In this video I use a smoke machine to create a new background in my studio.
AdoramaTV presents, Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you
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Now I'm really excited about doing this shoot because
I get to use one of these...
this is my 700 watt smoke machine or fog machine
or hazer, they have a few different names and this thing throws out loads
of smoke
and I'm going to use that as a background in my shoot.
Now for this to work you need a couple of things obviously you need one of these
little
smoke machines and these are really inexpensive
but you also need a dark background hence
the dark background I've got set up here. Now
they do add a terrific depth to the picture, they add a real feeling of mood
and atmosphere so they are really great to use
and incredibly simple. So let's get this setup we'll get our model ready
and we'll get on with the shoot.
So today I'm joined in the studio by Kerry, do you want to say hello Kerry?
And she's going to be acting the part of a fortune teller.
Are you actually able to tell the future Kerry? We'll see!
So you'll notice there's something distinctly missing from this shoot
yeah, there's no smoke, don't worry we'll get to the smoke in fact
the smoke should be the very last thing you add to the shoot because
once you've started the smoke it's kind of hard to get rid of. First thing we need to
do is actually set up
the lights. So let's just run with one key light and get that set first.
Right so the light for this is going to be my
StreakLight 360 and I've got it in
a ParaPop Glow softbox and this is just going to give me some lovely
soft wrapping light
around Kerry's face but, we need to get in the right place and I'm just going to
elevate it up so it's a little bit taller and a little bit higher than Kerry
and just coming down onto her face like that. So
next thing you need to do is to check the meter reading, now ideally I would
like an aperture
of f/8 for this shot, f/8 should give me enough depth go field to get Kerry's
face in focus
but get the background slightly soft and that's what I'm after.
So to do it I'm going to use my flash meter to take a flash meter reading
and all I'm going to do is just pop the flash meter under Kerry's chin
with the little dome pointing back at the flash. I'll press the test button
on the radio trigger and that tells me and aperture at the moment of
f/5.6. Now could do a couple things I could say ok f/5.6
and dial that into the camera, I could change my ISO to
give me slightly more sensitivity to light or
and this will be my recommended way, just trying to flash power and the great
thing is
I can do that right here on the remote for the StreakLight, so three clicks
that's going to give me one more stop of light but
never take it for granted let pop this underneath and sure enough
I'm on f/8 that gives me the exact
aperture I want I will dial in f/8 into the camera
and take a test shot here we go. Ok Kerry you can just look up to the light...
and as you can see that gives some great light on
Kerry, looks fantastic and that background,
well is not quite black but it's certainly very dark and
we're going to fill that with the smoke. So
I'm almost ready for the smoke but if I just put smoke back there you won't see it
because there won't be any light falling on the smoke at all, so I need to add a
second light
into the background that's going to illuminate the smoke.
So this is going to be my second light, it's just going to be
a light from behind pointing back towards the camera
and eliminating the back of Kerry. Now nobody this would be called a separation light,
but in this case we've got to think about what's going to happen in a few minutes
we're going to have smoke all the way around here
and the light is going to become more diffused.
So I could test this now and I will check in a second
but the effect is going to be different when we start the smoke
how different well that's the beauty of smoke, it's going to be
different every few minutes. So there are no rights and there are no wrongs but one
thing I would suggest is before you start using smoke
have any extra things that you think you might need to hand
because you don't go hunting around for it once you start using the smoke
this place will fill up very quickly. So I've got some color gels and I've also got
a grid which might come in handy just to give us a bit more direction I'm not
sure so I'm going to keep it to hand
and I'll pop these on the floor so I know exactly where they are.
Ok let's just take a test shot with this light
and as you can see that just adds a little bit of glow around Kerry's shoulders, a
little bit of a separation
so the only thing left to do is to get the smoke machine setup
and warmed up because it will take a few minutes for the smoke machine to actually warm up
before it uses any smoke
and we can take some smokey pictures!
Brilliant, there we go, so there we are,
the smoke was incredibly effective even in a small studios space
like this, however everything is a little bit kind of smoky and hazy and
we're having a bit of trouble seeing now so I think now is a really good time to jump
over the to Photoshop where
we'll edit one of my favorite pictures, and I'm going to do that right now.
So the smoke machine was
fantastic to work with but to make sure it went smoothly
I did a couple of things. First of all I made sure that the smoke machine
wouldn't set off the smoke alarms, we tested that in advance and also I
made sure the smoke
fluid was water-based so I didn't leave any sticky residues,
and of course non-toxic. Finally during the shoot
I kept checking everybody was okay and nobody had any breathing issues because
the smoke
really can get down into your chest very quickly. So with that in mind looking
back at the pictures
some of them were fantastic and needed almost no Photoshop
whatsoever, a couple needed a bit more help so let's have a look at one of those.
Now in this shot there is obviously one large thing we need to remove which is
the softbox
in the top corner and you might think well that was a mistake but
in a small studio you've got to have your lights close and also getting a light close
means I had control of the lighting
and softness of the lighting too and I know in Photoshop I can remove that
really easily but before I do let's just do a little bit of general sorting out of
the picture.
I'm just going to come down to the Auto button here and try that first
because you'd be surprised how often that actually gives you the effect you want,
and I think that's great, I'll leave that alone. Next I'm going to come down to the
colors
an I'm going to increase the vibrance because I had a light with a blue gel behind
and I really want to enhance that blue and bring out the red in her hair as well
and vibrance does exactly that. Finally I'm going to go to the clarity because this
is going to use clarity brilliantly
it'll bring up all of the texture on the smoke and really
add to the atmosphere, the trouble is
it's a global affect and it also brings up stuff on Kerry's face and in her hands that I
really don't want
so I'm going to reduce those areas by getting the adjustment brush
and on the adjustment brush I'll get the clarity for the brush
and take it all the way down to -100% the exact opposite,
and I'll paint away clarity from her face like that
from the hands and we can just dab in a couple of areas, across her shoulders
like that, there we go, and that should give me the clarity on the background
but reduce it and remove it from her face. Ok so
with that done I can click on Open Image and jump into Photoshop
because there's a couple things I need to do particularly the cloning,
that although I can do in RAW, Photoshop has much better tools to do cloning,
let's have a look. Let's start with the big obvious one, the softbox
here. Now to remove that I'm just going to use the patch tool,
with the patch tool it's really simple to use, you just loosely draw around the thing
you want to remove
all the way around and then you get a selection, and he drah that selection to
another part of the image
and when you let go Photoshop will patch it. But there's a secret,
have a look at the bottom part of where the softbox was
and you will see there's an obvious difference in tone between where I'm sampling
and where it was originally, and what I'm looking for is to try and match the tones
reasonably close so
somewhere down there looks a much better match across the tones
and as I come there that's even better, and when I let go that gives Photoshop
a much more fighting chance to try and get the the whole thing to match
much closer. Now if I just hide the marching ants for a second with Control
H, you can still see a definite edge there that's where the structure comes in.
So I can adjust the structure and reduce it down for a softer blend.
Now in the newer versions of Photoshop this is the numbering system but it used
to be called
Very Loose or Very Tight and so on and I think that works really well.
Now that's fine for larger areas but what about small bits, what about things like
the peg that's holding on the headscarf. Well for small areas
I'm just going to get the Spot Healing Brush just paint over it with the spot
healing brush,
it does a remarkably good job of just fixing little small bits
occasionally it goes wrong, just Control Z, and try and use a brush that's a little bit
more
in keeping with the size the thing you want to remove and you'd be surprised
how quick
you can go and tidy up your shots. So there you go
there is my amazing Fortune Teller
smokey picture completed.
I have to say the smoke machine worked extremely well and gave some fantastic results
and I'm definitely going to be using it again in my studio in the near future.
Now if you want to see more videos from myself and the other amazing presenters
here on AdoramaTV here's what you need to do, you need to click on the
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I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching!
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