it's probably my most active social media channel because it doesn't take a lot of thought so I can put my foot in my mouth as many times as I want just blast out 140 characters and uh you know and then cross my fingers and then that's my website too Valon comm if you have any questions and concerns emails you want to keep track of my work and what I'm doing that's the best place to uh to check out so let me start off this is our class it's a controlling the light that's our whole goal I'm going to teach you how to do that through different modifiers better understanding of lighting theory and basically the manual controls and everything on your camera so thank you very much for coming out New York's a lot of fun to teach him because most of the time it's usually the most active crowds that will ever get to talk to anywhere in the country that I've been fortunate enough to speak at so throw the questions out there if referring it to it later I'll be glad to take as many questions as possible after the class and hopefully I answer all your questions in the slides that I've got coming up so has anyone gone online and see my website at all you just thought was like me I get to hang out in the toy store for a couple hours and let's do this a couple people okay cool well just to uh just to tell you a little bit about me so you don't wonder who the stranger is talking up here my name is Eric valent I've got a couple people in the crowd that have known me for a while and a couple or just seeing me for the first time but I couldn't really think of a cool creative name that had like photos somewhere in it so I just kind of you know copped out and made my company Eric Vallon fight ography so what I do instead of a unique name with a cool ring and catchy thing to it I just come tell myself Eric with a k' how many people have gone out met someone shaking a hand two seconds later turned around and totally not remember their name it's happened a couple people okay cool well I latched on to the whole K thing because if I introduce myself different like hey I'm Eric with a K and hopefully we have a meaningful conversation or talk for a couple seconds it's a little little device that hopefully they remember my name so if they're googling I know this photographer named Eric I remember liking his work you know maybe at least they get Eric with a K right I think it had a V somewhere in it and hopefully Google is nice to me and puts me up there like one of the top pages and they can find my work later on so that's that's hard brand myself I'm a commercial photographer I think that just means I get paid I don't think that means I'm better than anyone else there there's so many amazing shooters of all different skill levels and financial brackets but I shoot for a living so fortunate enough to be able to walk around teach and take pictures and that's how I pay all my bills but I was originally born born and raised in Florida I had I had to think about that twice cuz I'm live in Detroit now I've got somehow migrating north you know when you retire you're supposed to retire south you know the Caribbean to Florida things like that I was born and raised in Florida and I seem to be retiring north because I'm now based out of Detroit and if you catch me in another five or ten years they'll probably be halfway through Canada and keep going that way but that really is what got me started in photography my grandfather was a shooter full time my mother took a lot of cool pictures but what really got me started in photography was the action sports and all the cool stuff that I was fortunate enough to do growing up as a kid anyone here gone surfing in Hawaii been to Florida anyone been to Florida okay we've got a couple people now their head okay cool Florida we have a lot of Beach where that little part wait way down in the south side of the country that sticks out into the ocean or the Gulf anyways we've got tons of beach so growing up before after school sometimes during school we'd skip out and we'd go skim boarding surfing wakeboarding you name it if we could get going on the water and ride on it I think some friends I even tried to uh try to go wakeboarding on McDonald's trays that we once borrowed from McDonald's that was there on the water and we got it to work so needless to say we were doing some pretty fun things that we thought at the time but we'd be out there for weeks or days or hours whatever it was trying to land these tricks and say you'll land like a really neat trick behind the boat you go back in the only people that ever saw it happen were those three guys and it lost something in translation when you're going back like oh my god did you see so-and-so diss Lena that 360 today it was amazing give her like 360 that's cool what's that well he's spun around in the air once you know all of a sudden it's not as exciting so one of the reasons I picked up a camera was to basically be able to record those cool events to go back show my friends and family and stuff all the fun things we were doing and that was kind of what would really like bit the bug you know who here has a cool story about first time they picked up a camera why'd you ever want to take a picture anyone hit with like a passion and got travel for a living and I started going amazing places and speaking of surfing I was in Hawaii trying to take pictures of surfers and I had to stand around Mill Point cheat buy Best Buy I guess so sick and tired of not being able to capture what I saw and take home and showed friends and family yeah that's so good that that's exactly what it is I think a lot of photography and why I'm so hooked on it and why I'm really happy to be able to share it with people is that is going out and seeing a really cool thing that you want to share with people but not knowing technically how to capture it like you see it or how you see it in your mind's eye so when you go back and share it with people it's like yeah but it was a lot better if you're there you'd have to be there to get it like I didn't want to have to tell people that when showing my pictures I didn't want to have to have that voiceover so that's one of the reasons down towards the bottom where I started to get into lighting the other half of my upbringing in photography or or when I was first starting out as event photography after growing up on the beach I made the bad decision to move away from the beach into the middle of the state to Orlando it would it wasn't that bad we have Disneyworld and all those fancy things but I went to school at UCF over in Orlando University of Central Florida and I did a lot of event photography throughout the years while I was there I shot through college and I was fortunate enough to work with some cool clients like a o L Wells Fargo were a couple of them bigger clients that had budgets to do productions so when I say event photography I lucked out we had I think the Orange County Convention Center is one of the top two or three in the country and what was neat about that is these big companies would come in and they wouldn't just have events in a boring space they had to try to get their vendors and stuff to show up so they would like make massive ice bars like they would have the part of the convention center they would have people come down and really carve blocks of ice and have like a massive ice bar and transform the whole thing into the Antarctica for like a weekend to try to get vendors to come out to their Expos so I got to shoot events at these places and started seeing like the production value where if I wasn't traveling at a cool location or in Puerto Rico around the beaches in Florida somewhere I was in a convention center and saw what you could do to create these cool environments and locations so I think I just shot a jobs for Wells Fargo and you know how their big thing is their stagecoach they have like one of three handmade stage coaches like in the world still they have like one of these primo guys build this thing and I got to shoot an event and stage people all around this thing which was a riot so between those two capturing action and eat people and seeing these great environments whether I was there in person or whether people were producing these things I really decided after school that I've wanted to hang my shingle out there's going to be a people photographer but more importantly I wanted to be a location people photographer and if I couldn't find that cool location or get the budget to go there to take the pictures I was really interested in finding ways to use lighting or props and things to build up a cool location to put my people in so I very seldom shoot in a studio I totally dig being on location and a lot of the time that means uh inconveniences of dragging a lot of gear I guess I kind of sell my imagery as being vibrant energetic but what were the some of the main things that you saw in your travel photography that you weren't getting was it what'd you ever go to try to take a picture of someone and you get them exposed and like the sky is blown out white is that ever happen anybody that was that doesn't lend to that vibrant energetic imagery when you take a picture of someone and you get them and focus and get them exposed and obvious and your beautiful blue skies and the palm trees in the background are overexposed and you can't see them in the picture that's what I wanted to get away from so I realized I need to start adding light to the image to balance it out if you uh if you you guys know about HDR photography right the high dynamic range that they came around with that because our eyes can see all kinds of light you guys can see me under the spotlight but you can still see detail in the shadows and stuff over here our cameras don't have that much latitude our cameras can't see as broad a spectrum as light as our eyes can so you can either take HDR images which mash a whole bunch of pictures together or you can learn how to light so I can come in and light the dark areas to even out the exposure so my camera can capture that I thought that was a lot easier to do and if you've ever tried to take an HDR of a guy moving down a wave it's almost impossible to do you need a static image so I decided to light everything and I had to learn how to pack light to do that because your friends very quickly turn against you if every time you go on a trip or go somewhere you ask them to help you lug three cases of gear and carry it down to the beach and carry it back up and hold their light stands all day you very quickly get uninvited to a lot of trips so that's why I started using small flash it was out of necessity it was either that don't have friends or you know learn how to use smaller lights so I decided to go with smaller lights that's basically the back story and how I came here just so you know I didn't pick up one day and decide how these flashes are cool let's do this there's they serve a lot of purposes and hopefully when you walk away here we'll show you how to control those a little more so you can walk out into those cool spots and locations and knock out some killer portraits because you're able to balance the exposures a little more so does anyone have any questions before we kick it off solid all right the picture over on the left hand side is uh I think that was stereotypical Detroit area when I moved up there it would had just the snow was just melting it was cold it was rainy it looked like it was probably in a snow or rain I think it did 20 minutes after we took this photo and that wasn't the kind of image I want to go out and take that day I'm from Florida I wanted like those sunsets the beautiful skies that kind of stuff so to get that I just added one flash to the picture with an orange piece of plastic it's called a CTO gel over my flash you can see it there in the background on the left and that allowed me to stream over the shoulder and get those neat Sun flares and warm up my picture so with one flash I didn't add fill to the picture but I flooded the picture with light and I made it my own color to warm it up like a sunset and I walked away with the image on the right and this right here I've got two simple lights ones on his back it's just totally bare there's nothing else on it I've got it hanging up there to look like it's the ceiling light and the front one is another one of these little guys that I taped inside of his machine now this was a this guy owns a couple bars in Orlando and I was hired to take a head shot of him for just like a write-up for one of the monthly magazines and everything they were going to do a story on him about his bars and a party that he was throwing so I went in there and I got the normal shot the safe shot you know the head shot they stared typically see and then we were hanging around for a little bit he was cool so it gave me a couple more minutes to shoot so I'm like you know let's try something else this is his video game he's gotten his green room in his office so I came up with this concept you know the whole smokey like Tron kind of thing you know I don't know if Ed Tron had been out because this is a pretty old picture yet but the original Tron was so for this one I put one flash behind him which was already set up and then I put one more in the machine and it was blasting him in the face but it just didn't work it was like this he was bright here but you didn't exceed couldn't understand why so I grabbed a couple guys who are outside in the bar smoking I had three of them inhale really quick run into the room and then exhale onto his computer screen and that's how I got the shot so this just shows how with a little bit of creativity and a lighter - I mean you can get some really cool portraits I mean the sky's the limit here surely with what you can do with these small flashes because you can place them anywhere so once you understand how to control them we can really do some cool things so how many people here have speed lights already and are kind of doing some of the strobe is kind of shooting yeah a good portion how many people are shooting people without lights so majority there's a lot of people shooters in here okay cool well what is it that you look for when you get a flash and you set it up like this you set up an umbrella and you go to light somebody what is it that you look for in the picture how do you know if you're doing it right does anyone have an idea no you guys all just go turn your lights on whatever setting and start firing away what do you base it off take a test yeah what are you looking for in that test if it looks good okay what criteria using to judge good the background that's interesting we're gonna show you how we can do a couple different things to get our background are you guys looking at the highlights yeah that's what I used to do used to grab a flash and I think I'm lighting this image so I'm gonna put the most weight on the light I'm going to see where the light falls how many people on the right see a girl's face pretty much everyone I hope right otherwise I've been looking at this picture too long how many of you guys see a saxophone player a couple more come on you guys are New Yorkers most of you anyways come on get in the few way farther opinions that I did this morning a but on the left you see two faces looking at each other yeah that's how I used to approach lighting when I first started I figured I have a light I'm lighting the picture everything says light that's all that I'm going to look at so I figured if the highlights on the face were properly exposed had to be a good shot I couldn't understand why a lot of my photos were lacking drama or why they didn't have like a contrast or an impact I wanted it because I was only really looking at half of the equation the other half is the shadows the shadows I want to say like it's totally lame pun but overshadow the lightens most aspects because the shadows are where your dramas lives it's where all the contrast is it's that balance between the light in the shadow that tension there that dance that actually makes a good image so when you're looking at a picture don't lose the shadow in the contrast that you're creating in the picture by looking at the light we're casting light to create those shadows those shadows are what give us the depth if you look at a snapshot where it's person getting blasted in the face with light the reason we unconsciously don't like that picture is because there's no shadows you took a very pretty three-dimensional human being and turn them into a flat character and not a very flattering one either not funny and that's why we don't like the snapshots right off the bat we're not the first people to realize this either do we have any Italians in here yeah okay who said that can you say it a little louder perfect this is basically the term light and dark it's an Italian term just like there I give my shadow to Wikipedia at the bottom I swear I would have passed college all over again you know I've known about Wikipedia or used it more but basically everyone's been using this woodcarvers have been used in this painters have been using this forever cinematographer nowadays we don't just look at the one to it for the exclusion of the other you don't just look at the light a lot of times it's your shadow that creates the image so that's why this term means light and dark interchangeably you can't have one without the other there's no point in lighting the scene if we're not consciously making the shadows what we want them to be and that's why if you study classic portrait they have all these fancy names for all these lighting setups all the lighting setups describe the shadows you create with your light rather than the kind of light that you're casting on your models faces all right there's rules there's not a whole bunch I don't think I would have gotten into photography if there were many of them and photographer math is usually set as simple as two or divided by two times by two that's all you need to know here are two steadfast rules that these are the ones you can't break but these are the ones that are great to know so as you try to shape your light you know how to get the kind of light you're looking for the larger the light source the softer to the light which means a massive light source is going to create a big wrapping light that's more pleasing and soft on a subject the closer the light source the softer the light how BIG's the Sun pretty massive right why is it that if you go out at noon and you take a picture of someone under the noonday sunlight but they have such harsh shadows and such an unflattering light you guys know why you think it was the biggest light source out there it should be the softest light so far away exactly the distance if I stand up then I'm looking at the Sun I can put my thumb over the Sun it doesn't matter how big it is it has to also be in relation to your subject that's what that means so if I have a flash swear I've got one here there we go if I have a flash it's a very small light so and by small and relating it to the subject matter so if I'm taking the picture of myself this light is smaller than me so it's going to create a very harsh light no matter how close I bring it it's tiny but if I have a larger light source and bring it in closer like this umbrella all of a sudden the light source is larger than me in this relationship so this is considered a large light source that would be a softer light because it's spread out and wrap away show you really quickly what that looks like this is a very large light source a very soft light it was also brought in very close I purposely did everything I could according to those two rules that we know about hard and soft light to make this light as soft as possible I can show you really quick what I used to make this actually to got a 7-foot parabolic this guy so we went from the image that we had previously which was created by this light source and then we went all the way up to pardon if I blind anyone in the front row a seven-foot umbrella so this is what I use so it got a little bit bigger in relation to our model and the thing is I used to shoot through too which is neat because the closest I can get a bounce to my model is this big but the shoot through I can put her right at the other end and I just cropped right out so I mean this thing was like inches from her face and seven foot the model wasn't seven foot so this was a very big soft wrapping light so that's the very high end of the other spectrum right there and if you eye I can't tell where the shadow begins or where the high light begins in that picture and that means it's super super soft light I did you spread the beam spread the beam user or just wide angle and just wide angle on the flash yep that's a great question the question was how did I diffuse the beam basically what he's talking about is the light coming out of here is a beam of light I can focus it to be a direct beam of light or I can zoom it out to 24 millimeters and be a wider beam of light and what I did is I pulled it all the way back and zoomed it out so the beam would spread enough to cover the whole inside of the of the umbrella that's a great question thank you do I have any other questions about hard and soft light yeah both yes actually when I use the shoot through umbrella since this photograph I've started using the cap on it very good question he asked if I use the diffusion dome which allowed me to spread the light out even more than 24 millimeters I'm going to come back to those in a little bit when I talk about modifiers but the answer is yes no mmm just just one or the other let me need to kind of stack them but I'm afraid I would lose a lot of light the question was what's the difference between a silver and a white reflector silver light is going to be more spectral so if you look at my face if I've been sweating a little bit there's going to be a hard hot spot here and fade over if you use a white that's not going to be such a distinct hot spot on the people's skin so your highlights will become less spectral huh oh yeah good question I'm going to come back to that when I go through equipment I'm going to explain how I use a flash with different modifiers and how to get the most out of them so I'll definitely come back to that this picture right here it's hard light on the Left soft light on the right we know that because we talked about how quick we transfer to the shadow but I like these because if you look over here look at the shadows they cast not just the shadows they create on the face but the shadows your subjects cast if you look over on the left hand side that shadow is just as harsh and defined as a shadow on her face and on the one on the right the shadows almost non-existent so if you've ever looked at those high-fashion photos where they've got them on like the white seamless paper or like the psyche walls and things like that and you wonder how they get like the shadows to almost disappear they're using very very big light modifiers like 8 9 10 foot Parab are octa banks parabolics like that one you saw there all kinds of crazy equipment I mean they have to go really big to get the light that soft to be able to cast a shadow where it almost disappears so that's how they do that that's why if you go home or you go into a home studio or a small studio or a spare room or whatever and you take a picture and you wonder why you're getting these shadows on the wall chances are you need a softer light source that's one of the biggest questions I get and was a big hurdle for me I'm like why the heck am I getting those gross shadows on the wall I want that soft pretty picture like you see in the magazines nope you need a softer light to do it so that's exactly how all right now that we've talked about hard and soft light and the different reasons why we would use them and how we can make them I want to talk about the different angles of light so now we've got a light quality that we like we have to figure out where we're going to place our light I'm going to get into details on that but there's different ways of placing the light and different uh different outcomes we can get for it and different reasons we would do it this shot right here I didn't want a shadow because remember I said shadows create drama and contrast and interest in an image if I had shadows over here on the side of her face or over here under her chin they would have distracted from the eyes that I wanted to balance with the necklace they would have taken away from it so I decided to use flat lighting if I could have my model step up for a second for me I'll show you exactly where I put it same way we get that gross flat flat lighting when we use an on-camera flash I did the same thing to get the flat lighting here so I'll have you a step up that way all I did was do this I had a softbox a little bit bigger than this actually but I stood right here right on camera access the light was on the same axis as my camera lens was I shot the picture and that's the picture I got that's why there's no shadows the only thing I did is knowing harden soft light I made the light source big enough that it would be a soft shadowless light so it was a pleasing flat light as opposed to a not so pleasing hard like spotlight snapshot kind of shot so that's why we would use flat light I don't use it a ton but for people with like a beautiful complexion or eyes or if there's something you really want to show off you can get away with it this is Rembrandt lighting this is a this is almost like you would put it at 45 degrees or about there this instead of going right on camera like this and not creating any shadow I'm moving the flash over here and she's looking over this way so that I'm creating just enough shadow again like I said we're fortunate enough to work with with really beautiful people so why do we want to go ahead and turn them into these flat characters of a people when we take a picture of them if you look here by moving the light over this was our flat light by moving the light over this way we're creating enough shadow over here that we see that she's a beautiful 3-dimensional woman and that's the point of the Rembrandt lighting and moving it over there like that and I keep saying Rembrandt lighting because he wasn't Turia's for this little uh this little dollop of light that he put right there under the eye he did that in a lot of his paintings he did that most of his self-portraits but that little triangle of highlight under that eye is why we call it Rembrandt lighting but basically he was a master of using the kit oscura so how you say it the light in the dark the balance there I wish I had an Italian accent but uh he was not-- he was notorious for that he was a master of it so that's why there's so much passion depth and creativity in his work because he had deep shadows yet like highlights that would just rivet you to that part of the scene and then let you wash over the rest of it and that's uh that's what made him one of the Masters but we can employ that every day when we're taking pictures with our camera doing the exact same thing so it's two different examples of that I was not the airport yesterday flying over here when I was laid over in Chicago and I'm I was on petaa pixel anyone gone to that website PETA pixel pedo pixel something like that it's one of the one of the big photo blogs they aggregate all kinds of cool content have neat articles and things but there was this guy over there his name is Quinton Arnaud but anyways they did a write-up on him in a series that he did and the series was called shape he's a French photographer I haven't even seen the rest of his website but this came up in my RSS feed I was going through my iPad looking at blogs and stuff like all these pictures are cool and I was just tweaking this presentation talking about rim lighting I'm like if this isn't the best example of that I don't know what is so I didn't take these photos it was that French gentleman right there on the bottom haven't even seen the rest of his work but if he's creative as this and I think he might might definitely want to check it out or do a Google search on him for sure are there any questions on that because that's a that's a lot of the theory of the light like the different features and different characteristics of light now we're going to go into more the nuts and bolts like the boring real stuff that you have to know in your sleep inside and out to be able to get the cool results from all the theory we talked about no questions you guys got it locked down all right how many people started shooting on film good okay there's a lot of you how many people still shoot film what's the fastest shutter speed you ever bought film wise and didn't feel bad about it when you develop it 1,600 okay 3200 what kind of film was that try X okay okay I was gonna say oh my goodness that's that's that's daring even on today's censors that's pretty ballsy but that okay very cool I like this gentleman because nowadays on most of the cameras my camera now is three years old if you walked out into the store and you win naps the camera guys like how high they would turn there is those out here I mean they I shoot regular at 1600 3200 ISO not even worrying about it I mean I might do minor noise reduction in Lightroom later on when I get home but anything below 3200 like I'm not I'm not worried at all and that's one of the things that I really especially people that started working on film I want to ingrain in your head is ISO is now a variable ISO used to be used to be like lead weight used to be a ball and chain used to put in a roll of film you were stuck at 400 ISO 800 ISO a si whatever it was and that was it so if you wanted more light you had to use your shutter speed rear aperture that was it now with digital we can go ahead and I'll take one picture at 400 ISO one picture at 6400 ISO not a whole bunch of difference anymore so it's actually a tool that we can have on our belt when we're shaping and controlling light so for all you film shooters I learned on film as well I mean in Grain that in there that ISO needs to be played with now that we're over that though ISO needs to be controlled globally or is controlled it controls everything globally and what I mean by that is look at it like a scale game with your shutter and your aperture you give and take with each of them when you change your ISO to be more sensitive to light you get more light all across the board and you make it less sensitive you lose light all across the board so it's really good to get your balance you have to do the dance between these two to get your exposure and then you can raise them all or lower them all all together like that so I'll show you a little bit something bout shutter speed how many people uh shoot at night you guys like night photography there's a night street photography or you landscape so what are you shooting stars awesome okay anyone else street photography okay so do you use a flash or you just kind of panning with people because you have a slow shutter tripod okay cool what are you saying I imagine for the stars you're using a tripod as well most the time when you're outdoors especially at night you have to use a really sho slow shutter speed is everyone in here it work in their camera in manual mode couple people are okay as soon as you go out there they'll tell you that P is for professional mode that's all you need just go out and shoot it doesn't matter what camera you buy that only gets you so far so I want after everyone leaves here to at least half the time if they're not already make sure that you're in full manual mode and that way you can really start grasping how your shutter speed affects an image how you're getting motion blur induced how you're getting more of that low light when you're right at dusk or nighttime and things and then also how your aperture throws things out of focus so if you've got a really wide open aperture and you're getting a lot of light coming in how your background goes to soft focus really quickly so if you're not doing that already definitely make sure that you're a manual mode because it totally unlocks complete control and that's what this uh this whole thing is about so we can break all the rules so really quickly shutter speed I'm going to pray here that Lightroom is playing nice and I'm going to go ahead and switch over to show you an example of shutter speed down here there we go really quick I shot this last night this is what I love about this city is you can come any time of day or night and you'll probably find someone of like mine or a model or someone that's down to go take pictures literally I flew in last night I I met up with my friend and I'm like I sent out a couple text message and I'm like I was on the plane I thought of a really cool example I need to get example images of shutter speed for tomorrow's presentation at not at 11:00 in the morning was my first one so sure enough here I am at like 11:00 last night taking these pictures to show you guys so awesome awesome like I said I'm really glad to be here teaching this but I'm going to go ahead and set it up so you can see what my what my exposure settings were here I made them go away can you see him now perfect so I'm at one 250th of a second now if you remember the slide that I showed you if you read the fine print behind it the shutter speed controls the ambient light what's the ambient light Street yeah it's the existing light it's the light that's there before we start adding light it's the light that if we slow down our shutter speed more of it leaks in like this what I want you to see though is shutter speed only affects ambient light so you can have your shutter as fast and slow you want as long as you're within the sync speed of your camera you're going to get a picture that's not messing up your exposure with your flash so think of it as every time you use flash and you're taking a picture there's two pictures being taken there's one picture being exposed by your light and one picture being exposed by your ambient light and shutter speed allows you to play with that ambient independently of the other one so watch what happens as I go down and shutter speed my one 250th of a second one 125th one sixtieth of a second one thirtieth of a second one fifteen to where that people come from like there weren't people there earlier you know so again these guys were nice enough to come out help me at 11 o'clock at night now drop of a hat so I've got good friends but basically what we did here is look at her now just look at the model now that you've seen it for effect still watching her she didn't change that exposure did not change a bit so when we're out there and we're going to start using our off-camera light we're going to use in a couple different ways shutter speed gives you maximum control because you can make your ambient and your environment up here and be an active part of the image or you can make it go away entirely and just focus on your subject of what you decide to light so if you I swear i dial my poor button or my poor roller here on the back of the camera is probably the first thing to wear out on this guy because I ride my shutter speed more than any other setting when I'm shooting any other setting because it can give me like 10 different looks like these are all different photographs and all I did was change my shutter speed my model my light nothing changed so you just got to definitely keep that in mind that uh that's the way to go shutter speed only controls your ambient light aperture I wish there was an aperture value I could give you and I could just say go shoot f/8 and like you're going to be good all the time people always ask like where do you start what are your settings on that aperture controls your flash power and it controls your depth of field so aperture is totally to feel I can't give you a real answer on that I can tell you though if I take a picture and I light my model and she's she's too hot she's overexposed instead of walking all the way over to my flat my flash and turning it down I can stop down my aperture one stop and get the exact same effect you will be stopping down your ambient also and that's why when we opened up we talked that it's a dance that was a very good question you mentioned that when you stop down your aperture and less light in you're getting less light from your flash and that's when you would ride that shutter button again and just slow down your shutter speed to let more light in to balance it out it's yeah it is global like ISO but ISO is going to do everything independently in aperture is the best way to dial your flash down without writing that but yes it can't is a global one as well aperture for you guys that are 100% familiar aperture is basically the whole and how much how wide it is open to let light in so if I matter like an aperture of like f-22 it's going to let less light in if I'm at a pure 2.8 it's a lot more open so to let more light in and that's why it's a global one because all the ambient and your flashlight is rushing in because the floodgates are open so aperture controls your flash power flash shutter speed is how you then compensate with your ambient light and then once you get your good balance and you decide the whole thing's a little dark or the whole thing's a little light then you use your ISO to globally change it so it's definitely a balance and a dance between those three at all times any other questions no you guys are just eating this all up did you guys like you guys should come to the advanced class right and you guys have this all down already you're like twiddling your thumbs okay well cool this is I'm going to get off the camera setting and we're going to go back to light shaping light different ways we control light because now we know the basic settings to control the light once we've got it out there in a shape that we like we can change it on the fly so I'm gonna ask my model to come back up switch over here awesome and you notice on the top that I says non camera access if you were bench if you remembered earlier earlier on I was talking about on camera access which means the light was firing right down the barrel of the lens which doesn't give it any shadow it doesn't give us any depth or any contrast or drama in the shadows so that's what we want to avoid but what if you're at an event like you're at how many people photograph weddings a couple wedding photographers and we have event photographers corporate event photographer that kind of stuff how many people just want to know how to like take better pictures of your friends and family like we're in holiday season like who wants to be able to show up and take awesome photos of your friends and family because you know you're not going to get to see them again till next year cool in that case then you're probably out there and the flash is stuck on the camera because no one wants you around the table with a light standard umbrella getting in everyone's way they're trying to cook they're trying to feed you you know the little ones are running around knocking your stuff over so chances are you're going to be you're going to have your flash on your camera and you're going to have to forgive me here because I'm going to take some horrible photographs of you for example and then I'm only going to try to make them better okay so we'll switch back over and if anyone's wondering I'm using Lightroom Lightroom rocks there we go and you guys can see my settings down there on the bottom its ISO 400 F 5.6 and we're at one 80th of a second but like I said the settings really don't matter because to get what I want we're going to change them up all over the place I want to change all of them so this is where most of us begin we've got our flash I'm going to set it on TTL mode TTL is basically through the lens metering it's Auto mode for your flash there's nothing wrong with Auto mode for your flash when we've got it like this because I'm going to show you some balancing things and I'm not that good at math that I could do that in my head and do it manually with any reliability so this is kind of what we what we begin with as a base and I'm going to have to apologize because this is really bad snapshot quality and it's not what you guys are here to see we're going to make sure our tethering sessions are working okay cool so now that we know a little bit about light we understand why we think that's a horrible photograph we can all agree that that's a pretty bad photograph right okay everyone's not in their head okay that's pretty bad but if we're stuck here if we don't have an assistant and we don't have the room or the time or we're not allowed to set up a light stand in the house the best thing to do is get the light off camera access like we had it here and we can bounce it this would be my first go-to thing so we're going to bounce off the ceiling in this case I love how they've got beautiful white ceilings so vent space rocks and for this reason there we go beautiful so the exact same shot I didn't move my settings didn't change but instead of shooting right down the barrel of the lens I bounced off the ceiling and all of a sudden we have a different look still not a best like my best image that's for sure but what if I did a it works for Lightroom too this clicker rocks what if we did something like that and then very quickly we did something like that I think if I had an option between the two I'd go with this one you guys with me all right cool now if you're really lucky you've got like this low white wall you guys realize what I'm doing right I'm using this as like a giant softbox this light right here went from a little light source first off its off-camera axis so it's creating some shadows that we like but notice how soft the shadows are it's because we went from a small hard light source to a giant softbox like I couldn't set up one that big up here but we've got the ceiling so might as well use it yep yeah go to shoot black and white all the way I'll definitely get to that I'm gonna show you something a little bit next we can work around that can you boss it off the screen there is a food water wall like right now absolutely yeah uh-huh he's too easy he's leading it now ready I'll have you look over this way for me a little bit beautiful I totally stole that thank you no but if you're really lucky you'll have a low white ceiling but you also have a wall that you can bounce off now that looks like I just set up a big soft box or an umbrella over to my right and I'm shooting out my model and you wouldn't tell that I've got an on-camera flash that two seconds ago was this this you know all of a sudden we've gone to this which I like a lot lot more so yes yep turn horror yeah the question was it would the light be any better if he tilted it yes what I would do right now I have this this way so it's only bouncing off the wall that would allow the light to go ahead and bleed onto her and bounce off so you'd be mixing direct light with bounce light there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing better but if you need it a little more juice that's possible do you play pool no yes yeah he basically the question was what if you bounced it I guess I'm at more of an angle yeah so you like your angle of incidence and then back out like what about the ceiling also why because if I'm doing this usually it's not a controlled environment like I'm shooting an event or something so it's safe to have it directly up because I know I'm not going to bump it and then accidentally get this harsh light hitter in the face I know for sure it's only going to hit the ceiling when I do this so I mean a lot of the time if we're outside of the studio and this is on flash it's not optimum you know optimal environment he's jostling shadows on the ice yep the valence treat so he said there's um you create different shadows to if you hitting them directly on you eats up the shadows rather than bouncing off the ceiling you create in the shadows underneath so it's a mix so play with it for sure there's no right or wrong about this these are just things to keep in mind bouncing off the wrists bouncing off the ceiling hope there you go there you go no that's not it and there we go cool see if you look in her eye right there I think this is what you might have a mention you see the little spectral highlighting her eye right there that's because we tilted it down just a little bit that we were getting direct on-camera flash here so definitely play with it again there this is tilted down a little bit so just a little bit of light skimming in there and creating a little highlight in her eye but the majority of is getting bounced off the ceiling so definitely play around with it and then keep in mind that you can mix some on camera a lot of the time if I'm using multiple lights I'll have one light coming in with a softbox and I'll still have one almost on camera access for a nice little fill light so if you cheat it you can almost get both of the best like the best of both worlds with just one light which is really cool I'm in manual on my camera but the flash is on auto that's because oh go on TTL yep so it's an auto mode so I know I'm controlling all my ambient light but that right there is um going Auto so it bounces off something it sends a little pulse comes back down gets a reading off of it and then decides its own output usually when we're this close it works pretty well now what if you're at a wedding or something like that and you have 50 foot black ceilings in whatever building you're in and there's no walls in sight and you're just in trouble you can melt your flash by pointing it straight up and trying to bounce a hundred feet off of a black ceiling or you can do something like this this is a TTL cable switch back over here to our slide show if you want to grab a seat for a second anymore welcome to this is the next step when it comes to our off-camera flash are the trigger go oops I think I broke PowerPoint I think that's what I get for running PowerPoint on a Mac there we go first thing we just talked about was bounce flash that flash up there rotates for a reason I mean when you get out of here definitely go play with all the different flashes out there on the floor I mean they rotate all the way back if you want them to so you can get whatever angle you want so I can shoot down on my model if I want it even and still bounce off the ceiling if I should wanted to shoot down like this or if I'm at a wedding and I'm shooting like tabletop decorations or whatever you know I can go ahead bounce off the ceiling or bounce off the wall so they definitely rotate for you to rotate them I don't think the manufacturer fully intended if you ever just leave them full steam ahead and you know blinding people like that so bounce off whatever you can but if we don't have anything to bounce off of the next best thing is going to be a TTL cable which is this guy it rocks because basically connecting like it does it's able to still talk to the camera it tricks the flash into thinking that's still on the camera so you know that you've got it out here and you're creating your own shadows creating your more dynamic images and everything but the poor flash is none the wiser and he still thinks he's on top of the camera so he's firing away in auto mode just like you want them to and this is how this works this guy slides right on top locks down you take pictures like this so in two seconds I keep one of these in my pockets when I shoot event so if I really get in a bind you know I walk outside and all of a sudden they want pictures outside and it's dusk and there's not enough available light I'm like oh no I got to bust out my flash now what do I do I don't want to nuke them by hitting it straight on I'll take this out of my pocket and then get some neat shadow play there and almost light up like a mini studio session right outside so people wonder how you do it just a little quick TTL cable like that and it gets the exact same results if I was shoot an event like that I would leave my flash on TTL mode so it's doing its own thinking for it's it's for me and I would just move it around whoever I want and we'd be all set yep a bracket occasionally I don't right now but I'm thinking about getting back into it just because it's easier to to go the question was do I use a bracket the brackets on the camera a lot of the time they come around and they allow you to basically get your flash from a horizontal alignment like this to a vertical one easier they kind of rotate around they rotate around your camera so I'm looking into it again but it's just an extra piece of gear and the whole point of using these is I try to be as light as possible so at the moment I'm not using one now most of the time my flash isn't I'm not shooting straight ahead anyways so I don't get the difference when I'm when I'm rotating over any other questions on uh that yep that's one of that's next that's going to be one of the next triggering ones yeah he had a stun why don't we use CLS CLS is a wireless triggering system we're going to talk about in two seconds here yeah okay they've got something similar now the 7d was awesome for that but getting back to this we're going to go into the nuts and bolts of an off camera lighting setup now so these are the things you're going to have to put together bare minimum to get the light from here to our TTL cable to totally cutting the cord and being free to move our camera around however we want within limits for a lot of them so the first thing we're going to look at is a light stand see if we got a free one up here if I'm using them all these right here the ones I'm using now our Westcott light stands if you guys are probably all sitting on the promo for it a lot of the things you'll find like the Apollo's the orbs and the umbrella kits and the things they have designed for speed lights they do you a service because I think for like the exact same price is a thing by itself they come with a light stand but if you have to buy a light stand independently like outside of a kit there's a couple important things one of them is the footprint that's basically when you spread these legs out how much ground it's covering that's your center of gravity the bigger that is the more stable your platform is going to be so when you're buying something independently definitely look for a big footprint and then make sure that you've got a buddy or a sandbag or something to hold it down even more because in the end of the day you've got what a five hundred dollar flash may be an expensive trigger a modifier got almost a grand swaying in the wind so you definitely want to make sure that thing is locked down so you're looking for a light stand look for kits because they're really cool I think I've got like probably too many Westcott stands sitting in my cases back home because I always buy the stuff when there's a deal on it so I've got a bunch of the the kit stands laying around and they've worked wonders for me next you need an umbrella bracket all right these come in the kit too which is kind of cool the ones on the right over here that you see these are the ones that are going to come in your speed lighting kits and your Apollo kits and things it's this guy right here the most important thing about any umbrella bracket you ever buy do not buy the cheap plastic ones you're going to go out there and you're going to see like ten different kinds they're going to write like range from $35 to probably $8 do not put a thousand dollars in the air with all this equipment get someone to model for you get your camera set up get the light where you want it and have it all hinging on an eight dollar piece of plastic it's a bad idea so make sure you get a metal one the one on the right is metal these are the ones that come with it they're metal they're like they're bulletproof they're pretty solid so what these basically do for anyone is never put together an off camera light setup is right here it allows you to feed the shaft of the umbrella or the Apollo through there and then use the screws to crank it down so that the umbrella stays in place this end right here goes onto the light stand so will connects your light stand in your Brella and then on top you have different kinds of shoes and the different kinds of shoes is we're going to jump over to now these guys the mounting shoes these prongs right here look really familiar I hope because they're identical almost to what's on top of your camera these guys over here are the ones that actually come with your brackets or yeah come with the the umbrella bracket right there that comes in the Westcott kit that's called a cold shoe and the one over on the right is a hot shoe does anyone want to tell me why there's a difference or what the difference would be between them electrical connection yes anyone else what would you use an electrical connection for all the way on your umbrella stand seeing Schreiber mm-hmm sing some triggers exactly the hot shoe on the right is hot because there's a hot live connection if you look over here there's a PC sync port looks very similar because most cameras still have one even though this technology is like ancient and should have been retired 20 years ago it's still there but that basically allows you to have a connection or a spark scent between the little guys on the bottom of the feet on your flash connect to your hot shoe there and send a trigger then through a cable that will go to it go to a wireless trigger like a pocket wizard or something and that's allows you to retire them remotely now what we have over here is a cold shoe cold shoe doesn't have a trigger doesn't have like a hot plate or a connection or anything it's just meant for holding a flash and that's cool because that's what I'm using right now to demo and we're going to show you something a little bit about CLS how you could trigger these wirelessly and all we're going to need is the cold shoe that comes with your kit right off the bat okay these are the different ways to trigger a flash I didn't realize there were that many options when I first started shooting we've got our on camera on which is super obvious that's the snapshot mode but we learn how to bounce a little bit then we've got the TTL cable which is pretty cool because that list gets us out of the sticky situations when there's nothing to bounce off of when I've got the TTL cable - I forgot to mention he still makes a hard light it makes a shadow but it makes a hard shadow so you're going to want to get something to bounce it off of this is like a mini micro Apollo I think is what it's called it's basically like a baby version of other Apollo these are cool because you can keep them in like a back pocket and then they just make the soft they make it a little bit softer by diffusing it a little bit larger so that way you don't have such a harsh light when you're using your cable out there so definitely look into something like that but I'm going to I'll mention that when I go over what you need for a lighting kit the other one is a CLS or controlling the light commander mode or CTL mode this is what that's actually a proprietary term - Nikon but Canon has finally stepped up and with the canon 7d gives you the ability to shoot and trigger off camera lights without any separate equipment they let you basically trigger lights with your pop-up flash anyone know you could do that yeah go people nodding heads the reason how many how many are Nikon shooters are in here how many Canon East us okay very cool you guys were faster throw up the hands I like it okay the reason I started shooting icon not because the autofocus and the megapixels in the videos and all that stuff is I heard that Nikon without having to get pocket wizards or anything would let me use my pop-up flash to take this guy from here and fire them over here I was like it's built in like they had a Nikon camera that had this pop-up flash doohickey where I could control this like wirelessly with no other equipment I thought that was the coolest thing because I already had a nikon strobe so I was like yeah when I buy a digital camera I think I'll do that so I've got like a D 200 I think it was and that's the only reason I'm with Nikon sure there's a bunch of other other cool things but now Canon does the exact same thing our new 7d allows you to do it I think the 60d does the t2 ion they do it so there's a lot of models so if you have one of those cameras look in your manual or if you're looking at buying a new camera ask your camera guys about this commander mode because it's awesome I'm going to show you why here set up a second set up here I didn't know that what he said is on the the Canon 320 on the Canon 320 he said that your flash will go off and actually control your camera control your major camera fire Wow don't tell PocketWizard that because that's like their their thing very cool what I'm doing now is I'm using just the stuff we talked about I'm using a light stand on umbrella bracket with a cold shoe on top so there's no hop shoot there's no connection there's no wires this is about as clean as you get and what I'm doing is doesn't really matter with the menus if you go right outside and you go to the desk and you ask for the newer Nikon flash it's like the d900 it's got a little dial lets you flip it into remote mode and like a heartbeat this one's a little bit older so it takes me like five minutes to get through the archaic menus and find remote mode but yeah and I'm there okay cool so now I have this set up and I'm telling it to not act like a normal flash but I put in remote mode so it's looking for a signal from a camera or another flash to fire so they can communicate I basically said hey we're going to have a conversation keep an eye out and literally I mean an eye because if you look really it's kind of difficult to see there's a little porthole I don't know why they don't put this on both sides of the camera but this needs to be seen both sides of the flash yeah both sides of the flash I mean because this needs to be able to see your camera this is the one limitation of this they're communicating like this guy is still smack dab on there but there's no cables except the only way for them to talk is like smoke signals like they have to be able to see each other like hand signals you know so this little eye has to all times be pointed there that's why you want to take advantage of you know the ability of your flash to turn around like that because I can do that and I can fire from this side so just keep in mind that one limitation other than that this is pretty awesome stuff so I have you a step back up again again you're going to want to look in your camera manual or ask one of the guys in the store for sure whether your camera does this and how to get to that setting but it's called remote mode and master mode so on my cameras in master commander mode right here and this is in remote mode looking for a signal so I'm going to have you step up just a little bit for me if you will I'm gonna go into this menu and rather than just fire a normal pulse alight I'm going into my commander mode I'm telling my built-in flash to turn off you can control multiple groups of flash so now we're not just one I can have like three or four or five out there yep it depends on your camera it's commander mode in a Nikon d700 but if you look at the back of a flash you have to put the flash in master mode so you can control it with a big flash on here like I can use another s the 800 if I want or a 900 or I can use the pop-up so if I'm using the pop-up it's called commander on Nikon so what I did is I went in here wind commander mode turned off this guy so he's gonna he is gonna pulse he'll make some light just so they can talk but he's not going to make enough light to influence my picture and I'm going to turn my flash on to manual mode 1/8 let me move over this a little bit for me if you could perfect right there I'm gonna take a picture I love the beep to it let's see no hey I'm recycled I'm ready to go I'm ready for another picture which is really cool we're going to switch over and again everyone cross their fingers that Lightroom is going to play nice I think I saw it cool we're overexposed like a whole bunch nope I'm in manual mode now i can use TTL now if you guys look at that and you just want to eyeball and guess how many stops overexposed ooh you think I am at least two I'm going to go with two I'm guessing so if I am I can walk over to my flash I can turn it down in this case I'm using commander mode so I can go in here I could turn it down from here but what if I don't want to do that how would I adjust that for my camera exposure compensation if I'm in manual mode what what I do is oh we could do that I prefer to do aperture what controls a flash power aperture awesome so basically I'm at five six here so I've got plenty of room so rather than going all the way to my flash or going through my menu in here I'm just going to dial my aperture so five six go to eight go to eleven we'll give another shot see my settings down here I didn't change anything but my f-stop I'm getting there I'm almost there go a little bit more thirteen perfect I'm there so I didn't have to go to my flash because we remember we fall back on the fact that shutter controls ambient f-stop controls your Flash output and if I want to raise or lower the whole picture I could go back to my ISO as a global adjustment so just keeping that in mind what's neat though one of the benefits about this the way that we're triggering this now is that I can go in commander mode and I could easily just turn the power down this way too so I'll go to like sixteen thirty second I'll go back to a five point six where I was and we're going to be pretty close so you do have multiple options but I want to reaffirm the fact that if you know how to change your Flash settings and all your power and everything from here well that's way over exposed yes you got it yeah I got hit enter there you go if you know how to change them from here it doesn't matter how you're triggering it you have the control you have the knowledge on how to change that flash so it doesn't matter what gear or what kind of situation you're walking into you know how to go into your camera and change it without having to learn a pack so say you're assisting for someone or you're maybe borrowing some equipment to try something out or you rent something like man I don't want to have to deal with the menu on that expensive battery pack you know how to change your f-stop to get the exact result or your shutter speed for the exactly so that's why that's the foundation you definitely want to build when you're learning off camera lighting cycle times or the battery capacity of that exactly yeah that's why a lot of times I'll shoot everything manuals so I can keep it down to 1/8 or 1/16 rather than TTL where it'll fire as much as it wants yes exactly so yeah he what he mentioned was if you um if you're not concerned with recycle time so if I have like this aperture of f13 I know that's a small hole in my aperture so I need a lot more light coming out he was saying the possibility of maybe instead of going to that maybe go to like 2.8 or f/4 so the hole in your aperture is larger let's more light in my flash doesn't have to work as hard to fit that light in there to make the exposure so yeah it's a dance I mean for whatever your output is if maybe we're we're worried about recycle time we can stop down or if we're worried about maybe getting a lot in focus we can go up to F 13 but knowing how to make that balance and still get the exposure using the criteria we want for that creative result mm-hmm yes we're definitely get to that yeah all right very cool now let's look over here remember shutter speed controls are ambient so I'm going to take a picture I'll have you move over this a little bit for me beautiful right there and back that up some all right really slow shutter speed here I'm down like one-fifth of a second thank goodness I have a tripod on this but this is basically I just wanted to show you all that light that's coming in behind her if we remember what controls app or what controls are ambient exposure shutter speed so instead of going out there and telling the guys to turn down the shop lights which isn't possible in this sense but if I wanted to or maybe going out and I tell them to turn down the Sun because it's too bright instead because I know that shutter speed controls my ambient exposure I can just dial up my shutter speed and I'm going to kill all that ambient light and I'm still going to get the same flash exposure so see the difference between the two shots all right so yeah if you guys walk away with this and you know your aperture and your shutter speed and how they work with flash in your sleep I did my job that's awesome all right if you want to take a seat again I want to switch over alright so the next step we're going to be looking at is infrared this is kind of basically the next step along the evolution if huh should use the cable but Wireless do why would you do one or the other the cable for convenience so if I have the cable I can just pull it out I know I'm gonna get a trigger every single time you know I'm still have the control to keep it off camera when I go wireless here if I'm out in bright sunlight it might not be a hundred percent reliable because the Sun is going to compete with that little flash exactly yep so the the cord is for event work this is for if I have a little more time and then I'm going to go into stuff like the infrared and then the radio triggers and those are what I use constantly those are my main workhorses exactly yeah I don't say they absolutely yes what do you mentioned was the autofocus assist on the cord some of the cords you get have a little auto focus infrared beam that comes out helps you get focus in low-light which is a lifesaver sometimes it was flash actually flash it's this light yes yep okay auto focus on the flash some of the flashes especially the SB 800 have a little red auto focus beam that comes out helps you grab focus when it's on camera if you use the TTL cable like I like I showed on the screen that also has one that's one of their big features is they have the infrared so you don't lose that assistant focus when you go totally wireless like that that shuts down so after the fact we're not going to have that advantage in the remote this TTL is totally free so I mean if you have the flash you can do this with your camera right off the bat if this you wanted to go up to this route these are about two hundred bucks I think for the su 800 s and I'm explain what these are these basically take this little pulse of light and the radio signal that communicate and tell it to fire and it's like a super powerful TV remote so it has it still needs line-of-sight but it'll shoot through like a Westcott apollo or an umbrella so you get that and you don't need a trigger on every end it's just a transmitter and then your flashes see it was that the question yes any kind of line-of-sight stuff is going to be difficult in bright Sun because remember this little light or that little beam of infrared is competing with direct sunlight which is pretty tough which is why I'm going to use what I'm going to show you next radio triggers most of the time outdoors did that answer the question though yep okay cool yeah so cost wise as we're scaling up if it's on camera it's free if you're using the cable it's anywhere between 20 to 90 dollars if we're using the built-in commander mode again it's free all you have to do is have the camera on the flash what we're going to now is now our adding devices to help us communicate better help us get a better stronger more reliable wireless trigger this right here is the Canon version of the nikon version these like i said basically take this little infrared pulse out and then upscale it to like a super-powered TV remote so it's still line-of-sight I mean if your dogs in front of your receiver it's probably not gonna be able to change the channel but if like a bedskirt or like you know part of your dresser table or someone's walking by or like your xbox game falls over it you know you might still be able to change the channel so I mean it works to a point it works well enough that you can have a Westcott apollo or something like that and trigger it with this but if you're in bright bright daylight I would recommend going on to the next step which is basically wireless control which is going to be radio waves which are going to be stuff like the pocket wizard maybe I did break power point there we go and back so this goes back to what we mentioned earlier these are the hot shoes we were talking about what's great about them is they are able to communicate a signal and what we're using is the pocket wizards here now this is going to get more expensive because now that we're in the triggers and we're outside of a Nikon or Canon product we need to have a product for every step of the way so I need I need a trigger whether it's a pocket wizard or you walk out the door and they're going to like 10 different kinds you know put that on there to send a signal put another one here to receive a signal and then the cable to relay it and then the hot shoe to touch the bottom of your flash to tell it to fire so it becomes a little more complicated I say it's reliable but you have more moving parts to break now so again there's a trade off and everything you do with photography especially when it comes to the gear so this is a like your standard setup I will say when you're going out there how many people are using pocket Wizards now got a small handful when you go out what's in need is so many people are interested in realizing how far you can push these small flashes that the market has exploded there's all kinds of different trigger manufacturers out there now like I said price points from $20 to $200 when you're going out and you're going ahead and looking the shopping around it's the same mindset as when you look for a lens if you spend good money upfront that lens is going to last your entire career if you buy into a system like pocket wizard or something like that these guys I bought like five years ago I can walk downstairs to the guys were selling the Profoto gear and fire their flashes today with these so when you think about that it's a little bit more money but you're buying into like a legacy product that's kind of ingrained and a bunch of different equipment and it's a whole system that you're buying into so keep that in mind same thing with lenses though if you're if you save up a couple extra bucks you can use the same lenses forever which is really cool yeah and they keep their value they're like the only thing that doesn't depreciate in this world which is really cool so that's um this is how I would go and this is probably our evolutionary step back in flash triggering there was this long time here where we had on camera we had cable stuff canon gave us or Canon and Nikon gave us a little bit of freedom with this whole communication thing but it was line of sight so bright days or far away like we'd lose our signal then PocketWizard came around they're like hey we got a fix but everything's back to manual mode we know how to do that so we're not worried about it but PocketWizard recently came out with some technology called their new unit such as their flex tt5 and flex tear mini tt1 these brought it back home this is like we hit that next level of evolution because these again make your flash think it's back on top of the camera so you get all of the functions that your flash has on top of the camera except you get it super far away so this is what I have set up over here and I've been using for demos it's basically the same way it's got a hot shoe built into the top to communicate the signal so the flash goes right onto the trigger and then this guy has a little foot that sits on a cold shoe to hold it there on my umbrella bracket and then it's got the little antenna that pops out and it talks to the guy on top of my camera and I can fire it and again it makes it think that it's on a TTL cable or right here so it thinks for itself it goes TTL mode you can do all the other advanced features you get out of your speed light you can do them all and you can throw this down all behind a wall wherever you want so you don't need line-of-sight anymore they don't have to see each other you can put them hide them get creative with them you can put them like I did in the video game shoot you can hide them in someone's video machine and shoot back out I mean it really unlocks all the creativity so which one is better next two to five or plus two um these guys the Flex tt5 for sure because the plus two which is this guy is going to work like GG did you fly it rather than next one oh yes I'll definitely explain that the question was on which is better this guy or this guy depends what you're using it for if you're using speed lights these guys unlock the full potential of a speed light just like it was on your camera these guys right here are all you need to fire most studio strobes and things like that because all you need is something to send a fire signal that's it so if you want if it worries in speed lights like we're talking about in this class and getting the most out of them this is definitely the way to go and I guess the other question was so which one do you need yes what's cool is they're backwards compatible so you lost your trigger here they'll work all the way with the flashers are the strobes and stuff for the plus twos that I bought five years ago will work with these guys so they work together see you have the channel marker here if I keep my channel one through four I can put these channel 1 2 and you can set more with the USB cable you plug in go fire off of each other so it's backwards compatible so all the flashes that I have I don't have to throw away I mean they can be used both with strobes and we've gathered absolutely yep the question was can they be used with both strobes and camera flashes yes mono mono lights yep like studio strobes and bigger lights both of them on the back of these they have a little 1/8 inch jack just like on the top of this it looks like that guy and you can get adaptor to go into a bigger one so yeah what's great about this is one day if you decide hey maybe I want to buy studio strobes these flashes will do the job which is really cool so they're definitely worth it alright we've got that all right now to modify us any other questions with triggers yeah maximum distance I think these guys say like a couple hundred feet and these guys were once saying they could go 1,600 feet I tried it once I sat I was on top of a 12 story building and had an assistant go like three blocks away and I could see the light so I mean those guys they go yes the question was can you use them to go higher than your cameras native sync speed yes it's called a high speed sync technology it bases itself off of the FP mode that's already built into your speed light that's a whole nother advanced workshop we can spend hours talking about but yes when you go this route then as your knowledge of your speed lights gets more advanced and you look into high-speed sync and rear curtain sync and all that kind of cool stuff these guys allow you to take advantage of all that so these are almost future proof like I said these make your flash think it's on the camera so if your flash can do it here it can do it now wirelessly and not have to see the camera for four stories very so it's going through the floor and everything to get down there yeah it drives you batty if you're working like a remnant studio with multiple floors it's like you have to phone down to find out who's on what channel because people will start firing your pax as they start shooting in the other studios so this right here has four channels they make another model called the multi-max that has 32 channels and these guys can do a full 32 channels as well you basically have to plug them into the computer and go through a little utility yeah you know what before I owned a bunch of these I was kind of on the fence because I mean that they're still there at the time they're like 200 bucks a pop or something like that am I really needed can I just use like my pop-up flash and call it a day so I only bought two of them and I had um I went to pot our winter Radio Shack and got a splitter like a 3-way like headphone splitter almost and basically ran three different strobes off of one plus two so I mean I can run a whole set up I still travel with splitters and extra cable in case my triggers die I'll just split off the signal so yeah great question question was can you run multiple flashes off these yes if you can get a line out and split you can do it to keep in mind though when you're using triggers like this notice there's only one ring here you need to use a mono cable you can't walk into an electronics store and get a stereo cable it'll muddle the muddle the signal that goes through the line and won't consistently fire your flash found that the hard way I bought like ten cables couldn't figure out why which ones didn't work you need a mono cable so when you're using speed lights and triggers pocket wizards whatever other brands out there make sure you're using a mono cable so mono splitter mono extension cables and mono plugs and yep not in this one no that's definitely an advanced class I do have a course on that but not today cool so if you guys are all comfortable controlling our light known how to knock down or raise up our ambien how to adjust our flash power by using our f-stop instead of running over to our flash every two minutes because nothing nothing takes away all that confidence that you've built up and your subject and your subject has in you then running to your flash 20 times to change the power like I tell you what your clients are to look like you like you're a nut and the person in front of the camera because this guy know what he's doing he's run over this flash twenty times already today so being able to know how to adjust your ambient in your flash power just playing with settings in your camera eyes is massive so I'm going to move on to modifiers now which is fun if I had one modifier just one I can get away with one I can shoot most jobs with one what do you guys think it would be Apollo 28 I wish you know if I could if I could shoot everything with the 20 I to be a happy man I shoot most of my stuff let Apollo umbrella yeah more particularly a reversible umbrella like this it's the guy I've got set up over there it's a 60-inch umbrella and the reason I went with 60-inch is because I'll show you how to make a 60-inch act like a 30 or a 43 inch a 23 inch I mean I can make a big umbrella go small I can't make a small umbrella act big can't do that so what I would do if I had only one modifier for the rest of my life it would definitely be this guy which is right over there and by reversible or removable cover basically it looks like it does I'm using that as a balance umbrella but if I take off the black cover it becomes a shoot through umbrella so it's like two umbrellas in one there we go and if I had to build on top of that a little bit quickly before I break down the umbrella I would get a reflector I get a bounce card or something like this so if I have my camera on a cable I would get like a little micro guy so I've got something when I'm on a TTL cable to soften it a little bit like I mentioned and in the Apollo 28 that's by far my was my favorite my favorite now is the orb because I like the round catch light but yeah so going back to this if Dave I could have you help me out I'm going to show you a couple different ways to use your umbrella how many ways do you think there are to use an umbrella there's some obvious ones are not so obvious anyone shoot through Oh bounce yep anyone else there's more I swear okay as a flag yes I keep getting that that's perfect you can use a flag was mentioned you can use the umbrella as a flag basically you can set it up to stop light from spilling onto something yeah anyways we're gonna do a we've already seen the bounce you guys so let's do a poor-man's softbox I'll show you how to make this act like an orb or on Apollo yep right stay dry yes that's an awesome I'm gonna need that this afternoon I didn't bring an umbrella other than my photo ones so yeah stay dry for real don't take one of yours so have you stand right over there if you could for me to stay dry well there's a couple more I'll show you this is my favorite one we've talked about the apollo for you guys not familiar if you look in the catalogs that were on on your seat the apollo is the 28 inch softbox it's like the medium-sized one and I like it because it's super soft light because you bounce light in the back so it spreads out nice and even so we take a small light source and then we've got it 28 inches already and then we put it through a nice like diffusion panel in the front so we've got a light that goes from small to larger to like buttery smooth when it comes out so it's awesome light often do I break the tips I've never broken a tip I've broken the ribs but not the tip oh um I've gone to two now I beat him up like I said if I didn't mention it earlier I fly with this stuff like the people at the TSA look at me funny because none of my umbrellas have handles and I actually have people say hey your umbrellas broken do you even want to bring that yeah just bring it like I mean I think I came over with a 60-inch tiny one don't if it's over here it's a little collapsible travel one so a forty three inch umbrella that breaks down like tie like a double fold an Apollo and an orb I flew with all of those cinch them together tied them to my bag and they just thought I was like over prepared to go to New York for the rain this week yeah with hilarious I almost tried to go on with the parabolic so my goal is before the end of the year to fly with this guy that's it gonna be used with gun full mana lights like seven inch shaft um I don't know if they tapered it enough for that seven HD yeah I think they tapered it yeah the question was can it be used with elinchrom allen chrome makes great lights but um they want you to buy their stuff understandably so they've made a non-universal hole in their umbrella bracket for you to put stuff through the standard is eight millimeters they made a seven millimeter so you can only bribe by elinchrom umbrellas the smaller hole is right where the reflector is okay the tilter bracket should have another umbrella hole wherever it doesn't you can put it on a bracket that does we have a workaround elinchrom is a I don't think they think they want to keep their stuff proprietary so the neighbor spitting Dave Dave's more blunt than I am willow will censor him like so over the past few decades okay customers this way so first we've got an umbrella you guys know what the bounced umbrella looks like it's a great way to light a group but what it does is basically takes the light spreads it out makes it larsen large and soft but we have minimal minimal control what I was mentioning about the Apollo is I dig it because it's a directional light rather than when I have light like this it's flying everywhere like 140 degrees or something like that I mean it's flying out the sides the front I mean it's a great way to get a lot of spread but when I take a picture which we will here but we need to find my trigger my receiver somewhere somewhere twenty years and forty years um the small ones yeah see now they're making wireless triggers so small I lost them but anyways what you would do is take something like this which is spreading light all over the place which isn't necessarily what we want in this instance and you break it down and I call this the poor man's softbox because all of a sudden we've broken it down and instead of flying all over the place it's more directional see how we've collapsed it down all of a sudden and this looks a lot more like the dimensions in the depth of maybe our orb which is meant to only throw a light in one direction which is really cool and I'm going to show you guys why a CLS is so cool because David want to go that there we go I misplaced one of my triggers so rather than go in my bag and get a second one I'll show you really quick how we can just slap this guy in remote mode and we can do the rest of the demo without any triggers scary thought so there we go put our camera remote mode Exeter it out there we go and if anyone's trying to mess with me and they've got a Nikon camera I'm on channel three Group B so if you guys want to jump on the same Channel cool let me check my settings to fifty five point six that all sounds good I'm going to go back here into commander mode and we're going to go one thirty second power just an arbitrary number just to see where we're at perfect and then we're going to switch this guy over yep you know if you want open it up a bit Maura perfect I got way too many pocket wizards for that reason because I always lose things or break things perfect there we go we guessed a good number I think cuz we were kind of almost balanced from our last one so we've got that so it's a lot more dramatic now compare this with our directional light so we're letting less of it spill in the background with this guy yeah perfect now this is probably one of the most overlooked ways to use an umbrella cause people like I'll just buy a softbox well if you even have one laying around then you've got to set it up change it out your lights never in the same place you know your settings are gonna be a little bit off because it's going through that so there we go did it work over perfect no it didn't go through inspire one more time ready oh that was it okay cool all right cool so if we go back to see how dark our background is see over right there that's with it all the way open and that's what it collapse down a little bit so this is great because it allows us to go from a lot of spillover here to bring this more over because I think she's like half lit I'm not liking I'm not getting light in her eyes there so I'll bring it over here there we go if you're thinking about catch lights I mentioned it a little bit earlier beautiful hold that catch lights um the reason I like the orb over the Apollo or the umbrella one day over like a softbox the next is because I shoot outdoors a lot and I love the catch lights and if you look really closely in the eyes you'll notice that this round catch lights mimic the Sun mimic like how we're normally used to seeing people's eyes like if you look in each other's eyes you're all going to have round catch lights in there what's neat about a softbox is the softbox makes you think that it's actually um it's actually like a window light it's kind of why they made it so if you have a square softbox and a square catch light outdoors to me it always kind of looked funky because I was like why is there this window light and this girl standing on a field you know my eyes are telling me one thing and the Lighting's telling me the other thing so that's what another reason why I mix between the two and I love an umbrella so there we go now that my exposure is actually correct we can actually see it a little better on the screens so that's what that all the way open but you know this is nothing new to you guys how to how to set up a standard umbrella so I'll break it down a little bit tilt it over and have you turn your face towards light just a little bit for me and bring your eyes back to me for awesome and this is just going to get us a little more control now if I wanted to be to really make my background grow dark I'll show you something else we can do by moving her away it's using the inverse square law but we're kind of cramped quarters here so I'm just going to switch this around and show you a shoot through umbrella which you guys are nodding like yeah I know what a shoot through umbrella is I've used it before Oh Dave let's break this guy down and switch it around I'm only going to use half of a shoot through umbrella and I'll show you guys why this is probably the second way people are the second most overlooked way to use your umbrella so bring this back over here I like the splash zone sitting up sitting up front here sorry about that all right I'll slide you over just uh actually that's perfect right there yep and then over now it's beautiful remember I said about shoot through umbrellas you can get it a lot closer to your model like if I wanted her that close on the other end she'd have the stick pokin her in the eye but this way I can almost get it right there right outside of the frame and bring it in I'm going to take the camera off here because I need to get a vertical shot to show you the difference in these two there we go perfect awesome now when this comes up I want to show you why I only left part of the thing on here can anyone guess the fall off the flag it exactly so if you look down her lower body there's not a lot of light going down on the rest of her clothes because why light the rest of her clothes it's a portrait the important thing is seeing our eyes and seeing her smile and that kind of stuff so compare that if we take this all the way off how most people just enough this isn't wrong either but most people just go and use this shoot through umbrella like this and throw light everywhere that's one of the good things of an umbrella is it spreads light all over the place but this guy right here without a baffle is like a light grenade watch you're going to be as lit as she is and you're going to be a little bit less lit but all of you guys are going to be lit like I can take a picture of the room and you're all going to be lighting up beautiful all right you want to kill that one let's turn it went off beautiful now see how lit our hands are and see how all you guys are lit - I'm gonna take one more of those because we had a little bit of a loose fire beautiful so this is one of the downfalls in when Briella and why I would use the poor man's softbox like I showed you because he's getting as much light as she is it's not necessarily what you want but if I had it like I did earlier it was broken down I have a directional light just like a softbox going in only one direction which is kind of cool if we want to go back to the clicker seems to be skipping over and you want to compare these there's a lot that we flagged off the light which basically mean we block the light at the bottom from falling down there and if you look at this picture look how distracting the right hand is because the right hand is getting just as much light as their faces so that's why if you're shooting a portrait portrait photographer is like a hot spot on the face and then less light on everything else because it forces the viewer because we look at the brightest thing in a picture right away it forces the viewer to go to are the most important part of our subject which is definitely the eyes on the face so that's why if you're shooting portraits I would I try something like this if you don't have something or someone to stand there with a reflector and flag that light off I would just leave half my baffle on and give that a shot so there's a couple different ways that's just four different ways but like we mentioned there's there's a couple other - - to put an umbrella to use but if I was stuck with just one modifier and it had to be if it had to be just one modifier for like the rest of my career you're definitely me an umbrella because I can fake a softbox if I need to and get soft even light for lighting a group portrait I can use a half baffled light right here so that it falls off a little bit faster and I can get an isolated portrait light there and I can bounce it back around and get a nice broad even spread of light yep how many would you need for a dip pen for ten ideally I would I would put two lights at 45 degrees with bounce umbrellas because the bounce umbrella is going to spread everywhere but like we're doing here it's shooting this way and that way so we're wasting light when you do a bounce umbrella it's only going to be going that one direction all over that one direction yes so I turn it around so it's bouncing in and then lighting back to my group exactly yep say yeah ideally yeah because I just want to get a flat even light if it was just a group portrait I wasn't doing like some creative like that I'd want to make sure everyone's lit that's the most important thing you don't have to if you just have one I would bring it on yeah right out the door I would bring it on camera axis again but I would do a flat lighting like we did with it with the girls portrait with the blue eyes so I bring it right here and fly it up really high and I would make it as big as possible and turn it up all the way because if I have it flying here it's going to evenly light my front row and slowly fall off to the outskirts or if I put it on one side or the other the guys at the end of the row are going to be anywhere nearly as evenly lit as the people over on this side so I bring it right over here front and center and what I would do is I pull it back as much as possible I can explain a little bit of inverse square law in another another class but I'll touch on it here it just basically means that light falls off three times as quickly when you double the distance so what that means is if I pull my light way back it's going to fall off really quickly here so this person will be like you know maybe five point six or I'm sorry FA this one will be five six this one will be two eight and then as you get farther away from your light you think of it like depth of field there's more area that's in focus the more depth of field you have and then with the more area it's kind of like light depth of field the more even exposure you have so I would move them far away or if I bring it close and put the light here she's going to be really hot and very quickly it's going to fall off but if I move her away from the light and no one's here no one's overexposed and then it slowly fades domore gradual fall off so I would move it far away on camera access and up high slash bet umbrella the umbrella I use it to bounce on the backgrounds white backgrounds when I want to make them white because I need to take a small light source and wide it out to get a wash of white on a white background yeah I haven't for a ceiling though no mm-hmm I normally when I bounce off a ceiling I keep the flash zoomed in so I get the most amount of juice going in the direction I want and then it disperses when it bounces back down mm-hmm anyone else cool let's move on back up cool all right now we're to light placement this one's a tough one now that we actually figured out the kind of quality of light we want we figured out how to use an umbrella to get it if you skip down a little bit we talked a little bit about catch lights why I would like to use a round light because it mimics the Sun doubt doors as opposed to using a softbox which looks more like a window which is really appropriate indoors because if you see a square catch lighting someone's indoors like man there must be a beautiful window in that house that they're standing by so that's kind of the thought process they want you to a to have with that but when we talk about a height that ties in really well with where our catch lights are most the time when we're lighting a subject we don't want to be overly overly obvious that we're lighting them so if we put the light where we naturally find it above the person you know it's going to be a more pleasing image to the eye so if you ever seen like the Halloween like campfire stories and stuff where they would sit around the campfire and talk like this it's not a flattering way to light anybody okay especially if it's a portrait or something like that they will you're never going to be able to photograph those people again and chances are you probably won't get paid if you were charging so keep the light high over the eye level because if we're pretending we're a Sun or a high window casting light light source isn't coming from down here usually I don't know depending on where you're standing in the world so keep it high and the distance to the background is super super important let's go with the Apollo for this one Dave bit warm mm-hmm no just saw the 28 inch up ah I found the triggers awesome one definite reason you would look into buying a new flash especially the sb900 so much faster to get from remote mode to normal mode or you all right I want to be all cool our Dave don't look into the light all right there we go perfect that's something you definitely don't want to do to someone bigger than you but if you have like a new assistant that you're bringing in or whatever you got to pop off a light in their face every now and then Dave's from New York and could probably take me if you wanted to so I'm not going to not gonna try to not gonna try to flash him yeah I'm still a thin blooded Florida kid yeah all right so we'll keep that guy off all right what I'm doing now is the reason I'm going to a softbox is because what I want to show you is going to involve I'm going to need a lot more light control to be able to pull it off so having a softbox again I've mentioned a couple times it's very directional light so instead of an umbrella blasting all over the place I'm selecting this because it's only sending light in the direction I want and some people have mentioned feathering feathering I'm based going to use these lips here on the front to feather off the edge of my light off the background so first thing people do a lot of the times when they have a softbox or an umbrella and they're going to take a portrait to have their background two feet up they stick their model two feet more up they stick their light and they call it a day turn it on turn it off they wonder why they have harsh shadows they wonder why they can't control their background and it's because they don't understand hard and soft light for one thing and what I'm going to show you right now which is basically we know that if the light distance between our subject stays the same that exposure is going to be the same but if we pull it off that light's going to fall off very quickly so if I bring the light in close to my model and close to the background like most people normally do they normally blast it off like this take a quick sample shot any four finger swipe over to a lay room maybe Dave's got the magic touch and can make it work no my flash fire fire that time I've Lightroom froze up there we go alright flashes firing or gold in there let's get a decent exposure maybe cool alright here we go so this is how normal people would set it up they have their background their model their light they'll go ahead and take a shot and they would call it a day like okay cool and if they had any problems they wouldn't even know where to begin troubleshooting so that's not a bad portrait it helps because I've got a good model and really soft light so if I wanted that background to go away a little bit more all I have to do is pull her off the background but we don't want to change a lot of variables because the problem is when you change everything and you don't get the result you want what do you go back and then change again so we're going to change one thing at a time so that we know how to troubleshoot so rather than moving our model in our lighting everything all over the place I'm going to have you remember how far you are from the light and then walk up with me okay perfect right there alright turn your face towards light just a little bit beautiful eyes to me excellent awesome so now what we did is we kept her the same distance and remember the light falls off faster the closer it is to our light source so the her light isn't going to change but since we moved the background so far away we very quickly went to black and all we did was move our model up like three or four feet so you look back over that's where people start and they wonder why they have harsh shadows and backgrounds that are distracting if we know what we're doing we can very quickly in two seconds get the same shot we didn't change anything but our distance from the background camera settings didn't change modifiers didn't change model didn't change flash output didn't change nothing but that so that's definitely good to keep in mind when you're talking about backgrounds if you want your background to disappear keep your light the same distance to your model but move the whole setup away from the background same thing if you want to bring it in if you're stuck in an area like that and you're getting the shadows you don't want there's not enough room to back up get a bigger light modifier because remember that shadow gets really soft and almost disappears if our light gets soft enough to so that's a definitely a way to overcome that any other questions no all right the next thing we're definitely going to want to go into is using all of your light this is another common mistake and these are all things that I kind of blundered through and I wish I would have done more education and stuff rather than trial and error but I'm using the entire light most people get these these big soft beautiful light modifiers and don't end up using the whole thing I'm going to have you step around right here if you could for me right up front Center yep what they do is they have them they have their softbox here and they place their model smack dab in the middle of it or the same thing with an umbrella you think if you have this this light you need to put her smack dab in the center and that's going to get you the best light output not always true so if I have this light hitting her and I'll have you look up straight down the aisle we're going to pretend I'll have you square up and everything from President Davis the photographer so our cameras down there we've got her smack dab in the middle of this light that's our camera we're using half of our light only half of our light is spilling onto the front of her face I'm say we're only using half of it because we're still using the other half of course but it's on the back side of her head so that's not going to do us a lot of good with the camera until we get like the cool light dose generation 5 or we can take all the focus and in all the shots all over the place but for now we're wasting half of our light so if I wanted to make a soft shot and take advantage because remember we've got a small flash with only so much output so we want to take advantage of all of it I would just move this up a half a foot so she's sitting on the back side of the softbox now and all of a sudden we're using 90% of the light to sweep around the front of her face a lot more light a lot more soft light because our light got bigger here she was only a 14 inch softbox now she's a 28 inch softbox see the difference so that's definitely using all of the light now to really uh to really go to the opposite end of the spectrum I'm going to show you how we can use very little amount of the light to get a really high impact portrait so I have you step over this way if you could and then look straight ahead at the light again this works best with a softbox because you have control because you have a really directional light so oops like I think I broke PowerPoint again give that a second to catch up I'll actually do the demos live here really quick to what we're going to do is now we showed you how to use all of the light so if you buy a 28 inch softbox you're not walking around through life only using 14 inches of it and feeling like a chump because you left half of it on the table definitely want to use all of your tool so you're going to stab her in front of here we're going to start off like we said might be incorrect right in the middle of the softbox so I'll have you square shoulders and everything there and I'm going to show you what this profile portrait will look like well we came back alive okay cool the profile is going to look like this basically what we're doing is we're we're using 14 inches of our 2010 softbox on the front side of her face that you see and because I have a dramatically facing profile we're using the other on the back so right now we've got a 14 inch softbox which is great because in this case I'm not interested in using all of it I'm interested in using a very small amount to sculpt a picture so I'll have you sidestep about two feet this way if you could a little bit more there we go so if I'm shooting the picture here previously if I was shooting it from this direction I'm now letting the whole softbox wrap around the front of her face I'm doing the inverse I have her in front of the softbox and now I can only see about six inches of the softbox coming around the lighting up her face so we have a smaller light source which means it became harder which means our transfer from the highlight to the shadow became more pronounced so I have you slide step just a little bit for me perfect are there see what's happening slice up less a little bit more that's the final result actually you'd probably be about here I'll take a shot to see if we get that exact same thing so have you step up a little bit more and there you go full profile excellent so that's what we're going to be looking at so in this case if I'm standing here and I'm her I can see about like two inches of that softbox that's a very hard light but basically we know now how to use the smallest amount of our softbox for a high-impact portrait versus using all twenty-eight inches of our softbox to wrap around I get a really soft shot so going into this we can be a lot more creative with our one light without changing any settings we just walked our model up the thing is really cool though if we actually did this for a client like we walked in and put our model this far in front of a softbox probably think we were nuts it might drum us right out of the studio so don't open up with this but after you get the shot go back and do something neat like this and just offer a couple different looks along that same vein though when you get something set up before you mess with your lights or change any settings or move your move your light sources around and things I really want you to a get creative not with your lighting setups them but your angle of shooting so I'll have you take a seat if you'd like right there I want to show you an example of that which is this guy right here if you look on the left the photo on the left is flat lighting that's what we showed you before it's actually this picture this was taken last night they're my they're my buddies right there with the Apollo the Apollo orb and what I did is I asked the model to freeze and not move this is another instance of getting the most out of a set up and a bunch of settings without having to change anything but getting drastically different photos so I took one picture straight on I basically stood right under the right under the Apollo and took a picture straight on and got that flat light because I wanted to see all the details and everything I didn't want a lot of shadow and drama and then I moved over against the wall just move me if you look she's got the exact same pose the exact same hand face everything literally two seconds later I scooted around the side and shot down and all of a sudden we've got really hard side light and almost rim lighting so we have flat lighting and then rim lighting we didn't change anything but my position so those two things show you that all you have to do is move your model a little bit remove yourself a little bit you can get like 10 different looks out of one set up and then we already know how to troubleshoot it if we're not there yet so once you build something definitely push your creativity to move to use as much a possible of it yep oh yeah um kind of like I guess I understand the question is was I the same distance for each shot I wasn't I think these are probably different focal lengths to the neat thing about it is though my distance to the model didn't really affect the exposure a whole bunch it's just kind of my selection of what to put into the frame so if you look at this pullback you see the fall-off right there it was always there it was just what I selectively chose to shoot so no I think the distance just chain a little bit my distance but the neat thing about it is if all my settings are manual everything's gonna stay the same so I can move wherever I want I can move across the street with like a telephoto lens and get like a really compressed shot and all the light would stay the same and then you decide to go around let's just walk a couple of meters away or whatever and do creative stuff but once you get the sense right for the first one you can just walk around exactly that's exactly what it is he was saying once you get the settings right you just walk around like it's rocket science totally get your settings dialed in get an exposure then I always joke about this because people go out and they have this mindset they're like okay I'm gonna get this shot okay they get the model they get their subject they go out they know what gear they're going to use they get their settings they got it all they get so excited then they walk away or they tear it down or they start moving their lights but if you take two seconds and walk around or just ask your model to take two steps this way without changing anything else nine times out of ten you're going to look at that picture and be like it's either going to be like better than the picture you thought it was going to be or at least it'll spark some ideas to keep working a location or a setup saving you time because you're not redoing gear redoing settings redoing a set up putting new putting new softboxes on it's all about getting you more pictures and sparking your creativity on set and getting the most out of your lights rather than having to think oh man I got to buy two more flashes I got to buy more of this it's like really learn the gear you got and then when you do go by that other gear you're going to have a better understanding you're going to use it that much better too so any other questions yep it's just a softbox but it is reflective I mean there was no baffle on this so I used it so sorry I use it similar to a balanced umbrella see the light coming out so I used it like just like a bounce umbrella except it's deeper so it's got a more focused beam of light I did the same shot with a bounced umbrella and I mean I had light bleeding all over the place so when I went back to frame it up differently like this that dark line wasn't there because the light flew everywhere so by using the orb it only gave me that little spotlight of light and then I got that line that fall off so well without the diffuser is yes ring light it's more spectral so it's a harsher light yeah and it's a little bit brighter too because you're not going through the front diffusion panel so you're not eating up that light yep the question was without the front panel does it look more ring light it doesn't look more ring light it just you have more pronounced highlights like they're sharper they're more spectral so you have like a harsh like I said if I have a shiny forhead under the light you see like that really have that highlight right there that's a spectral highlight and when you don't use the front baffle that doesn't get softened so beauty dish yeah beauty dish a beauty dish is a whole nother beast but yeah it's a it's a smaller smarter holler or a smaller harder light like that yes a little harsher yep any other questions yeah uh-huh so that um this is an action but this is daylight this goes back to remember the kit I said if I had one piece of equipment it would be an umbrella now if I had two pieces of equipment it would be an umbrella and it'll be like a four and one reflector kit like this four and one right yeah it's a foreign one this is the sunlight one so basically in the kit there's a shoot through fabric that looks like the front diffusion panel of a softbox and then on one side there's silver which is highly reflective and then there's like a weave of silver and gold which warms it up a little bit if I had two pieces of equipment this is what I would own because most of the time I'd rather use a reflector to bring in a fill light then set up a second Shrove in softbox to be my fill light so I get a lot of use out of these and this picture right here is an example of I just walking around out in the afternoon I wanted to take this photograph but of course if I got everything lit behind her she went dark or if I exposed her everything out went white you know it's the normal problem we run into and when we're shooting outdoors so all I did was set up my speed light and hold this guy in front I didn't because I didn't have an Apollo or anything with me I just had a that kit on a carabiner on my belt and I was walking around with it so I take out this guy hold it up shoot my flash through it and I get that really nice soft light and I was able to balance that out so this is why this is like definitely the second piece of equipment I would I would have on me at all times there's that and then a so I mean it's it's great again this is where you just add a little bit of fill to kind of augment a scene yep that was pretty fast that was using high-speed sync so I'm going to see if I can do if I can do a high-speed sync your advanced lighting one because there's all kinds of fun stuff you can do with that it's a good question let's get more light with the I don't know the exact bleed on it because we need when you do the question was if you do ND filter or high speed sync high speed sync pretty much your flash is less effective allows you to use faster higher or higher shutter speeds and then an ND filter just eats light like it's using a really low ISO so I don't know what's that yes the autofocus is really goes goes to town there - I mean this same shot I could do at I could do with a speed light I chose to use high speed sync here because I wanted the shallow depth-of-field yeah if you saw from that last picture I use this a lot if I'm just shooting around or I'm really quick and I go CLS mode you know you take it off and you just use your pop-up flash to control it it's really cool because I always have a reflector with me just to bring it in and get almost that softbox look when two seconds to go I was shooting on-camera flash so that's one of the first things I use I use the diffusion part of a reflector right probably more than any other part of it because it's really small and it turns into a mobile softbox the next part is the silver part which is pretty much the only other part that I use and the silver is great for for beauty lighting so if I have like a big beautiful light up here that's nice and soft but I want a little more pop in the eyes I'll bring this underneath which we're going to set up here and show you it's called clamshell Beauty lighting it's what they do for like the makeup commercials it um if you look here's my nice top lighting this kind of brings it in and gets the catch lights underneath the bottom of my eyes and really fills it in very flattering to use on women if you have like a girlfriend or a friend or someone that's going to pose for you for like you know you got 20 minutes you're always badgering me about taking pictures you get 20 minutes go up set up one light up high like this with a little reflector underneath her chin ask her to hold it like just hold it here for two seconds take that picture and turn around the camera and show her she's butter in your hands like two hours like a woman cannot turn that down so that's the way to really flatter someone to make a beautiful portrait like that I want to do an extreme help you you do not have to put the Apollo run a light stand through the Holy about see what I did I put her right outside so now I can tilt this quite a bit yep Lamia and husband that's right up like five on the dots I'm trying to cut you off okay the light is so powerful we pour water on a flash it's so powerful the light just goes all over the place so that gives us a nice beautiful so I'll have you step right over this way if you will butterfly like what we're going yeah high enough yeah it should be perfect yes please there you go so next I'll have you hold this down first so we'll get a shot without that she's been through this before it's like this is my favorite kind of light okay if you ever want an advice on light and you don't have a photographer sitting around to ask questions about his ask a model they've been through more lighting setups than most photographers have beautiful and then we'll bring one with it like right under your chin like really close beautiful just like that so that right there yeah that's like that's pretty much your textbook you can see because you got the little little highlight on her lip and when he says butterfly lighting he means again classic lighting portrait isn't named after the lights named after the shadow it's the little butterfly looking shadow that they create under her nose that's what butterfly lighting comes from so now that we brought that up do the same thing beautiful now this is going to be the same thing with the reflector so this is the only other application that you look at that how it just totally lightens it up so I'll put those we've got this guy so that's that's fine and dandy that's a good shot I just said fine and dandy yeah and then if you compare the two oh trying to get them side-by-side okay that guy and then you have that so it's like that right there is worth the 20 bucks for the reflector I'll tell you what so that's go to right there and then all you do is ask them to use it because I mean if you've had a model in front of your camera for two hours or two minutes you know chances are they're getting fidgety and stuff and they're bored and you say hey you can you help me hold this I mean they're jumping at the chance just to do something with their hands because they've been sitting there like this the whole time so the sunlight side okay cool and this is on this is Sunfire I am sunlight sunlight basically this is the gold silver we've and for the longest time I had this aversion to gold reflectors because every time I thought of one I pictured like the 1980 swimsuit like shoots with like the gold the gaudy gold and you know the old magazine print so I was like I'll never shoot a gold reflector but it's really cool if you do like the sunlight because it's just a little gold weave so it just warms it up just like this gentleman asked if I if I use um a warming gel on my flashes usually I have at least a little bit of orange on my flash to warm it and I really like this kind of reflector here because it does the same thing without having to put a warming gel on my flash it's going to warm up the reflection of the light because it's got a little bit of gold weave in there see how it warms it up a little bit so if I had our own like say a white background or something you'd start to really get the feeling that hey this girl might be actually on the beach looking this good like not sweating in 100 degrees in the salt water you know what's that yes he Dave just mentioned you have to be careful where your white balance is set I usually set it for flash or maybe sunlight a little bit so that way it normally renders a little bit warmer thank you very much appreciate it we got one more hand for our model she can take off amazing but really quick not to touch on like the file technical boring stuff shoot raw if you don't if you're not comfortable shooting raw start to learn shoot JPEG and RAW so you've got your JPEG files ready to go but you can have something to play with because RAW files if anything else they let you change your white balance later so you take a bunch of pictures and you realize oh my goodness I didn't set my white balance right they're all green you can go back and change them later with no repercussions so that's my final piece of advice definitely try to shoot raw mode for portraits so any questions that's about all I got for you cool thanks awesome for more information please visit us online give us a call or stop by our New York City superstore you can also connect with us on the web you

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 786,229

Keywords: space, pro, bh, B&H, photography, BH Photo, controlling, photo, setup, badh, event, audio, guide, settings, and, BH Photo Video, control, bh photo, light, Valind, Erik, video, camera, lighting, bhvideos

Id: b5v7ejTAIlA

Length: 109min 47sec (6587 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2012