Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV. I'm Mark Wallace, and in today's episode we've got a bunch of light shaping goodness coming your way, but first let me introduce you to our model her name is Ximena and she is from Medellín Colombia, which is where we are right now, and we're gonna be doing all kinds of really cool stuff that will help you shape the light that you're using, understand how to process your images based on that light, and also work with the light modifiers that you have in your studio. It's gonna be a lot of fun... so we're gonna get started right now. Before we begin we need to understand four terms, they're very simple the first is 'monochromatic' Monochromatic just means that there are different shades of luminance values of the same color... my shirt is monochromatic. It's not black and white it's just different shades of gray. You'd have different shades of green or red or blue whatever, it just means that something has one color, and it's at different values... from light to dark... not necessarily black and white, could be different shades of blue or green, but it's monochromatic. The next thing we need to understand is 'shape'... Shape is when we see something... a form of something.... but it's instantly recognizable... like a silhouette of a person. Shape is when you have something that is two-dimensional, but you can understand what it is when you start adding light to something and making it look more 3-dimensional. Shape becomes form.... A 'form' is usually used in color images... specifically for things like landscape photography, or nice portraits.... form is color.... and shape is monochromatic. So things strong in shape tend to be monochromatic.... the last term we need to understand is contrast. 'Contrast' is just the difference between the darkest and the brightest area in an image.... high contrast images go from jet-black... to the pearly white.... there's a huge difference. Low contrast images go from maybe a gray to a brighter day... there's not much of a difference. Shape in form is where we're going to start... so we're gonna start by looking at things that are strong in shape. Notice this has circles and squares... and it's very, very strong in shape, if you can look at this little thing right here, this reflector, it's a very strong round shape, we also have
weird shaped like this... little Christmas decoration here, you'll notice one of the things that is consistent in all of these things is... that they are monochromatic, so it doesn't mean they're black-and-white.... it just means that there's shades of the same color... so that is a clue, that will help us learn how to shoot and process our images. So we need to know if we're going to be processing are images that are really saturated and colorful... or if we're going to take the opposite direction and desaturate... maybe make him black and white... that depends on if you're shooting form, which is sort of a three-dimensional look like a portrait or a shape.. which is more like a silhouette, so we're going to explore how to determine that, by positioning our light. So we're gonna bring back Ximena and do that right now. Well now that we know our terms... let's talk about how the position of light can control all of that stuff... now I've done videos in depth on position of light, so we're gonna do this really quickly... but I've included in the description of this video.... all those other videos on position of light. So you might want to check those out for a more in-depth description of how all this works. So first let's talk about our light being on axis with our camera, so Ximena is gonna come over here.... she is also on axis with the camera, so Ximena.... it's our light, it's our camera, everything is lined up in a row, this is going to give us a really flat light, so we're not really going to see shape or form or contrast any of that stuff. So let's start by metering this... so we're gonna meter this right at the light, and that meters right at f/8... So I'm just gonna take a really quick picture here, put my little remote on there, so Ximena look at the straight at me... Perfecto, it's just like that... okay this is really boring and ugly light, so if we take this light... now we're gonna move this to the side, so we're right over here. This is side light, 90 degrees to Ximena, so I'll get my meter, so we're gonna meter this light as well. So we're metering that, that meters at f/11.... so I'm going to turn this down quite a bit, either that one more time.... Okay now we're back at f/8, so the camera position has not changed Ximena has not changed, so we're just going to take this second photo here... got to put my trigger on the camera for this to work. Second photo here... Okay we can see in this shot that the contrast has been kicked up considerably. The third shot we're gonna do here, we're just gonna take our light... and I'm going to put it directly behind Ximena just like this. I'm not going to meter this because it doesn't really matter, everything is on axis... if I take this shot... BAM! We can see that now... we have a silhouette, so what have we learn from that light in the front.... really no shape.... no form nothing, Light to the side... higher contrast so the contrast is higher when we move to the side... so we're getting more contrast. We're getting more shape... and when the light comes all the way to the back... we're getting the maximum amount of contrast... and the maximum shape! Now that we know all of our terms, we known about contrast and shape and position of light let's put that into practice. So what we're going to do is we're going to kick this up... we're gonna use two lights instead of one, and both of these lights are going to be using hard light modifiers. In other words, we're not gonna use any soft boxes or anything to soften the light, because we want our light to be really crisp, so that our contrast stays way high. Now what I'm going to be doing here is... I'm gonna have a Chi light, that's gonna be illuminating Ximena from the side, and then the second light I'm going to be using is behind her, and I'm going to be using this. This is a Fresnel attachment, and so what this does is it allows me to focus the light, because as I showed you earlier, when the light is behind our model, we can create a silhouette, and so that's what I want to do. I want to have really high contrast light from the side, and then I want to add this... so I can add a silhouette... and that's going to pop her off the background, which should be totally black... the other thing we have here is Ximena has a white shirt, and then she also has this really cool black shirt, and so we're gonna try both of these, because the point of these is high contrast, so we want our blacks to be absolutely black and our whites to be absolutely white, and so who knows which one of these is going to be best. We're gonna try both, so without further ado let's start shooting. This is our lighting setup from the perspective of our camera... so I'm shooting it this angle, you can see that the key light is to the right at a 90 degree angle. That's giving us that high contrast, now I don't have a grid that fits this head. So I just borrowed one and clamped it to my speed ring and networks just fine. That makes sure that Ximena has light on her face, but nothing is falling on the background. Let's talk about the second light over here, so this second light is a Godox... it has a remote head, so this is just the power pack, I need to make sure that the sensor which is this right here can see the light coming from the key light. So I've mounted this pack on a stand slightly in front Ximena, so we can see the light, and it'll trigger, and then we have this light behind her, that's adding our separation. I don't have a modifier on this at all, because I don't need one. I just need light to be flying everywhere... this light is hidden behind Ximena's back, and then what does, is that make sure we get a nice outline, and because we don't have a light modifier that means light is spilling onto the floor, and onto the wall, and this back light is going from totally black to a nice dark gray. Now that we have this set up, let's start shooting, Now we're flipping things around instead of having a really, really dark scene, we're gonna have a high contrast scene with a white background to do that, very simple, they're the same lighting setup. But I'm gonna just go back here, I'm going to take this light, the bear lamp, I'm just gonna turn it around, so now it is throwing light on this background. It's gonna be throwing light all over the floor, it's gonna be all over the place. So I need to meter this light, and this is a little bit tricky, because I want this to be white, really white... So I'm gonna make sure this is overexposed. So I'm just metering this like this. I'm gonna close my eyes so I don't blame myself alright! That's metering at f/16, but what was really important is... how much light is hitting the back of Ximena, so I'm gonna meter this again with my light meter facing that back wall when I meter that... it meter's at f/8... which is what this was metering. The second thing I want to do is... I want to move this forward just a little bit, so that we lower the contrast on him in his face, so I'm just gonna move this.... just slightly forward... and make sure that's still hitting her face. Then I'm going to meter this one more time, see how that works out, and now we're metering it again at f/8. So I just got lucky.... let me just walk over here.... take a photo and see how it looks... look straight at me, perfect, just like that... and excellent, let me put this on here. All right, everything's focused up... here we go... fantastic, I love it! Thanks a lot... many of these were awesome images, we were able to create high contrast black and white images. You can use these principles to shoot just about anything, remember the position of your light and the light modifiers will tell you if you're gonna have shape or form or a silhouette, just move those things around, and you can create some very interesting things. It doesn't have to be a person, it could be product photography, or whatever, play with this stuff, and see what you can create, and then don't forget in post-production if you have something that has high contrast, something that's strong in shape, consider flipping that over into a monochromatic, or a black-and-white image, and see if it makes more sense post-processing in that way. Thank you so much Ximena for being a fantastic model. You can check her out on Instagram, I've included her link in the description of this video. Also follow me on Instagram, because I'm always posting behind the scenes videos of us creating videos, and scenes from my travels around the world. Don't miss that, also make sure you click Subscribe and turn on the bell so you get notifications. Thanks so much for joining me.. and I will see you again next time.
