Introduction To Dramatic Portraiture With Chris Knight | Chapter 1 PRO EDU Photography Tutorial

[Music] you [Music] shada emotion mood storytelling lighting these are all important elements of the dramatic portrait over the course of this tutorial we're gonna take you through all of these different ingredients and how they form the foundations and the pillars of portraiture and more specifically the dramatic portraiture this can be an intimidating process what kind of lights do I get where do they go what kind of power settings all of this can be a lot to take in and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna break it down and go step by step and dissect the tools that we use and how they can apply to how you speak the language of light so we're gonna start with the tools the technical side of lighting what like does how light behaves how we can shape it how we can manipulate it and how we can use it to work for us and it's kind of meant to be a little bit of a review but also just to make sure that everyone works on the same page and we're all kind of talking the same words in the same language then from there we're gonna work through three different shoots and we're gonna use the techniques that we cover in technical lighting and we're gonna continually build on them to create more complicated sets years ago when I was learning I hunted for behind the scenes videos and images that would help me dissect larger sets and so what we are gonna do is give you a total walk through in a behind the scenes just like you were being on set with me as we break down and walk through some pretty complicated setups all of the techniques are routed very firmly in the fundamentals that we're going to cover but you're gonna see as we build on those techniques and we compound the fundamentals to create these very dynamic very unique much more complex sets and we're gonna start with something relatively simple a single light setup I'm a big source and then we're gonna develop it and add to it and really create much more unique and and detailed and complex setups as we move through the process and you'll see me working through this whole process and figuring out problems and encountering obstacles and how I would address them and how I work around them we also have Lindsay Adler someone you might recognize she's gonna be assisting me on set which is a great collaborator if myself someone who shares a lot of sensibilities now you're gonna see a lot of attention being put on how we shape and craft light and that's obviously very important to the process but probably a more important part of the process is the idea of the narrative or storytelling or what the purpose of the shot happens to be and what we're really going to do is we're gonna break down this process and the ideas behind the shoot so that we can create light that helps fulfill the narrative not the other way around beyond the technical elements of the shoot the lighting and the set up and all of these things we're actually going to dig a little bit deeper we're gonna focus on the narrative the storytelling the purpose of the shot what what is really the meat of what these images are about probably much more important than just how to light it so we're really gonna dig into these images and we're going to explore the concept and what they're about and we're really gonna focus on that because it's actually a lot more important than just how we create the images technically I wanted to make this tutorial because I love the dramatic portrait and I love teaching and I've had several of these ideas floating around for quite a while you'll see in the third shoot it's something I've been working on for close to two years from the original concept to drawing it out and planning it out and really trying to make it happen so all of these images are personal projects of love for me and labors of love and it's something that I've personally invested a lot of time into production and planning of and we've spent a lot of time putting this together and the whole point was to just make the highest possible quality educational experience for you even though it may seem like we're working on a big set you can still take all of these tools and you can just shrink it down and it can work in a variety of ways and vice versa I personally shoot pretty small a lot of the time but all we're doing is increasing the scale so the concepts are universal the ideas are universal and the ways in which we work work across the board in whatever capacity you want to work so that you can make these dramatic images before we can explore the different ways to use light we have to look at not just how we see light but how we see a photograph the human brain is wired to pick up on certain things first and it's important to know what those things are so that we can decide as image makers if we're going to reinforce those perceptions or intentionally break them the middle we notice things in the center of the image first and we work outward toward the edges the brightest part our eyes are attracted to the most luminous part of the image this is one of the most important tricks of directing the eye areas of contrast our eyes also gravitate towards contrast and this can be done either through luminance or color specifically complimentary colors highly saturated colors warm colors more than cools the more saturated the color is the more our eyes notice it be careful not to overwhelm your viewer by making the entire image highly saturated use pockets of saturation to draw the eye exactly where you want it to go human faces we recognize faces even those that are out of focus or obscured and there's a hierarchy to this in the order faces in focus looking at camera faces and focus not looking at camera visible faces but out-of-focus backs of heads full bodies with a discernable face and then finally full body with no discernable face patterns we are drawn to patterns and shapes that don't occur naturally or often in nature additionally we're not wired to appreciate the pattern but instead seek to find the break in the pattern and we find these anomalies visually compelling what we look at first is important stepping back and asking ourselves the question what is the purpose of the shot is essential to the process it's a seemingly simple concept it's one that's often forgotten and dramatic portraiture we use the components of drama darkness shadow contrast expression and mood to shape our perception and feelings about a photograph so it's fundamental to know how to direct that response you [Music] all right so we're gonna begin by talking about a couple of different qualities of light now the point of this is not really to start from the become the same page so we're gonna be using a lot of different terms and some of the language of light and so as we progress through the course of this tutorial we should make sure everyone's on the same page so that's kind of where we're starting from here now the other thing you're going to see me use quite a bit is a light meter and I'm using a sekonic 3:58 light meters are super handy quick ways to read light and visualize what's happening in the scene and some people don't really like to use them which is fine there's not really you have to use it but I do find it super helpful so I will be using it a lot over the course of this tutorial so let's jump right into it we're gonna talk about the two main descriptors of light first probably the two most common things you'll hear when you talk about descriptions of light and that's gonna be hard light and soft light okay and we're gonna start with hard light now today we are shooting on the Pentax 645 Zee we're tethered directly into Lightroom and we have a pro photo d2 mono light as our key light and most of what you're gonna see here for a little bit is going to be just single light setup until we change otherwise and we have our model helping us out today this is Mariah she's gonna be standing in and be our demonstration for a lot of these characteristics so let's jump right into it we've got hard light or direct light in this particular case we talk about direct light a little bit later but this is hard light and hard light is defined by very abrupt transitions it's very contrasting light so if you pay really close attention to the shadow area of the face the shadows by the nose you'll see that the edge of the shadow is pretty hard now you'll also notice that hard light tends to be very specular and what that means is it really accentuates a lot of the highlights so over on this side of the face you see that the shiny bits are all picked up and they're pretty visible hard lights also can accentuate texture sometimes you want this sometimes you don't it really depends on who your subject is and what you want them to look like so remember as we move through this there's not really a right or wrong way it really always ends up on preference and what your personal preference is so it's a really important characteristic of it we're just going to talk about the different ways you can use it because at the end of the day most photographers use the same tool box we use the same kinds of light we use the same kinds of modifiers it's just really a matter of how you want to articulate your vision and how you want to articulate those tools to to facilitate the final image so we're gonna start with direct light direct hard light and it's pointed directly at the subjects face okay you can see I move it around we just kind of have this centered on the subjects face and what I'm gonna do here I'm a 1/8 power but I'm gonna grab my my flash meter and I'm gonna point it right at the subjects face and I'm gonna meet her it right on the face and it's telling me f10 so I'm gonna set my camera to f10 I want to take a quick little shot here no right and here we are okay so as you can see especially when we zoom in quite a bit right we can see this hard defined shadow on the edge of the nose and that is what we really want to pay attention to so that's hard light it's gonna be a very crystal e defined edge specular light it's a very contrasting light overall and that's what we've got right here now moving on we're gonna add a softbox to this light to create soft light there's a lot of different ways you can create soft light you can bounce it off a wall you can run it through a diffuser it can be clouds if you imagine hard light being the Sun the clouds make the light soft it's a way to modify light and we're gonna talk a little bit more about hardness and softness a little bit more specifically later but we're just gonna add a softbox to it and this is a four by six softbox and on the inside you have an inner baffle okay this is double baffled and this does a couple of things one it's gonna soften the harshness of the hot spot in the middle which we're talked about a little bit more in a second and also it's going to spread the light a little bit more evenly throughout the entire shape of the softbox so this is ultimately going to change this light which we're not going to change the power of we're not going to change the position of two too much and it's basically going to change the characteristic of that light into something much softer okay now you could already see the light is drastically different we have the light the middle of it pointed at her face roughly and it has completely changed the appearance of the shadow on the background before it was very very hard and now you almost can barely see it at all the transitions on the side of the face become much softer on the nose becomes much softer and overall the light becomes less aggressively contrasting now the other benefit of soft light is it tends to diminish the appearance of texture and also lowers specularity so soft the soft soft light ends up looking a lot more flattering on a lot of different skin types you don't necessarily always want like to look super flattering sometimes you want that more aggressive appearance that you get from hard light but this becomes a way to soften the light as a different aesthetic now we're gonna meter this again so before I was at f10 and I've got two baffles on it which should force me to lose a little bit of light but just as a double check let's meet it by the face and I've gone to nine so I only lost about a third of a stop go okay so if we zoom in on the face you'll notice the catch light becomes much larger it's much more visible the trend the edge of the shadow becomes much less abrupt and overall the skin looks quite a bit softer we compare it between the hard light and the soft light we can see pretty dramatic changes in the overall image overall like the light the position the light hasn't changed it's still coming from the same sign the background becomes lit a little bit more smoothly and the face also becomes lit a little bit more smoothly as well okay and that's soft light now we're gonna talk about hotspot I mentioned that a second ago so when light comes out of the source and it hits a modifier it is usually brighter in the center and a workaround for this with a lot of different soft boxes they have an interior baffle and that dissipates the light spreads it out a little bit more and it also helps fill the entire size of the softbox which is really helpful but a lot of people tend to just center the hotspot on the area they want to light so if you want to light this position what you'll end up doing is centering the light on it and what that does is it points the hotspot down in this general direction and that's not where we want to draw attention to we always want to draw the attention to the face and a portrait because it's the most important part of the photo so you want to make sure it's the brightest part of the photo so take a look at how obvious the hotspot becomes when we take the inner baffle out let's repeat her and what you're gonna see is a slight difference between the two where the chest on the right image gets a little bit hotter that becomes a little bit more obvious there's a tiny bit brighter maybe like a third of a stop maybe up to a half a stop and you can see the difference now where this stems from is something where we have to think about the shape of the light okay so light moves through space it moves through space in the shape of a cone its conical so that means it starts here it gets bigger the further it goes now obviously it loses power the further it goes but in the middle it's the brightest spot so that tends to be an area of light that can be really aggressive and we don't necessarily always want to use it so we want to use that area around the middle of the light and to do this we do something called feathering the light now I'm going to put the baffle back in to soften that light a little bit more okay and at the moment the light is pointed at hurt which in turn is lighting the background pretty evenly so I'm going to take one more just for control now that I've put the baffle back in great and we're here okay so we can clearly see the light on the background and the brightest part of the image is lighting her but if we turn this light we start to get a little bit less light on the background now she's still pretty relatively close to the background so this effect can actually be exaggerated even more if we were to pull her forward so I'm going to show you the difference between the two so this is flatten the image out by just turning it a little bit more off the background but you can see we've also lost a little bit of light on the face as a result but overall the image has a much more even appearance so to exaggerate this I'm going to bring the light in much closer to her and I'm going to show you how that effect changes and I'm again start with her being lit and the background being lit a little bit closer okay and then as I move this off the background and then can I have you scoot forward a little bit for me please good great you can see how it changes the appearance of the background and the image itself okay so we go lighter to darker on the background just by turning the light and using less of its shape alright so that covers the descriptors of light hard hard light soft light hotspot fall-off and feathering [Music] [Music] all right so we started talking about the bigger descriptors of light the hard light and the soft light we're going to kind of explore that a little bit more complexly and we're going to talk about direct light diffuse light and different kinds of reflected light direct reflected and diffuse reflected so we're gonna start with direct light and direct light as we mentioned in the first video hard light right so direct light is when the light travels from the source to the subject without anything in between it's usually very very hard and we're going to get a control on this just so we have a base to work from and we're gonna start with a little test okay all right 13 okay perfect okay and just to reiterate just like the hard light before direct light is gonna create these very harsh abrupt transitions these areas from light to dark so you can clearly see the definition the shadow it creates more specular more contrast alight and it's usually a little bit harsher and more aggressive direct light now let's move to diffuse lighten where the direct light might be something like the Sun or a bear strobe diffused light is when you get some kind of semi-transparent material of some capacity in front of the light and it's gonna change the quality light it's usually gonna soften it up a little bit so the clouds blocking the direct Sun is gonna soften the light diffusing the light diffuse light can come from a soft box or a scrim or you know part of the reflector a lot of different ways shower curtain a lot of different ways you can diffuse light we're gonna use a scrim just to briefly block that light and soften it up and so you can see instantly it softens all of the light oops right the shadow on the the faces become a little bit more gradual in their transition and overall it flattens the contrast of the overall image so we're gonna take a little brief meter on this hold it up a little bit perfect so we took us to nine so we lost about a stop on that great now at the moment the diffusion was relatively close to the light about this far away so it did soften it up a lot but it's still relatively hard compared to what we can do with it and the further the diffusion gets from the source the softer it will be so we're gonna do this one more time and we're gonna move the scrim a little bit further away from the source just to see the difference and then if you can swing back a little bit mangle perfect that's pretty good right there and this just doubled the distance it added about an extra foot we're gonna look at all three together and you can actually see a noticeable difference between the three images so obviously huge difference between the first and the other two if the shadow becomes a whole lot more gradual but if you actually look at the difference between the second and third and the second image the no shadow is a whole lot more defined and in the third the whole thing kind of meshes together a little bit more and you create overall softer light so the further your diffusion is from the light source itself the softer it will be all right let's take this out of here good okay difference between direct and diffuse now we're gonna move on to reflected light and the two main ways we describe reflected light are going to be direct reflected and diffused reflected and there's a little bit of variability in the diffuse reflected light direct is pretty simple it's like a mirror and so we're gonna bring the mirror in and kind of like playing pool and it bounces off the corner right it's it's very angular in a straight line so the mirror doesn't actually change the quality of light from the original source so the original source in this particular case is still a hard direct light so the light that bounces off of this onto the subject is gonna be pretty hard and if you kind of take a look at the wall over here from this shot you can this light creating its own shadow on the wall and if you look at the source here on this wall they're actually pretty similar in relative hardness softness of light this one's gonna be a little bit more contrast II because this one's less power we're losing power on the distance so it travels there it hits here and it comes off as opposed to just going from there to here and so the distance from there to there is less than them going from here to here so it's less powerful but the quality of light stays the same hard light here hard light here you can use a mirror as fill or you can use a mirror bouncing that main light off and changing to key and we're actually going to talk about the jobs of light key light and fill light a little bit later but just know that diffused or reflected light usually direct reflection or diffuse reflection light usually works pretty well as a weighting to manipulate the shadows so we saw the direct light with nothing first and we're going to use that as the control and now that we have this in we're going to get a little bit of fill on that side I'm moving my aperture back up a full one full stop because we got rid of that one stop diffusion so I know that I'm gonna have my exposure back up to that full stop okay and we're gonna compare the original hard light to this one and if you look really closely does the shadows have gotten a little bit brighter now this is an analog system analog system means we can't change the power so it would dial but it can change the power through distance so any time we use a diffuse reflection or a direct reflection or we use scrims or even a lot of times when we use these lights whether you're using continuous lights or strobes one of the ways you can change the power is the dial there the way you can change the power is through distance so if we move the mirror in its going to create a stronger effect and we're going to have a brighter fill now we go bigger difference there now the other thing we have to pay close attention to when you're using reflection is the angle so at the moment the lights coming in from the side and it's creating this clear reflection on the jaw but if you just want to fill the shadows in more evenly you want to make this film or from the front because that's the plane where the camera is gonna be you're gonna have less of this dark area in the middle which can look a little bit unflattering so I'm gonna kind of fill this around from the front unfortunately I have a little bit on the background but it's not super noticeable and you can see just by rotating the angle of the fill we could actually change the appearance I think the one on the right looks a little bit more natural and it looks a little bit more flattering you don't get that weird area in the middle of the face where you don't have filled in shadows but you can kind of see a little bit of the two sources coming in because it is really aggressive this isn't necessarily my preferred way to reflect but you can kind of see the effect alright let's take that out of there all right next we're gonna get to diffuse deflection and diffuse deflection can come about in a lot of different capacities you can use a reflector you can use a V flat you can even use an umbrella it's basically light hitting a surface but instead of bouncing back like a pool ball at the same angle it's gonna hit the sub hit the object and just scatter and diffused reflection is usually the softest and some people think prettiest way to reflect light and you'll see it in white you'll see it in silver gold and you'll see zebra surfaces which are a combination of different things the couple that we're gonna look at we've got a white and a silver reflector and we've also got a V flat and we're going to show you both how that looks as a fill light and our saree has a fill and also as a key and they can both work in a variety different ways to quickly manipulate your single source so thank you first thing we've got it's just a simple handheld reflector this one's got a silver and a white but you'll see that these come in a whole lot of different configurations you've got five and ones where they've got the diffusers on the inside and black on one side zebra on another and they're all great I always say that though these reflect your kits are like the Swiss Army knife for photographers they're really one of the most useful things you can carry around in your bag if you're going to shoot on location it's it's it's what one of the first things I'll grab now the silver reflection kind of exists somewhere in between that soft white totally massively diffused light and the mirror so if the silver is going to be a little bit harder a little bit more aggressive and a little bit more contrast II so I'm going to show you the differences between a silver and a white as a way to manipulate fill so come on in for me okay so we're gonna start with the silver and let's actually drop it for control just so we get one more take it all the way out great alright so we're back to this and let's bring the silver in bring it a little bit more around to the front for me please and then point it perfect okay we're going to look at the two of these side-by-side great so you can see it's not quite as strong as the mirror but it is still pretty punchy let's bring the white in as well great and then we're gonna look at all three of these together side by side there we go okay so on the Left we've got nothing in the middle we've got silver reflector it's a little bit brighter and a little bit more contrast II and then the right side it brings up those shadows a little bit in a pretty even way again analog system closer it comes to the subject the brighter it is the further away the darker it is now also we're just manipulating shadows here if we want to use this as a way to manipulate the key becomes a really useful way to soften your key light so what we're gonna do is we're going to flip the head around and we're gonna bounce the light off of the white side and the silver side to show you the difference in a pinch I have been used assisting I've been used when I was wearing a white t-shirt as a reflector or I've even had lights bounce off of a white shirt so it just really needs to be a white surface can be be really handy so we're gonna start with the silver great now the thing about hand-holding this is you end up getting a lot of variety so you want to make sure the person holding it tends to really know how to point the light but you can kind of see how we can angle the light and it really changes the quality of it depending upon how it moves around okay you'll also notice it's pretty hard let's go right there it's pretty hard right here but it's a little bit softer and we're also gonna lose quite a bit of light when we do this so I'm at 8 I was at 13 so I lost about one and a third stops and so it softens the light a little bit but it's still pretty contrasting obviously a bigger reflector further away is going to soften this light more and the closer the light is to your source the harder it's going to be let's flip it around let's do the white great now the white unfortunately loses even more power that's kind of the trade-off it's gonna make the light softer prettier but it is going to drastically diminish its power but 6-3 okay and if we look at the two especially when we look really closely under the eye we can really see how those shadows have softened up tremendously becomes a nice easy quick way to soften the light another way to create reflected light is to use an umbrella same idea bounce umbrella right two kinds of umbrellas we we commonly use shoot through in a bounce we're talking about reflection so we are going to use a bounce umbrella and usually umbrellas come in white or silver you'll also see sometimes gold you'll notice I didn't use a gold reflector before either because I think they always look pretty terrible so I never use gold for anything I'm only gonna use white and silver so we're gonna use a white umbrella I almost always gravitate toward white umbrellas you lose a little bit of power but it usually presents a softer a softer lighting that's generally just what I personally tend to go for so we're gonna use a giant large Profoto umbrella so it's a pro photo deep so it's a parabolic it's a little bit deeper great that's fine I'm a big fan of umbrellas I find that umbrellas are probably one of the most hated on and underappreciated kinds of modifiers out there umbrella has been used for a really long time and they work really well and they're relatively inexpensive so so I'm a big fan of them people always say they don't really give you as much control they do if you if you kind of not use them and they're they're really easy to use so what we have right now is a giant umbrella and it's kind of lighting or pretty pretty evenly we're just wanna make sure that it's pointed at her face I'm gonna bring that up a little bit alright and I'm gonna take one quick little test shot here whose all right support 14 think I changed the power a little bit all right and so we have is this really beautifully soft light that kind of just paints the entire scene with with light now there's different ways you can modify this you can also add a diffusion to it so it becomes diffused reflected with an extra layer of diffusion that's gonna make it even softer and diminish the power a little bit and we'll get there a little bit later but for now just basic diffuse light now the cool thing about this is it is actually a lot more adjustable than people necessarily want to give it credit for so we can feather it just like we would the softbox and at the moment it's lighting the scene right if you turn this you can really control what that lights looking like so just as an example still the same power on her and the background light is gonna change a bit this basically takes all the light off the background and then we can also kind of go somewhere in between the two like this and it's three ways to feather or sorry three ways to control that umbrella light I'm gonna do one more on this last one so we can exaggerate that a little bit more you know very subtle differences in how the umbrella can control both your subject in the background all right so the other key way to change the umbrella is by manipulating the focus so if you look at this background you can see the shadow cast by the umbrella is pretty soft as I move the umbrella closer in that shadow gets really hard and the same kind of thing happens on the face you start to see a more clearly defined shadow right next to the nose so if you want the light to be a little bit harder you bring it in if you want it to be a little bit softer you push it out and so that's just an extra way to manipulate the shadow or or control the the transition the hardness of the softness of light with these umbrellas okay now we're gonna bring in the flats and for the sake and consistency we're going to take this umbrella out go back to the hard key [Applause] yep okay so back to the hard key now we're going to re meter this obviously all right so we're bringing in the B flat and again we we took a look at diffuse reflection which is exactly what this V flat is going to be but the benefit of this is it's bigger which means it's gonna be softer and it also has the capacity to cover a full body because it's so big now V flats usually or often you'll see are white on one side and black on the other and the black allows you to create something called negative fill which we're gonna talk about a little bit more later but we're just going to use it as a way to manipulate the fill on the shadow side and then we're gonna use it as a key light to show you how to create soft light when you don't have a softbox and you need to in a pinch so let's go ahead and bring that soft V flat in so we brought the V flat in relatively close remember this is again an analog system so the closer it is the brighter the fill is going to be the more you back it up the less powerful that fill is going to be and so basically what we're doing is we're coming in and we're just filling in the shadows on this side of the face nuts there we go one more time all right let's turn that down a little bit so we get it closer to where it was before everything was a date - that's better okay so now this is pretty close and we're going to use let's take it out as a comparison shot just to kind of show you what that looks like okay so the image on the left has the V flat in pretty close image on the right has no V flat and you can kind of see how it allows us to brighten up the shadows a little bit alright so you may be asking why are we spending so much attention talking about filling in the shadows well it has largely to do with the idea of I've given ourselves the most flexibility in post-production so if you kind of visualize the develop module whether you're in Lightroom or capture one I use Lightroom you've got black shadows exposure which is the mid-tones you got highlights and whites and so what I like to do especially when I'm shooting a lot of dark low key tones is really make sure my shadow tones are squarely in that shadow range and so usually what I'll do is I'll bring a little bit more control a little bit more fill into the shadows just so I have a little bit more control and basically what I try to isolate especially when I'm doing really dramatic the lit stuff and so I'll try to put the highlight tones the the key light tones squarely in the highlight so as I move the highlight slider it moves that pretty much by itself and then when I put this in the shadow tones I can actually control what the shadows on the face look like just with one slider and just gives me a lot of flexibility so you know all that all that said that's why I'm spending so much attention on the the crafting the controlling of the shadows now we're going to take the V flat that same tool and we're going to use it as a key light so we're gonna put it over in the corner where the key light is and we're just going to bounce the light into it now bouncing a light into a V flat cheap easy usually pretty versatile solution to be able to create soft light again it's about distance the more inside the V flat your light is the harder it will be and the more it comes out the softer it will be but you know that you're gonna be exponentially losing power the further it goes so there's a little bit of a threat as far as how far you can move it we're gonna do a little test on this okay and there you go that is a simple soft light via diffused reflection so don't necessarily always think that diffuse reflection has to always be reflection for the fill you can also use that same idea to manipulate the light for the key so what we've covered direct light diffuse light and then different kinds of reflected light including direct reflection and diffuse reflection [Music] [Music] all right so we've talked about hardness and softness alight but what really determines hardness and softness of light well you might think it's about diffusion or modification or power but it's actually about size or relative size so the smaller a light source is in relation to the subject the harder it's going to be think of the Sun it's massive and large but it's also millions of miles away so even though it's a big light source it's very small compared to us so it's very hard specular contrast the light but when you have the clouds blocking it the light source becomes much larger relative to us and it becomes much softer so yes we can modify light to make it softer we can also change the distance we're going to illustrate this in a few different concepts we're gonna start by using a relatively small light source then we're gonna change it to a larger version of that light source and then we're going to move that large light source so that you can see how the hardness and softness changes with distance so we're gonna start with this Profoto small umbrellas now the reason we're using a small is only to kind of illustrate size differences softboxes come in a variety different sizes and the same principles apply but we're going to be using the umbrellas to illustrate the concept today so we're gonna start with this small umbrella it's a small white umbrella it's relatively soft light but the edges are a little bit harder than they might be with a a bigger light source so again this is where we're starting small umbrella it works just to like the face probably wouldn't want to use this kind of an umbrella to light the whole body to increase the size of the spread we'd back the light off but when you increase the size of the spread you're also changing the way the light looks so even though it might light the the figure more more evenly it's gonna change the overall contrast it's gonna change the hardness or softness of light so what you end up seeing and what you're going to see over the course of this we have to light either a larger group of people or a larger scene all we're going to do to maintain that level of softness is just increase the size of the modifier so that's what we're gonna do now so we've now got the larger this is an excel umbrella and it comes in a variety of sizes we've gone from small to excel to really illustrate the point you're not gonna see a huge difference between like a large and an XL you're not gonna see a huge difference between maybe a four and a five-foot octa but you know there is there is still a little bit of a difference it's just Illustrated a little bit more clearly here now by using a really large modifier which is what you're gonna see us doing over over the next few days is we're doing something I like to call broad brush lightening painting with a big brush which is to say I'm using one giant source to light the scene pretty evenly a common mistake that you see a lot is a lot of people will when they need to light a bigger scene bring in more lights all the way around and that's going to change the overall shape of the light so if you want the light to look like it comes from one big source and still be soft you just got to increase the size of the modifier so that's what we're doing now so we've gone from the small umbrella we're now at the large umbrella we're gonna do a quick little reading on this that's the same and if we look closely especially at the nose shadow what you end up seeing in this image is there's a little bit less overall contrast with this larger light source because the lights bouncing more places and all around the scene so what you're actually seeing is the shadow side is a little bit lighter in the large umbrella size and the definition on the shadow shape is a little bit more gradual in this bigger source so if you want that softer prettier softer light you're gonna want to go with a much bigger source now the light source is relatively close to the subject I can move it in closer I can really make it big and soft and so I'm gonna show you as we change the actual position that's the next big important thing we have to think about when it comes to modifying the source so I'm gonna bring this in real close and we're gonna meter this okay it's a little bit brighter two-thirds of a stop so we're gonna bring it up to eight and we're not going to see a huge difference between these two but it may give us a little bit of a difference so the one extra benefit it is a little bit softer and we can see it especially by the nose in that transition but because we brought it in closer and we haven't changed the power of the light we've ended up making these shadows darker so when you bring the light closer your and you don't adjust the power you effectively have to change the f-stop to incorporate it which is don't have the darks darker alright so we've taken a look at this larger umbrella relatively close now we're gonna do is we're gonna push it quite a bit back probably n 12 feet and we're to change the relative size of it to show you the difference in how the light looks now we're also as we change this not just changing the distance but in order to keep the light the same the lighting pad on the face relatively the same we're gonna raise it up a little bit to keep the angle consistent we got to kind of move it back at the angle that was coming in at see better about right here there we go something like that that's alright we'll make do okay okay so we were right here when it was closed we're also gonna lose a whole lot of power out of this as well so let's take a little meter okay so we've gone down to 3-2 huge loss of power and it's completely changed the look of the image it's lowered the overall contrast it's changed the quality of light and truth be told it kind of defeats the purpose of using a larger umbrella like this or a large modifier for that you know for that matter so if you you've got a big modifier you really want to make it look soft bring it in close and you'll get that soft light because when you bring it further away you might as well be using a smaller modifier and you're not really getting a lot of these soft characteristics out of the light that you would if you had it closed now we've lost a lot of power just to kind of illustrate the difference on the last image we were at 6-3 so I'm now at 3-2 I need to increase the power a little bit to see if we can get something comparable to at least show you how to fix that distance that's kind of meter that not yet I was about at 7 before so we actually may not even be able to get it all the way up to 6-3 that's the total loss of power out of this good up to 9 as you can see it takes a little bit of finagling okay that's close enough what about a third of a stop off okay so even at about the same aperture the difference is massive you're just not getting anywhere near the same mood to the shot when you pull that modifier all the way back although relative size is usually the big determining factor for hardness or softness of light there's one key exception and that's an exception that we're going to be using a little bit over the course of this tutorial the scrim and it's because the scrim is probably one of the biggest modifiers you can get it comes in a lot of different sizes we were to bring out a six a six footer in a second six foot eight foot and even much bigger than that because generally speaking when you just want to light more of the scene you just make the modifier bigger but the scrim has a variety of ways you can work with that and that's because the light position behind the scrim changes and that changes the way the light that comes through it looks and so we're going to show you a few different variations on that on that's kind one of the great things about the scrim is you can really shape the quality of light to be exactly what you want it to be by how you manipulate the light behind it imagine being able to change the position of the light inside a softbox and it's kind of that idea so let's go ahead and bring the scrim in I'm gonna swing around I'm gonna go this way and you come around to me uh-huh all right great good well we're gonna make it work bring it swimming around a little bit more great and then we're gonna angle it a little bit a little bit more great let's bring it up keep going great that's probably good right there we're gonna a little bit lower he's gonna be sitting so yeah good all right so we just put up the scrim and we brought in a boom arm so we can have a little bit more accessibility and range of movement as far as putting the light in the middle of the scrim and as we said a second ago this is a little bit of a different way to use the size of the source and we can manipulate it a little bit more and this is a six-foot Wescott scrim Jim Auto boom and so we're gonna start with the light relatively close to the scrim and if you look on the other side of the scrim you can actually see the shape of the light it's about this big okay and that helps us visualize what kind of source the lights gonna be and when it's really close the light is relatively small as you back it up the cone gets bigger so we're gonna start with it pretty pretty small it's still pointed interface but you'll also notice the light is pretty hard it's not super hard but it's pretty hard so you still have these pretty clearly defined shadows by the nose and on the cheek and everything else so we're gonna get a little meter on this and it's pretty bright we're def 13 the light itself is pretty much at full power so you can see that even through this one-stop of diffusion we're still getting a pretty pretty decent aperture out of it there we go okay so we have lots of contrast II light the shadows are still pretty dark because we are shooting an F 13 if we were to lower that aperture down for an F 13 lower the power we'd end up lightening up those shadows a little bit we can also if we wanted to bring in a white V flat to fill in those shadows so a couple of different ways that we can manipulate what this light looks like now we're going to take this this boom we're gonna back it up a little bit and what that's gonna do is it's gonna change the spread of that that cone of light it's gonna fill more of the scrimp it's gonna make the light softer but as it spreads its gonna dissipate and we're also gonna lose a little bit of power so let's move that back kind of as far as we can there you go great now you can see this almost instantly so if you do me a favor bring it in close again pay close attention to the shadow on the face here and you can see it becomes a really defined when it's closed and then as it backs away that shadow softens up tremendously so we're down to nine we lost a bow to stop and so it's really only gone back a couple of feet but you can already see there's a difference between the two they're still a pretty clearly defined shadow over on that side of the vase but it is much softer and obviously the further we moved it back the softer it would be now we're gonna do one more thing to in a to increase the size of the spread in a smaller space and we're actually going to run a modifier through it and so sometimes you'll see an octa box be shot through a scrim which cuts the light down a little bit but it's also going to create a larger spread for the scene what we're gonna use is an umbrella and the reason I like to use an umbrella on this particular method is because it come almost completely eliminates the hotspot altogether the benefit of using a diffuse reflection source like an umbrella already doesn't have a hot spot using the light shot straight to the scrim is going to create a hot spot and the same for the same reason that we use double diffusion on the larger 4x6 softbox to soften that hot spot up this is kind of sort of doing the same thing but it's bouncing before it gets in which is soughing the light up even more of course it's also cutting down on the power a lot so we're gonna be shooting an F 10 I'm sorry we're gonna be shooting it at 10 full power on this so you're actually gonna see a big loss of power but it's gonna spread more evenly across the scrim it's gonna give us a more even soft light source all the way through okay so let's wheel this out a little bit you know hold that for me right there just hold that in okay okay all right something like that all right just hold that for me he's gonna slide around a little bit all right so the light giraffe they could be gonna come down so we were at nine we're coming down to six three so we lost another stop out of that but in the process we've created much softer light and so here's the three and you'll see a little bit of a difference between two and three not as much as you would between one and two or two and three but the difference between one and three is is pretty drastic so you see it just adds a little bit more softness to the light and obviously the further it goes back the softer it becomes I like shooting it this way because it tends to eliminate a hot spot and it just helps give you a little bit more of that soft painterly light across the whole image so there you go that is using relative size to change the hardness and softness and light both we started with a small umbrella we moved to a large umbrella and then we move that large umbrella back to change the quality of that light then we brought in the big exception to that which is the scrim which is what you're gonna see a little bit over the course of the the next few videos [Music] [Music] all right now we're going to talk about the position of light the relative position of light and what those positions of light due to the lighting patterns on the face so as you've seen the light moves around and when the light moves around your subject that changes how things look on the subjects face there's a couple of different ways you can change how the light appears on your subjects face and one of it one of those ways is by physically moving the light and notice how the patterns on the face change okay the more the light goes to the side be more dramatic your light will be obviously the position around the subject isn't the only way you can manipulate the lighting pad on the face you can also hmm we go you can also move it up and down which we're going to get to in just a second but for now we're going to use the position of light to articulate what those terms mean when the light moves around the face so if we start all the way over here on the side we have something known as split light point that down a little bit there we go and split light cuts the subjects face in half and puts half of the fast half of the face in shadow hence why we call it split now I'm gonna take a little reading on this just so we can take a photo let me go all right now it's a super super dramatic light half that faces in shadow half of the faces in the light it's to the side it rakes across the face so it's not necessarily always most flattering light but it is super dramatic as the light comes around a little bit more the next position we're gonna take a look at is something known as Rembrandt light named after the Dutch painter Rembrandt and because he was notorious for this triangle of light on the unlit side of the face that is what we are creating and you can see that by putting half the face in light and the other half is in shadow except for this triangle of light there's a couple of things we look for when we're doing Rembrandt light one of those things is making sure we have a catch light in both eyes we can see the reflection of the light in both eyes and we want to make sure this triangle is closed and that's usually one of the key descriptors of that and it can be a small triangle it can be a big triangle as soon as the triangle opens up it becomes something different and as soon as the triangle goes away it becomes split so it kind of works in between it's this really great way to show dramatic light but also put both of the eyes in like now what you'll notice under the nose right now is that light is pointed to the side and it's creating this lit area above the mouth that can be a little bit distracting the way we get around that is either by moving the subjects face and she can tilt down a little bit keep that straight good tilt your head down and then tilt your head up and you can kind of see how it changes when she tilts her head up makes it a little bit more obvious as she tilts her head down keep going that triangle closes in so obviously the higher the light is the more that triangle points down so if we could also do this if we raised it up we could also change the shape of that triangle so just a couple of different ways we can articulate this pattern and we can fine tune it and the Rembrandt light is going to look something like this and there we are we get that triangle on the unlit side of the face at the moment it's a little bit high I can't quite see the catch lights in her eyes so I could either ask her to raise her head or and perfect a little bit less for me please that's great I'd open just a little bit more there you go or we could lower the light and either one of those two solutions would introduce the catch light into the eyes just brings a little bit more life back to the eyes now as this light moves around you'll notice that triangle opens up and now we've got is something called loop and the loop light pattern puts that little loop shadow right next to the nose it can be pretty long like this or it can be pretty short like this and obviously the height is gonna change the appearance of that as well bringing it down is gonna make it shorter closer to the nose bringing it up is gonna make it longer so one is not more correcting the other that's just what they do and it looks something like this okay there we go as we keep moving the light over it's gonna be a little bit tricky here we go okay usually you want to put this on something like a boom arm and the nose shadow goes just underneath the nose turn your face a little bit more to the light perfect you get something called butterfly light or known by its other name paramount light because it was used by the Hollywood studios back in the day specifically to Paramount movie studio and so again when it's relatively low the shadows kind of short right here as you raise it up the shadow gets longer the other benefit of this is as you raise it up the cheekbones become a little bit more defined and that looks like this turn your face a little bit more light for me please perfect great and then of course this changes the next shadow as well when it's high up you've got a really strong neck shadow as I lower it the next shadow changes great there hasn't been too much of a discrepancy in light which is why I haven't really been rimi during it's a it's adjusted a tiny tiny bit but especially as we moved it around the side I kept the distance away from the subject about the same and that's why you didn't really see me adjusting the lights too much now this pattern is important to remember with the patterns that it has nothing to do with the position of me it has nothing to do with the position of the subject in this case which way she's turning it has everything to do with the way the shadows look on the face and that's usually how we you that's how we use these terms as a descriptor also it's worth noting that just knowing these terms doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it right in terms of light in the face because there's a lot of variations and you may you want to be be prepared to be receptive to variations in the lighting pattern you don't always have to go in and say I'm gonna create Rembrandt light or I'm gonna create split light it can just be a good way to think about starting somewhere and then kind of getting a little bit creative but know that the more light goes to the side the more drama and contour you get so at the moment we have the light straight up our eyes face if I have her turn a little bit this way so the lighting pattern has changed but if I move the light to the front of her it's still paramount light okay because even though she's turned it's at her front it's creating that light under the nose so there are a lot of different ways you can get a variety of lighting patterns okay so in this particular case we're going to move the subject so do me a favor turn back to the front for me please okay and we're not going to move the light we're only gonna move the subject okay so we have Rembrandt light from the front it's a pretty harsh Rembrandt we're almost losing the eye we're almost into split but it's still a Rembrandt if let's rotate you a little bit perfect good we've now just by moving her put her in split and then do me a favor turn back this way that's good we're in loop and then turn a little bit more for me please perfect we're in a profile I'm gonna tweak a little bit there we go and that's our paramount so we can get this variety of patterns just by moving the subject it's also important to know there are two other important descriptors when it comes to talking about these lighting patterns and that's broad light and short light and broad light basically means turn your face to me the side closest the camera is lit that's broad light turn back this way short light means the light closest the camera is more in shadow those are the two big sort descriptors you don't really get it so much with paramount light but you get it with loupe you get it with Rembrandt and you get it with split okay so what that basically means is you actually get to dictate overall drama more shadow more drama and you can also use as a way to change the shape of your subjects face so if you want to broaden out the subjects face you would use broad light makes the face look a little bit more broad if you wanted to narrow your subjects face you could shoot it more in short light put it more in shadow and it makes the face appear a little bit more narrow so a couple of different ways that you can go about changing the shape of your subjects face so this is kind of how you can decide which way to go with broad light or short light once you figure out your subjects best side which often times it's the left but you know you want to experiment both sides see which way it goes the best is your left side okay it's her left eye most people will tell you most people are really really aware most people already know what their good side is another good way is when you're talking with your subject before you shoot you'll notice they kind of lean in one way versus the other and it becomes a good way to to figure out what the best side is so it's our left and we're gonna do Rembrandt in broad and short so we're looking for that triangle on the unlit side of the face and we're gonna do one where she's facing the camera and broad light so do me a favor turn your face a little bit turn a little bit more great and I'm gonna move the light to accommodate and now we have is the Rembrandt light because the triangle on the unlit side of the face looks like that which is great and then we're gonna go the other method and I'm going to bring this around keep the face exactly where it is and I'm going to create that same look that same triangle of light on the unlit side of the face here as a different variety and there we go two different ways to show Rembrandt light can be broad light or it can be short lane again this works for all kinds of different lighting patterns split loop and Rembrandt becomes just different ways to show to show drama relative position so I'm gonna move around and I'm gonna have her face move with me so you can see how the light changes as I move so we're gonna start right here all right come here come a little bit more drastically and then we'll come this way and I'm gonna get a little bit of the background showing when I move all the way this way but turn back to me good well it's pretty dark so so what we have is a series of images where I'm moving and the subject is shifting to me but the light is not it changes the way the light shows up so it's just one easier way or it's another way to to change light and sometimes it's a little bit easier to do one sometimes a little bit easier to do the other depends on how many lights you have what's happening with your subject so forth and so on now the other one it's height so I'm gonna bring this light in and I'm gonna put it right at about the pace okay all right I'm gonna go really low I'm gonna go right at the plane of the camera and I'm gonna go above and it's gonna change it from aggressive down lighting to very very flat lighting to up lighting just based on where I'm shooting from and the cool thing about this is you can use height as a way to manipulate the appearance of things turn your face down to me a little bit perfect right at me and then we're gonna bring in the ladder that's great okay cute and my position the frame changed a little bit but you can see that the height of the shadow completely changes as well so it goes from down lighting to up lighting the light didn't move no thing that moved was my position so the other part we're going to look at this is we looked at relative height so let's actually move it physically so we get that as a as a comparison so at the moment the light is relatively low and it's creating light that's relatively flat because it's relatively close to the plane of the camera but if we angle it down you raise it up we can create this light really contours the cheekbones also help if it's not in front of my friend okay now what you have to worry about when you do this is going so high you scull out the eye sockets and you don't get catch lights in the eyes and this can be a thing like this can be what you want but know that when you do it it definitely creates an effect that is real dark on the eyes oops there we go and this is an exaggerated version obviously so be careful out going too far here it is relatively close to the plane of the camera you can see it because the no shadow is pretty close as the nose shadow gets longer and then longer and longer and longer you start to get these sculling of the eye effects I thought if you want contour that middle image is probably your sweet spot if you want something a little bit flatter than one on the left probably to make a little bit more sense we've now done physical position of the light we've done lighting patterns we've done relative position of the light both horizontally and vertically what that means so now we're gonna take the model and we're gonna take the light we're gonna move it together in relation to the background and that's gonna shape the way the background looks however close you are to the background shapes the way the background looks and for this we're gonna throw a softer modifier on the light because it helps control and shape the light a little bit more this hard light tends to spread the light in every direction pretty substantially so we're just going to put a 4-foot octa to help guide it a little bit more give us a little bit more control so I'm gonna have you move all the way back to the background please and we're going to keep the distance and the power between the light and and and the subject the same angle this down just a little bit we go so we're probably a couple feet couple feet away from our subject and then do me a favor let's meter that please okay we're def 11 all right we have a really nice soft beautiful light now we're gonna move her probably up about six feet and you could see we have quite a bit of light on the background relatively similar distance and that background has already gotten much much darker there we go we look at the two together we can see substantial difference between the backgrounds in both of those two shots and then we're gonna do one more and we're gonna make it even darker so let's move you all the way up to the front a little bit more great and the idea here is that you can get a much larger versatility of your environment your backgrounds and a lot more manipulation of what that's going to look like if you just learn to control the distance between the two the further away your subject is from the background the less lights getting it the darker it's going to be and bring it a little bit more this way right yep right cool all right and those are the three images so we started relatively close to the background got a lot of light on it as we move the subject off the background less light on the background still a little bit of light as we moved her even further off the background just got darker and darker so it gives you a really great flexibility simply without having to control any kind of lighting back here about what that lights gonna look like if you want more light on the background you move your subject post or light if you want less on the background you it further away and so that gives us the position of light physical position relative position and relative position of your subject to the background [Music] so one of the more helpful ways to think about lighting is to think about intent or purpose so if you give your light a job that sometimes makes it a lot easier to think about sometimes a light can have multiple jobs sometimes it may only have one for example a light may light the subject and the background doing two things but it will help us understand and segment and organize our light if we think about what they do a little bit more specifically so that's we're gonna do we're gonna break down jobs of light for the most part when you're lighting people it most like falls into one of these one of these descriptors so the first light we're gonna take a look at is the key for the main light and this is the one that we have on right now and the key light of the main light dictates the overall look and feel of your image and we've already metered everything out and pre lit everything so it's all kind of set up and ready to go but the idea behind it is to just kind of pay attention to what each of these lights do so we're gonna look at each of them individually and then each of them as they add and build to lighting the scene so like I said first light key light main light it's a four foot octa box and we are sitting here at f11 and by itself the four foot octa box looks like this all right and it's dictating the overall look and feel the scene it's lighting Mariah in a loop style of light almost a Rembrandt it's pretty dramatic you'll notice there's not a whole lot of light on the background so we're gonna really divide everything off so we have this light it's pretty dark over in the shadow side so if we wanted to brighten that up we would want to manipulate the shadows and we talked a little bit earlier about different ways to manipulate the shadows using reflectors white reflectors silver reflectors you can also use lights lights give you a little bit more flexibility a little bit more control and so in this particular case for our fill light we've got a four by six softbox and the reason I like to use something like this I like to use a really big modifier for my fill light the point of that is I don't actually like my feel like to be obvious and I likely to be obtrusive into the lighting of the image so if you remember when we brought in the mirror and we brought in the V flat to the side it was really obvious when it was too much to the side but if you shift it more to the front it starts to become a little bit less noticeable and it controls the contrast of the scene in a way that is more even and less obvious so I like to use a big soft modifier some capacity right behind camera or relatively near to camera so doesn't create any of those weird shadows in the front so that's what we've got here we're gonna take a look at the fill light by itself and then we're gonna take a look at the combination of the two now it's important to note that my exposure through this whole thing isn't changing the key light f11 my exposure isn't changing at all I'm only using this light to manipulate the fill so I'm going to talk about metering different lights at different settings that doesn't change the overall exposure the overall exposure is locked in so again f11 five six let's take a look at this by itself on f11 okay so the image itself is gonna look pretty dark it's meant to it's underexposed you're shooting something that meters f6 and f11 it's going to look dark that's the point what this tells me is what the shadows are now going to look like so that when I combine this with the key light it's gonna brighten up those shadows the shadows look more like this great perfect and when we look at the two images together we can see we've brought a bit of brightness into the shadows and we've lightened them up substantially now I lighten up this I'm gonna be able to if I turn the power up I'm gonna be able to lighten up the shadows and if I turn it down I'm going to darken the shadows so the benefit of using a fill light as opposed to a reflector is it gives you a lot more control and what you want those shadows to look like so the third light we're going to take a look at is the rim light and the rim lights job is to create separation of the subject to the background and some people like using a rim some people don't it introduces this concept of multiple obvious forms of light and some people prefer a light that feels more singular even when it's not this definitely says hey there are multiple lights happening in the scene and that's not inherently wrong it's just a preference so we're gonna turn this rim light on and this rim light is metered to balance the key which you'll see in a second which means the key in the rim have the same degree of power and the reason we're doing you know we're using a rim is to VAT up to two alternate values of light and dark because in a two-dimensional image the way that we create and show depth is through alternating light and dark or highlight and shadow that's what defines depth or bret breath in a two dimensional space and so we go light with the key then it goes dark with the shadow side of the face and then it goes light again with the rim and that shows volume and it shows it shows depth so I'm going to show you the rim light by itself and then we're gonna turn the rim light on with the fill and the key and in this particular case we're just using a nice small strip box which is giving us just a nice soft tightly controlled separation right there on the head and shoulder and so this when combined with everything else looks like this and then we're gonna take that and we're gonna combine it with the other lights so we started with the key we added in film and we add it in the rim now the last thing we're going to do is add a little bit of depth to the background for that we're going to use a background light so again four big descriptors key fill rim and background and for the background we have just a standard head with a 10 degree grid I'm going to turn this on nope there we go and I've got it positioned right behind the subjects head it's pretty even and so it's gonna look like this not really gonna see much of anything except the background it also creates a nice vignette on the background as well now there we go and then finally we turn everything on and we put it all together we've got the key the fill the rim and the background light and we get this okay and you don't have to use all these you can kind of use any combination you want you can use one or you can use many you can use twenty different lights to accomplish these four different things the point is just to kind of know what you want and really know what the intent of a light should be but it's just throwing up a bunch of lights and thinking that it should go this way or that way think about what the purpose of the light is and it's really going to help you a lot when planning out how to light your image [Music] [Music] alright so the next thing we're to talk about is lighting ratios now lighting ratios is kind of those things that I like to use as a way to teach and explain light but some people don't like to use lighting ratios for the same reason that some people don't like to use lighting meters and that's fine just know that when you learn with the light meter you tend to get a little bit more comfortable with specifically how light behaves and tends to get you there a little bit quicker at least initially you don't have to take the picture check the button check the camera and go back and forth now the more comfortable you get with your equipment probably the less you're going to use a light meter just because you know how it behaves you know when you put this modifier on or you move the light this much you dial it down this much it's going to behave in a way that you're familiar with but for our sake for the teaching portion of this the learning portion of this we're going to use the light meter and and we're going to explore the idea of lighting ratios which is to say we're going to take the key and we're going to manipulate the power of the fill to control the overall contrast of the image by controlling the contrast of the face which is how bright or how dark the face is so we're gonna look at a variety we're basically look at the range we're gonna look at a one-to-one where the shadow is even with the key and the lighting is very flat and we're gonna bring it down all the way to about the point where you start losing a bunch of information which is about a four stop range so as soon as you're about four stops underneath the key you start to lose a lot of detail but before we delve into that you've heard me mention stops quite a bit and so let's just for a second discuss what stops are every three clicks of your wheel whether you're on shutter speed whether you're an aperture whether you're on ISO doubles or halves the amount of light that your camera can read and that's a stop so three clicks doubles or halfs the light in each direction when you go up from f/8 to f/11 you are requiring twice as much light to get the same exposure when you go from eight to five five six you're needing half as much light it's the same like going from one 125th to one 250th of a second obviously it's a little bit different in the studio but when you're looking at continuous light when you go from ISO 100 to 200 you need half as much light so that's kind of how it works every time you double or have the number with ISO or shutter speed you are requiring half as much or twice as much light now how that actually translates isn't totally a 50% brighter in the overall image so it does take a little bit of experimentation to get used to it but the more you play with it and the more you use that you'll know what a three-stop difference looks like or a two-stop or a four stop difference and it allows you to control the image in a much more specific way and you can pre visualize it and you can build all these lights complexly without ever having to check the back of the camera until you're ready to fine-tune and so that's what we're gonna do today we're going to start with the one-to-one and we're going to work through a a one stop difference a to stop difference a three stop difference in a four stop difference we're going to show you them all side-by-side so you can take that idea and you can apply it to your own lighting now in this particular case we're also only applying it to the key and the fill you can use ratios and underexposing and overexposing and you take your lights on location and you can under expose ambient and stuff like that just becomes a good way for us to read light in a consistent way so we're gonna start with the key light and the key light is set at f11 and we're also going to turn on the fill light and the fill lights going to read f11 and there's a couple of different ways we can read that either we can turn the light off completely if we don't want to get this confusing our reading at all it's like I would read this at 11:00 and I could either block it with my hand or I can I can turn it in or a combination of the two right and that will help me get a more direct reading off of the fill light or we could just straight turn it off but I'm reading this as 11 and I'm reading this as 11 and we've already adjusted those power settings and the cool thing about these lights is generally speaking moving down because it goes from 2 to 10 and it's power setting if I go from ten to nine that's about a stop it's it's technically a stop at its output and it's gonna translate to about a stop here at least relatively so I know that's gonna be a pretty good starting place for how I move through the apertures and the F stops so this is gonna be a one to one which is both of them metering at f11 yeah we'll go ahead and meter it all right so you're gonna fire that for me please okay so we're gonna we're gonna meet her here try that one more time okay that's reading 11 and I'm gonna come here that's reading 13 so let's take that down just a little bit now it's reading f11 so we're we're 11 and 11 on both sides and that's gonna look like this a one-to-one ratio is pretty flat it's not really gonna have a whole lot of depth a whole lot of shadow or you can mix qualities of light when you're doing keys and fills I regularly like to use a hard key with a soft fill in this particular instance we're using a soft key and a soft fill so everything looks very soft you can also go hard and hard generally speaking a soft key with a hard fill can look a little bit distracting that's probably the one that I I would personally shy away from but you can see one-to-one on both sides it's pretty even light across both sides of the face now we're gonna take it down a little bit so the exposure is not gonna change on the camera we're gonna stay at f11 this doesn't change the only thing we're gonna do is we're gonna change the power output of the fill and so we're gonna take it down about a full stop and give us a starting place so we know that if we're starting at f11 we're gonna turn this down and try to get it to read f8 at 7 1 one more time it's nine eight okay this is gonna be a one-stop difference and in a one-stop difference you're gonna have a noticeable carving in this particular case from the key light but the shadow is going to be pretty bright so you're going to notice the shape of the light but it's still gonna be pretty bright it's gonna be a nice poppy light you see a lot pretty commonly in advertising images and there we go now benefit of putting this light close to camera is you don't really notice it too much so it just evenly fills in the light and I happen to even get it a nice painterly feel all right so we're turn this power down another stop we're gonna create a to stop difference so we're gonna go from eight to five six and that's what we want this to read six three five six now this is going to give us we saw the two point six a little bit earlier when we were setting up the giving your light a job video but this to stop difference is gonna give us a little bit of a darker tone on the shadow but it's still gonna put it squarely in the brighter part of those shadow tones so it's gonna be a little bit more dramatic gonna create a little bit more carving on the face but it's not gonna be super dark and that gives us a two-stop difference now if we take it down one more stop we're gonna go from five six to four so three o'clock three clicks down on that after if we were changing it we're not changing the exposure we're still sitting at f/11 nothing has changed on the camera we're going from five six to four okay so we want this to read four that's four very good very good so four stop four is going to give us a three stop difference between the key and the fill so that's a lot of light we're going down three is about the threshold for when you're just on the verge of losing shadow detail so it's gonna be pretty dark not quite clipped but really at that low end of the shadow tones and it's just like I said the threshold of losing shadow detail so it's gonna be a much more dramatic carving on the cheek and that's your three stop difference and we're gonna take it down one more to the very bottom of that we're gonna lose a lot of shadow detail in those tones which is okay we're gonna make something really dramatic and really dark when you do a four stop difference and we're gonna make this read 2.8 now sometimes the power of this doesn't go to a four stop difference you really have to get a lot of power out of this to make sure you're creating that discrepancy between the output you may have to turn this off you may have to bring in negative fill sometimes there's different ways you can manipulate that that fit we're gonna try to get this to read 2.8 to 2 to five two eight four stop difference you're gonna see lots of dark tones on those shadows okay and you can obviously keep going with that if you have the capability to do so so for example we maybe even to put be able to push that beyond four stops into really really dark tones if we shut that light off completely we brought in a negative feeling if you wanted to make those shadows really dark you can really bring it in to do so the reason I like to have a lot of control is again I've said this before when you bring it into the development process either through capture on our Lightroom if you put it squarely in that shadow slider you can manipulate the way that looks without affecting your highlight tones and it gives you a lot more versatility on the back end so what we are now looking at from start to finish we didn't change the overall exposure at all one-to-one when they were both there as soon as this gets brighter then this it's no longer the fill it's the key so a one to one they're perfectly balanced it keeps us at an f11 across-the-board with both of these we brought it down a stop f11 this is now reading f/8 the overall exposure doesn't change starts to get a little bit more curvature on that left side of the face one stop below that it's reading five six it's a little bit darker one stuff below that is four even darker and one stop below that we're reading 2.8 that's a four stop difference between the two and the more you do this the more you'll get familiar with what that looks like and you can plan for that ahead of time you can meter it and you can pre visualize exactly what the tonal range is in the contrast and the shadows are going to look like in your lighting before you ever even have to check it and tweak it now I know this can be a little bit complicated and it runs into a lot of numbers and a little bit of math so so don't be afraid to go back and watch this again to double check it I find it can be a little bit confusing the first time around but it does give a lot of flexibility and a lot of versatility and a lot of control when it comes to lighting your images [Music] [Music] all right so now we're gonna explore and take a look at the shape of some modifiers in a little bit more detail obviously modifiers come in a variety of shapes and sizes we're gonna look at some of the more common shapes which is the octa box we're going to look at the rectangular softbox the strip box the umbrella and the beauty dish and you've seen a few of these throughout the course of the few videos but what key difference is I want you to kind of notice when we use these relatively close and soft it's actually how similar they are and you're gonna see that a lot of these different modifiers produce relatively similar results you're gonna see slight differences in the specularity or in the contrast but truth be told there are quite a bit more similar than you might think there are some slight variations for how they control light but what you're really going to see the difference in is in the catch lights and the shape of the reflection of the light in the eyes and that can have a variety of different results or can be decided because of different kinds of purposes and we're going to talk about those a little bit more in a second so before we dig into a few these different modifiers we're gonna do a quick little control test with just this hard light obviously we've seen the hard light before but we're also going to look a little bit closer at the catch light and we're going to move in close we're gonna do this for each of them with the catch light okay I think it's light in this one is gonna be pretty small all right so the first modifier we're going to look at is gonna be the octave box and this is a 4-foot octave box eight sides octa and it's gonna be a pretty soft light this particular one has one baffled sometimes you'll see multiple baffles and these come in a variety of different configurations and sizes but this is gonna create a round catch light in the eyes and some photographers you know catering to a certain kind of OCD they like the round concentric circles inside the eyes so they'll regularly use round modifiers whether it's an octa box or the beauty dish or other things so we're gonna take a look at the octa box first and we're going to bring all these modifiers in pretty clothes to show you that you know soft light is soft light bring that it nice and close there we go great all right now let's get a meter on this 11 great moving clothes right so this this is the octa box alright the next one we're going to take a look at is the four by six rectangular softbox again these come in a lot of different sizes this one's pretty large meaning it's gonna be pretty soft has two baffles on the inside the shape is going to be a rectangle okay and we are pointing the middle the hotspot area at the face so we're going to bring that up just a tiny bit you know we go and again we're gonna get a meter on this good we're eight inner baffle made us lose about next restof of power great all right so that is the rectangular softbox alright next we're gonna take a look at there's an umbrella again comes in a variety of sizes this one here is the XL so it's pretty large remember the umbrellas have no hot spot because they bounce so they're gonna give us a nice wide soft spread of light looks like this and for that we have to flip the light away it is gonna take away a little bit of power from the light but it's gonna make it softer and more even okay and the meter mm-hmm eight and the close-up great alright so I want to take that off and we're gonna take a look at this strip and this is a small strip strip some strips are very large this one is a little bit smaller this is only about a three foot tall strip and it's only uh you know less than a foot wide it's pretty pretty small these aren't often used as main lights but we are using one as a main light it's gonna the the softness is going to be similar to other soft boxes of the size but the point is you're gonna see a tighter channel of light and you're gonna see less light on the background when we use this alright and so we have the strip box here it's gonna like I said create a little bit more of a tight channel of light so we're gonna get less light on the background it's gonna be darker shadows on the side of the face so the whole thing is gonna feel a little bit more contrasting but you'll notice the edge of the light's still going to be pretty soft so let's get a meter on this grate I'm gonna move in pretty close it's great and then finally the last one we're gonna look at is the beauty dish and the beauty dish is a very soft light because it uses the idea of diffuse reflection which we talked about a little bit earlier so the plate is meant to block the direct light that comes out it bounces off and then bounces off all of this other white light here and you can put a diffuser on this you can put a grid on it to really isolate and channel the light so this can be modified a little bit more the idea is that it just creates really soft light it's also gonna be pretty punchy pretty contrast II but no discernible highlight in the middle and that's kind of what's unique about this life okay we're ten okay great and what we're kind of looking at as we look through these images is we're gonna put up the five portraits side by side and although the contrast changes a little bit in the image what I want you to really focus on is what that gradation of shadow looks like from light to dark and you'll notice that they all pretty much do a similar thing which is they soften that gradation from light to dark and it's going to create soft light in a variety of different circumstances you're gonna see some produce a little more contrast some protruded some produce a tighter channel of light which is kind of the purpose of a thinner softbox or a smaller modifier but but basically what they're all trying to do is create soft light so why don't we pick one versus the other well a beauty dish for example might give us a little bit more specularity a strip box might create a tighter channel but when it comes to an octa box or a rectangular softbox as long as they're both relatively the same size you're gonna get pretty consistently soft light so the difference is the catch light and we're gonna look at that in just a second but before we do we're gonna look at all of them together side by side and truth be told in a blind taste test I think the vast majority of people would find it kind of difficult if the eyes were closed to tell which was which and I always think this is a really kind of a kind of an interesting experiment the only one that's really drastically different from all of these is the strip which is the fourth image and it doesn't get a lot of light on the background because it created that tighter channel of light but if you actually look at the rest of them the light is pretty similar strike like it's kind of surprisingly similar the difference between maybe like a rectangular versus an octagonal is some people think that a rectangular can give you a little bit more control when you want to feather the background and moving it from side to side but there's really not a massive difference when you're considering the overall scope of the image now we are going to zoom in and we're gonna look at the catch lights on each of these so we're gonna look at a close-up version of the face and I want you to pay close attention to the catch lights now this is going to be particularly useful when you ever want to see how the light was created or shaped or you want to kind of decode what was happening and the catch light becomes almost like a backstage view into what was happening with the light because it's reflecting what's happening at least to the front and so sometimes it can give you a lot of understanding and a lot of help when you want to figure out what it is but all you have to really do is know what they look like so let's visit these catch lights the image on the left the very first one is the octave box and you can clearly see there is a round octagonal shape in the eye right it's a circle inside a circle relatively right so that gives that concentric circle this is a giant rectangular softbox it's going to give you something that looks kind of similar to a window we have the umbrella usually the way to tell is you can see the the light stand or the c-sam whatever you happen to have in it and you can kind of see it but it's still a round shape then we have the strip narrower rectangle and then finally we have the beauty dish and usually they give away for the beauty dish is it kind of almost looks like a donut and you can see a dark spot in the plate where that middle should be that's usually the way we we tell the difference and there are a few other modifiers out there that kind of create different catch lights but it becomes a really useful way that we can decode the image and see how all these different modifiers respond in the scene [Music] [Music] so the methodology of lighting is pretty simple right you put light where you want it you block light where you don't and so far for the most part we've talked about putting light where you want it and now we're going to talk about controlling it a little bit more blocking it where you don't want it and we're gonna look at a variety different modifiers to get there so we're gonna talk about grids we're going to talk about barn doors snoots grids on modifiers and we're gonna bring out the flags and so those are just different ways in which we can block light so we're gonna start with the grids and grids come in a variety of different sizes and configurations and right here we have a five ten and a twenty degree grid this is a twenty degree grid it's kinda like this honeycomb pattern that fits on top of the light and sometimes they're big and sometimes they're small and it basically creates these tiny little channels that help focus the light what I like about grids they actually don't change the quality of light they just make the spread more focused and so since we have a hard light it's still going to be hard light but you're gonna notice how the spread changes so we're gonna look at it on the wall first before we bring in our model and we're gonna see how those look at different degrees now you can also change the spread by alternating distance as well so it's you're gonna use a combination of distance and grid degrees to really tighten the beam to get what you want so we have the twenty degree grid now here we have for control you can see that the beam it's pretty tight in the middle I'm sorry it's pretty bright in the middle and then it spreads across the whole wall and yet we put this twenty degree grid on that beam gets more focused cool thing about grids is the edge isn't abrupt it just becomes a way to channel that light into a narrower beam it's not going to create a spotlight effect it's just gonna control the light a little bit tighter so this is a twenty this is the 10 and you'll notice the honeycomb pattern in this particular instance is relatively similar but the barrel is a little bit longer and then finally we have the five the five has a pretty long barrel but the grid pattern here is pretty small and focused that creates a pretty tight beam of light I'm going to show you the three of these side-by-side this is 510 20 none another way in which we can focus the light is the snoot from the snoot does kind of a similar thing creates a channel of light but the difference between the snoot is you're going to notice a more prominent hotspot in the middle it actually kind of changes the quality of light a little bit and it gives you a little bit more of an abrupt edge so you can see it is a little bit different than the grids next we have the barn doors and the barn doors have a series of flaps kind of on the edges that allow you to shape and control the light creating either a narrow channel or you're able to control that light to not be on the background create a small channel in the face so forth and so on and you can move this in a variety of configurations when it's wide open you'll notice no difference there we go no difference from the hot light but as you can see which we wanted to bring some light off the floor we could do that you want to bring a light little bit off the top or from the sides you can create a more focused beam you can create a totally narrow channel and you can really fine-tune and manipulate this light to control it to be exactly what you want modifiers like beauty dishes and soft boxes also have grids whenever you see a grid on a softbox it's usually a little bit of a honeycomb soft thing that velcro's to the outside of it I really like the grid on a beauty dip which again looks just like a regular grid just much bigger because it allows you to really focus the beam and take a lot of spill and light off the background I'm just kind of fits on the inside of this and does this and that's the grid on the beauty dish so I'm gonna show you with and without how that changes here's the beauty dish we've already seen what that beauty dish looks like on the subject pretty widespread you know and that creates a much narrower beam on the background finally we have the flag the flag is one of my favorite modifiers of light and it's underutilized by a lot of people it's very very powerful basically the flag is just the metal frame comes in a lot of different sizes wrapped in a very absorbent black fabric that either can darken shadows or absorb light so we use it as a way to create negative fill when it's next to the face you can also use it as a way to block light from hitting the background or create intentional light sorry creat intentional shadows on the face now the thing about barn doors was the modification was really close to the light itself so that makes it very soft with the flag you can take that flag and move it pretty far off of the the light and you can create a much harder shadow so the closer the modification is to your subject the harder it will be so by taking the modification off the light we have a lot more control about what that shadows going to do so we can either use it as a way to block light from hitting part of the image like the background or we could use as a way to create intentional shadows on the face and I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways to do that but basically locks the light alright now we're going to bring our subject in and we're going to demonstrate all of these with an actual person so we can kind of see a little bit better how they are applied to a person okay great set that right there perfect sure will woken up so we are going to position this light a little bit higher we're gonna do more of an angular light so we can make it a little bit more flattering how'd it go on the face bring it down a little bit okay all right let's get it let's get it control I'm gonna get a little little meter on here gonna meet her go ahead okay so we're 11 so this is gonna be our control with no modifier great now we're gonna start with 20 degree grit we're gonna lose a little bit of light on these grids as we go so we're gonna make sure we re meet and we're gonna try our best to keep the light pointed at the face 8 so we already lost about a stop great okay and then we're going to swap that out with the ten okay about the same and then one more really tight on the face same all right so let's take a look at the four of these images side by side so in the first image we've gotten no modification whatsoever it's it's pretty open pretty hard then we move into the twenty degree then the ten degree than the five degree and you can see by the time we get to the five degree image the the sweet spot of lights pretty small you got to be careful when you're using that tight of a pocket alike sometimes the the bottom of the the face may not have enough light and that can run into some problems for you it changes the sculpt that changes the color of skin a little bit so you really want to be super aware of that all right so let's put the snoot on and take a look at what that does just hold that up there for me please right there perfect and we're going to do a little meter on that so there's a little bit brighter we're at f10 now alright and you can see in this image and it's actually noticeably brighter on the face we do have a definitive hot spot in that and that kind of a modification all right now we're gonna put the barn doors on so obviously wide open it's gonna look the same let's go ahead an get a meter on this on this light just so we can confirm 11 it is gonna be the same as wide open but I'm actually gonna move it a little bit to the side so that I can block that background light a little bit more make it a little bit of a better use for the barn doors so at the moment completely wide open right and as we close these in you'll notice you get a little bit more shadow on the background we're basically our threshold is right about when it starts to appear on our shoulder that means it's gonna be right about where we want to cut it you can see right around then so let's get a little bit darker on this side of the face we're going to bring this in a little bit more as well just to give us a little bit of control get that extra spill off the background and if we want to bring it up off a little bit off the bottom it can and same with the top we're basically going to cut light from the background and we lost a little bit of light on the face but it's still pretty close so we probably want to compensate that and brighten that that exposure up just a tiny bit let's double check that meter just so that we can make sure we're in the right spot okay you lost about a stop and there we go that looks much better when we compare the two okay so the first one is wide open the second one's we've created a little bit more of a tight channel using the barn doors and you can isolate how that light looks pretty simply all right let's take that off all right next we're to take a look at the beauty dish and we're going to move that in a little bit closer because the beauty just really shines when it's pretty close so when I'm moving in nice and close nice and tight get a really soft contrasting light and then we're gonna bring in the grid and show you how that's gonna isolate the subject from the background in that way - and the grid is gonna give us a little bit more control all right through this beautiful light super soft super pretty but it is definitely lighting the background right and there are different ways we could manipulate this if we want if we wanted to bring her way off the background we can isolate it that way but sometimes you only have a limited amount of space so a grid allows you to focus that light and get a little bit more that light off the background and the quality of out of the face doesn't change we have to compensate exposure but it allows us more control in a tighter space and that's pretty cool all right last thing we're gonna take a look at is the flag and the flag is unique to a lot of these other modifiers because it works with whatever existing modifier you have so where's the barn doors it's gonna be a pretty hard light the grids are gonna be a pretty hard light the flag works with whatever you have so we could technically use the flag with the the beauty of the grid or we could use it with a hard light by itself or you could use it with an octa box or you can use it with a scrim we're gonna make the light hard only to make it easier for you guys to see the shadow but know that the flag can be used in a lot of different configurations with a lot of other modifiers and it plays really nicely okay so let's also keep it in mind this is a relatively small flag Flags can be very large and they can block bigger parts in the background so you will see a much smaller shadow because of this flag the size of this flag but just know that sometimes you may want to use a bigger flag alright so we're gonna get a control image okay all right hard light alright good now let's say we wanted to block that light from hitting the background we could bring in the flag you bring it right up another really useful way to use the flag is if you pay close attention to the shadow on the background so I know kind of about how close I want to bring it in as soon as this shadow starts to interact with her shadow so I'm actually looking a little bit at her but I'm also looking the shadow in the background and that's hitting that shoulder I can see it's hitting the shoulder if I'm here it's not okay and how you change the angle is gonna change how things look there all right so I'm gonna do that block the background light turn a little bit more to me please great okay I'm here I block the light from the background okay now you can also use the flag to create shape and shadow from the front so if I happen to want to create a little bit of a defined shadow on the side of the face I bring it in and again the closer it is to the light the softer it's going to be closer it is to your subject the harder it's going to be so when you want to create these little pocket channels of light this is how you do it all right it's get a little bit of a meter on that face I might have lost a little bit there you go okay whew lost a lot turn it to the light all right 45 let's see okay all we have is this very soft beautiful cuddle light across the face now if you want to make that more defined all you got to do is bring it closer to your subject a little bit further away from the light I'm going to bring it down a little bit and we go can you bring it up a little bit higher please now I'm paying close aware because this is a smaller flag that I want to make sure that shadow is covered pretty consistently across my back where I don't want to see any the edges of it can you lean for just a little bit for me please perfect good and let's get a test on that great the other thing about this is because we're using a more abrupt edge it's getting a lot more light on the face so we want to make sure we're paying close attention to that now for me I'm not going to use this in conjunction or so I'm not going to use this by itself I'm going to use this in conjunction with controlling fill and a variety of other instances but that's how you create that kind of light across the face and you're going to see me manipulate that similar effect over the course of the shoot production days but we're gonna do it in a few different few different ways and we really going to control the fill-in and and put a lot of the techniques that we learn in terms of lighting and fill and cutting the light all together to create some more beautifully crafted pockets of light [Music] [Music] all right so we've covered a lot of things over the course of this tutorial we've covered hard light and soft light different kinds of modifiers sizes and shapes and relative size and relative position there are a few things that don't really fit in any of those categories a few of my favorite kinds of light modifiers that don't really fit into those categories and I love weird unusual light and we're gonna look at three of those three those that we're gonna see probably quite a bit over the shoot days and those three modifiers that I use a lot but don't really fit into those categories are the umbrella with diffusion the ring flash and the spot projector and there's three specialty modifiers okay all right so the first one we're gonna take a look at is the umbrella with diffusion but before we look at it with diffusion let's look at it without so we can kind of see the difference and it's gonna be a subtle difference part of it is just gonna take the power down but it's also going to give us a more consistent spread so that's gonna be a little bit more useful when you want a little bit of versatility and flexibility when you're shifting that light around now we're at F 9 okay we have a pretty dramatic light happening here the shadow side of the face is pretty dark that would go excellent now we're gonna add this layer diffusion across the front of the umbrella we're not going to change the power setting we're not going to change the position so you're going to see that there's going to be a little bit of a loss of power here okay banana for me please great all right beautiful let's back up a little bit let's raise it up a bit a little bit more great let's meet her that all right okay let's look at the two side by side all right so as you can see there is a very slight difference if you pay close attention to those gradations of shadow over by the cheek you can see it is just a little bit softer and so this is about as soft as you can get light it's a large source it's bounced and it's diffused so it kind of hits all of these check marks and it really basically produces like super super soft light there's not it's kind of tough to get light that's that's any softer this so I like to use it because it is just the softest light you can you can use all right so that's the umbrella with diffusion you'll see me you'll see me use this as a key and you'll also see me use this as a fill all right next one we're gonna take a look at is the ring flash and the ring flash is kind of unique to itself we talked about light being relative and the position of light being relative and the ring flash is mounted around the camera and it was originally created for dental photography to create virtually shadowless light because since the light surrounds the lens light hits it from all angles and it makes it relatively shadowless the effect is that actually creates something of a halo shadow all around the image which was was popular in the 80s and 90s and I think Robert Palmer used it in a music video but I digress the way it actually shows up is you see the tube behind it I'm a fan of putting a couple layers of nd on the top of because I use it so subtly especially with this super super soft diffused light you're not necessarily getting a whole lot of power out of your out of your lights so this allows me to really just slightly give a little bit of a kick and what it also ends up doing is it produces something of an illustrative effect to the shadows with the fill it's a very unique kind of fill it's not like using a big soft fill or a reflector it actually creates a slight specularity it really accentuates a lot of textures so if you've got leather shiny surfaces or muscles it just adds a little extra Sheen to the highlights on the image and it makes it look a little bit more illustrative so I'm gonna show it to you both the key light show you what the effect looks like strong and then we're to pair it with an octa box as a key so you can see it as a fill so we're going to attach this to the camera and take a look what this looks like okay so we have is the ring light attached and we're gonna use this as a key light just so you can see with that halo shadow we're talking about looks like it's also gonna create kind of a unique catch light in the eye it's gonna create like that donut right in the dead center so sometimes if you have a really high key light this is gonna come in and it's gonna make sure you have a catch light in that eye the closer this is the bigger it's going to be it's also the closer she is to the background the smaller that Haila is gonna be all right so we're gonna bring this in as the key and I'm at nine okay so I'm gonna go two stops up it's gonna put me at 18 okay and I want to try to make sure this reads 18 I could go the other way with it I could dictate this first and then I can come in and control this but since we already have it set up we're just gonna go jump and jump two stops over this so let's go ahead and meet her the key light and see if we can get it to 18 14:20 sixteen is like okay good so we've got is we're at 18 on the key this is still going to shape the light but what we're going to use is the ring flash to come in and control the shadows kind of similar to how we did it with the ratios earlier but it's going to give us slightly different effect to be a little bit more illustrative and a little bit more snappy in the shadows there we go okay and that's about a two-stop difference okay now with it off I'm going to show you the difference try that one more time okay pretty Dart so what it does is it gives you this nice soft painterly fill to the shadows and it's kind of unique you also see this used in advertising with like a hard key in a ring flash fill and it just gives you a whole lot of control between the two all right so on the far left image you can see the ring flash by itself we've got a little bit of a color shift because of the the ND filters in the second image you can see the ring flash is fill and on the right image you can see the octave octave box by itself alright so the last specialty modifier we're going to look at is something called the spot projector and it is one of my absolute favorite modifiers it's a little bit of a pricier modifier it was definitely a save up purchase so what this basically does is it allows you to fit in some kind of a lighting pattern these are called gobos there stands for a go-between I've got several patterns that come with this and you know you can project things like windows and rain and all kinds of things and this is actually the one that I used quite a bit which is just a long rectangle what makes this tool so unique is on the end of it there's a lens and it moves back and forth and you can focus the lens and that's super useful because when you put a pattern in here you can actually dictate how sharp or out-of-focus that pattern is so if you've got a pattern of leaves you can make them super sharp or super out-of-focus or you can vary where that focus happens to be based on where the light is so whereas the grids just basically tightened that channel of light but still left the edge pretty soft the snoot made it a little bit harder the barn door is kind of blocked it and the fly made it pretty hard this allows you to cut and shape light in either a pattern or a shape razorsharp without a pattern it kind of has that effect of a spot light from a theater so it kind of looks like this on the background right spotlight and it basically gives you the sharpest possible edge you can really get you need the lens so anytime you see like patterns projected it's something like this you can you can cut holes in cardboard but you're really never going to get that crisp crisp sharp effect without a projector of some kind because you need the lens you need to be able to focus it and you can kind of see how you can actually defo 'kiss it if you want to make it have the effect of a grid or you can make it super sharp so what you can end up doing here is start cutting light or creating feathered light feathered focus light on the face and even though the edge is soft the light itself is hard and that kinda is a it's a pretty cool thing to be able to use okay other than that it's still just looks like a regular hard light now what I've got here is a gobo and this is a gobo that I use all the time that's probably the one that I use by far the most it's a rectangle and that kind of is the same thing that I was doing with flags wherein you'd bring in several flags to create this strip of light it's gonna look the same but I get to do it on the modifier and a really confined space so this I can throw in a bag I can put in a backpack and it basically allows me to create the equivalent of white shaped by like four flags on different arms and stands in that amount of space it looks like this and as you can see super similar effect to the flag but the cool thing about it remember how we moved the flag closer or further away to feather that edge soft soft hard and so it's totally up to you what you want this pattern to look like I'm gonna get a meter on this and show you a few different varieties okay here it is pretty hard this is gonna be a little bit softer and then we can also do something like this where it's completely defocused it creates this beautiful pocket of light and we're obviously we we're not going to use this by itself we're going to use this in combination with several other lights background lights and rim lights and we're gonna use it with fill different kinds of Phil so Phil and and ring flash feeling we're going to combine a lot of these different concepts together but we are gonna really shape light in a really fun and creative way now that kind of takes care of the different ways we can modify light there is something I do want to address though and that is the concept of gear and knowing light so the big thing is that you got to remember light is light it doesn't matter if you're sitting with ten thousand dollars of lighting gear or you go to Home Depot and you buy thirty dollars of lighting gear if you understand how to use and manipulate light you can make beautiful light in a variety of different circumstances the gear I use makes my life easier it's a luxury it's not a necessity it's a luxury this is kind of a kind of a necessity for me because I'm really used to it but you know at the end of the day it's all about how you use what you have and anyone can make a mess of a lot of money worth of gear or they can make something cheap look beautiful it's just a matter of what you do with it and the things that we use the tools that we use do make a difference at a certain point but it does take a while to get there I have a camera that has you know the six four or five it's got great dynamic range it's got great shadow detail because I shoot a lot of dark tone so that helps me in my work it makes my life easier I could also add another light or reflector or control things a little bit differently and I could I could shift the way that control works but this allows me to work easier and it makes my life easier and that's a value to me with the lighting gear that I use yeah I could go out and use flags to create a very similar effect but this makes my life easier because I can do it in a smaller amount of space and it comes at a premium it's you know not cheap gear it's it's it's really well-made but it's it's meant to uh to help me not not be a crutch so that's always a really important I think takeaway when it comes to light is that for the most part it took me a long time to get to the point where gear mattered and in the beginning there are certain gear that is integral right if you were a chef in a kitchen you know you don't need the most expensive kitchen money can buy but you need a good set of pans you need a good set of knives you know you need you need a few integral things and that's kind of key here you know a good consistent light a mono light it's great you know there's there's a lot of different things that I think I think are really great staples so for me if I had you know like a d1 which is either really reasonably priced mono light and I threw it on an umbrella with a diffuser I'd be pretty happy that'd be more like the first staples I'd buy right get a get a camera that that works well for you at the end of the day that's really what it's about more than anything else and then you know think about the ecosystem you want to be involved in if you like a particular set of lighting brands modifiers or you like their their customer service or you like their their warranty system or whatever it is you know these are all the things that we think about in the greater scheme of things I think someone someone told me once if you if you buy the expensive umbrella first you only cry once which was a piece of advice that I always like so you know there is value in good products and the ecosystem that surrounds it so you know let's not you know I'm not I'm not downplaying that idea but at the end of the day you know know where the value is and know how that value translates to what is most effective to help you create the images think about what kind of imagery you want to create stylistically and and what kind of story you want to tell and then use the tools that you know the idea of shaping light and crafting light and using your sense of personal style and photo retouching and all of these things to help tell the grater idea you just have to to think more about what that idea is and how you can articulate it and so you just take these tools and all these tools are meant to help you facilitate your vision all you have to do is know what your vision is and the only way to do that is to get out an experiment and shoot and shoot and shoot and the more you do it the more you'll be able to figure out what you want to do and then everything else just falls into place [Music]

Channel: PRO EDU Photography Tutorials

Views: 825,398

Keywords: proedu, online, photography, photographer, learn, education, how-to, best, professional, commercial, retouching, retoucher, Photoshop, Lightroom, top, lifestyle, portrait, portraiture, fs 2.0, frequency, separation, post-processing, photo editing, manipulation, camera, techniques, how, to, rggedu, rgg, tutorials, course, editing, lighting, strobe, unlimited, dramatic portrait photography, dramatic portrait lighting, chris knight, dramatic portrait editing

Id: mi8XiGKGU3s

Length: 159min 23sec (9563 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020