How to shoot Ice Cold Portraits in Studio | Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

and there it is that still looks absolutely brilliant this is actually a really old background that sam hand painted a couple of years ago for a previous adorama tv video is not going to be the oldest thing on this video actually that's me now i think about it but other than that this is a really old window and it actually is the window from my garden shed that really is that's going to be very handy hello i'm gavin hoey and you're watching adoramatv brought to you by adorama the camera store that's got everything for us photographers and today i'm going to be shooting an ice cold portrait in my nice warm small home studio now whilst i'm getting everything set up you should be clicking on the subscribe button and the bell icon and then you won't miss any videos right here on adoramatv so let's get a light set let's get a model in let's get shooting so to help me out today i've got the amazing chloe chloe is the model and the makeup artist for this shoot and as you can see she's got quite a wintry cold theme going on and it's that feel that i want to bring through in the final photos now i'm going to use several lights to light chloe so i'm going to break it down one light at a time let's get the camera and take some test shots i'm going to take a picture without any flash firing just to see what we get in the room no flash no picture now we can start to add in our own lights let's talk about the key light that i've got here it's a flashpoint explore 300 it's in a 70 centimeter soft box with a grid to give my light direction because what i'm trying to avoid is actually lighting the background with this light that's going to be the job of another light i'm working at f 5.6 so i need this light to meter f 5.6 chloe i'm going to pop my flash meter near your chin and i'm getting f 5.6 absolutely perfect that's a bit of luck okay let's take a test shot with just the key light see how it looks okay chloe here we go and that looks great i can see chloe clearly against the background but the background is really dark also the right hand side of chloe is a little bit in shadow too and it's that i'm going to fix next this is going to be a separation light i'm going to use it to put a little tiny bit of light just onto chloe's shoulder and her hair it'll add a little bit of separation from the dark background it's not really that i want though it also adds a bit more three dimensions to the shot so that's what it's going to do but the position of it is really important because if i have it angled towards chloe's shoulder some of the light will spill onto the background and i really want this background to stay dark you'll see why in a second so i'm actually going to spin it well away from chloe and even more away from the background so now i can't see the surface of that softbox and this background should stay reasonably dark let's just see if it works i'll take a test picture and see what we get okay chloe here we go that works really well there's a little dash of light on chloe's right hand side as we look at this picture but the background has remained reasonably dark the whole reason for keeping the background dark is because of this light this third light is just a background light it's just going to point at the background and that's going to allow me to control how much brightness there is on this background so this is a smaller flashpoint evolve 200 it's more than capable of lighting that background in fact at the moment it's on 1 64th power so that's not particularly bright let's see what it looks like with a test shot and i think that's really good i like that that has a nice illumination to it but now we've got to sort out the color because at the moment but it all feels kind of normal and i want this to feel cold so at the moment i'm in the standard flash white balance normally where i would be for this sort of shoot i'm going to set a custom white balance of 3800 k and i'm going to dial in just a little bit of green as well just to add a sort of a greenish bluish tint to the photo that feels much more wintery which is kind of what i'm trying to achieve okay everything is now set up so let's take a few pictures like this so chloe are you ready okay let's take some shots [Music] now these are looking absolutely fantastic i love it but uh let's give you a prop to work with [Music] as you can see things have changed ever so slightly i've added this picture frame in front of chloe and if you look closely at the picture frame you'll notice it has a frosty effect now that's sam's handiwork with a little bit of epsom salts a little bit of bubble fluid and a little bit of water and a few hours to dry it creates this effect on glass now i've still got my light in the same place i'm going to lose the grid for this because i don't think i'm going to need it okay chloe let's just take a test shot see what we get here we go yeah i think it's fairly obvious that there is a definite problem with this shot because that is a large reflection off the glass of the softbox so we need to move it around so i've checked the metering it's still f 5.6 but you'll notice the light is now well up there in the air let's take a test shot i've turned all of the other lights off by the way so this is just the key light here we go and straight away you can see that is looking promising we've got a little bit more work to do but that is a really good start i've just turned on the separation light it's still in the same place it's still at the same power let's just see how this adds to this particular setup here we go chloe and this time the separation light is coming back through the glass and illuminating my frosty effect and the more i increase the brightness the brighter that becomes and then finally there's the background light now arguably i don't necessarily need the background light for this because if you want to see the frosty effect you really only see it against a dark background i'm going to put it on just on a very low power let's just see how this looks okay chloe here we go quick test shot and that just puts a little bit more illumination back there without losing the frosty effect but when you go close you can see that there is a little bit of an issue here because the frosty effect goes all over this piece of glass and we can't really see chloe through it just as if this was a real frosty window on a frosty day i'm actually going to scrape some of the frost off now i can only do this once this is a one-take thing so i'm going to take a little bit out from the middle okay there's a little clear patch just in the middle that looks really good when i look up close i can see chloe's eye is perfectly in focus but the frost is a little bit soft so i'm going to change my aperture to get a bit more depth of field i was at f 5.6 i'm going to change it to f 11. so to equal up my exposure i'm just going to change my lights each of them by six clicks that's two stops of light so i'll do that for all three there we go that's better so now we've got the frost in focus and we've got chloe's eye in focus that's great okay i'm gonna take some more off [Music] it's actually on really firm [Music] to mix it up a little bit i'm going to swap out to the other frame which is actually my shed window i'm going to get chloe to hold this one which will make it much easier to set up but it really will limit the poses that chloe can do [Music] if you don't have a real frosty frame don't worry i've created a virtual one that you can download free of charge from my website at gavtrain.com actually there's two of them just click on the link and download and feel free to use them so here is the second one and all i'm going to do is go to select and all and then edit and copy and inside of photoshop now all i need to do is paste that on to a final image which is going to be this one of chloe so edit and paste now when i do that i'll get a brand new layer that slightly covers the image all i need to do is make a couple of changes the first one is obviously size so i'm going to come up to edit and then free transform and just drag out the corner handles so the new frosty frame completely covers the image click on the tick to commit to the change then i'm going to come to the layers here in photoshop and change it from normal blending mode to screen blending mode and that's basically it it just works straight like that now there are a few things we can do to make this a little bit better so if we go in close we can see it's all good there's nothing wrong with it but maybe i'd like to remove some of the frost from in front of chloe's eyes so to do that i'm actually going to switch off the background layer i'm going to get my color sample which currently is black and white i'm actually going to click on the foreground color which is actually black at the moment and choose a gray from this image now you might think why am i not using black it's because it's not quite black it's important that it is not quite black otherwise you'll really see what we're about to do it'll look wrong i'll turn the background layer back on again there we go and then i'm going to get a paintbrush with the brush tool with a nice small brush and we're just going to remove a few of the bits of frost from in front of chloe's eye and maybe a little bit off her lips like that there we go at least off her teeth and maybe a little bit off in front of this eye now i don't want to do too much because of course that rather defeats the object of doing this just enough so we can see something going on there a little bit more selective i'm doing this very very slowly with a very small brush just to sort of make it all look about right as if i was just scratching it off in the real world okay so there we go that's done one final thing to do here is to come up to image adjustments hue saturation and then on the hue saturation box which is just off the screen there we go i'm just going to click on the colorize option and then colorize the icy frosty frame to match the picture below so it needs to be probably for me up in the high 180 190 something like that and there you go there's my final picture completed right well i guess i should probably go and put the window back in the shed before it actually freezes for real out there oh speaking of real when it came to lighting chloe it made no difference whether i was using a real frosted window or the virtual one the lighting was exactly the same on both now if you've enjoyed this video or you've got any questions leave me a comment below click on the bell icon and you'll never miss a video right here on adoramatv we have new stuff pretty much every single day and of course remember to click on that subscribe button i'm gavin hoey thanks for watching

Channel: Adorama

Views: 25,602

Keywords: adorama, adoramatv, adorama tv, winter photography, ice cold portraits, shoot winter portraits in the studio, how to, winter portraits in the studio, portrait, winter portrait photography, how to shoot and edit winter videos, studio portraits, winter photography ideas, flash photography, portraits, winter portraits, flashpoint, xplor 300 pro, flashpoint r2, olympus em1 mark iii, tether tools, portrait photography, studio photography, tutorial, learn photography, gavin hoey

Id: G9MAMOkgWTU

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021