Hollywood Lighting Techniques

hi my name is james schmelzer and today i will be filming and taking photographs with this little clx 10 from stella lights in motion it's battery operated it comes with a fresnel on the front and this is the perfect light for doing hollywood portraits so today i'm gonna show you a little bit of how i do hollywood portraits and the techniques that i use to pull this off but i'm so excited about these little lights because in the past if you see me in the past you've seen me with the big bardwell mcallister big huge uh spotlights and stuff to pull off these type of portraits in my classes so today i'm going to show you how i do it with the little clx 10. so let's take a look here so i'm going to take this light now and put it on the stand and this is the perfect light for lighting the hair because when we're doing portraits we don't want any spill on the shoulders so that's like the perfect light to light that so to light the hair or the hat i've got two and they're gonna come in and crisscross like this now typically in the past you've seen photographers use a boom and they put like a bowl of white i call it the bowl of light on the top of the head but your another technique or what i would prefer to use is cutting the lights into the sides and then that way you get a little bit more into the hair and all that kind of stuff if you want it but again we're being careful not to light the shoulders in that so we can see from this light as we turn it on and again you can use a remote control to do this um i'm going to adjust this so that's not spilling onto the front of the face so i'm just coming behind a little more keeping it close tilting the light up i just need it on the hat and again the power settings are going to be a little bit brighter than the main light so that it brings the black out because the black of her hat is obviously a lot darker than the skin tones so that's how we start and we see we're going to get a little spill there so we're going to back it off some more and again i usually come into the front of the face and i look to see what's happening to set all that up before i turn the main light on now at the back of the room is uh the fill light coming straight in and the fill light is what you can see right now we could take the photograph from just the fill light and so the majority of studios that you go to nowadays they are taking a lot of the portraits with what i call just the fill light in the era that we're in now you see a lot of photographers using soft lighting soft boxes umbrellas pair box whatever it might be but and and it's a sellable photograph right now the lighting that's on her face is sellable but it's not hollywood lighting so to do the hollywood lighting i prefer to use a 10 inch fresno so the fresno was invented you know they used them in lighthouses in the beginning but it was invented to make a hot spot in the center or it's brighter in the center and the rings of light diminish back and they get tighter and again a bigger opening here and then it is into the back so what you're getting is the most beautiful light that you could ever photograph with so what you're seeing right now again is just the fill light and a lot of photographers think that the fill light is great and that's a nice look but it's not how it was done in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s so now we're going to turn this on and we're going to build that light up but before i do i see a little bit of spill right here from the hair light back here so i got to control that right now so i'm probably going to back this up a little more and tilt it up and feather it off so on the video you might see this stand in there but when i go to take the pictures i'm going to rotate the camera and you won't see these light stands in there so let's get back to the best light ever now when you're doing this type of hollywood lighting you are still concerned about the distance because remember the 10 inch at this far away is about the exact size of somebody's head so the reason that you're using a 10 inch is because the size of the light source is the softness of the light this is a crisp spotlight but being that it's 10 inches bigger if i got to get it in closer to avoid the spill i'll just bring it in closer but look at the beauty of that now if you've taken any of my other classes you'd have learned split broad short butterfly rembrandt broad rembrandt all the different patterns of light but in glamour photography or these hollywood portraits you want to stick with butterfly and modified butterfly so the shadow under the nose chin down just a little eyes at the camera and tilt your head just a little bit so you can see that shadow under the nose is perfectly underneath her nose now if she puts her chin down some more keep going the shadow starts going into the lip would be the same thing as you raising your light up too much the shadow never touches the lips so raise your chin up or i could have moved the light it's just simpler tilt your head just a little more and now the shadow is still too close to the lip so we're gonna lower the light down a little bit and her chin up a little bit so see that perfect shadow underneath now you can modify that to modified butterfly when it goes over to the side but it wasn't too much on women that you would see rembrandt lighting or broad or split or any of that now you can see what we're doing here and if i shut this off again you can see what the other lights are doing and i'm going to take this shoulder and what they did in the 40s and 50s is they always brought that shoulder way in so i'm going to take this armor we're going to pull it back and do that and again i'm just watching one more time for any spill on there and it's just a little bit okay looking good now we're going to talk about the background light now that we've got this pose really good i'm going to move one more here just inside your throat in here you always spin it like that clean up any stray hairs if you've got any hairspray in your hand you do that and just clean it up now we're gonna add this cookie back here cookalorus and you know the distance that you move your light from it changes the focus and what type of light you have but again to be able to do all this on a battery is absolutely phenomenal now we're going to turn on our main light and i don't need a lot of light because it's very close oh yeah look at that look at those shadows look at that light so again what we're trying to do is avoid any light touching her shoulder i see a just a couple tiny little hairs any light touching in here it's leading your eye right to her face and let's take a look okay so today i'm using the lumix s1r which is lumix high resolution camera and what's nice about that is the quality you can get out of this camera it's just incredible now i'm seeing a little bit of brightness up above her head so i'm going to lower either raise the cookie or lower the light and get the darker spot of the pattern back there up above her head and i prefer to use again the 7200 on a collar so that i can rotate the camera to rotate my shots and even amplify the angles even more okay so now again we're going to build this light up so the first thing i'm going to do is take the cookie off the background [Music] then we'll take the hair lights off and take the other hair light off and then turn the mane off [Music] nice and there's your fill light so let's build this up again so the first thing you can see now is just the fill light coming in just broad lighting the subject but no contrast to her face no lighting patterns we're going to use the clx on lowest power and look at the beautiful shadows that's creating and it's close enough and the axis of the light is not down here and it's not above her head this is the axis of the light when you have a soft box you don't know where your access is because the lights all over the place now we add another hair light just to skim across the top of her head just hit the top of the hat the feathers build that up a little bit then we come in with our other light so this hair lights on the opposite side and we can see what that's doing i'm going to turn that up then we turn our cucalorus on back here get create some patterns on the background just to break it up and i usually feather it a little off center because it might be brighter on the one side closer to the light stand and then we turn this good and there's our full monty now let's take a photograph of that so i hope you enjoyed this quick teaser of what it's like to do hollywood portraits it's not that complicated you just need a few lights and a place to do something like this and i hope you enjoyed looking at these photographs and remember to scan the qr code to get 20 off light in motion follow me on instagram james schmelzer workshops and a special thanks to maria evola for being a great mom

Channel: James Schmelzer

Views: 73,628

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Id: 2LKfH3FUeXI

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021