Hi guys welcome and welcome back thanks so much for joining me Jessica McGovern International
multi-award running portrait photographer and today on this Five Minute Friday where I explain a
tip tool technique or topic inside of five minutes I'm going to be covering off a really really
really important one for any studio photographers or people who like to do studio photography now
the reason for this video is basically purely down to the acrylic lick shot video that we previously
did I'll go ahead and link that above now loads and loads and loads of you have tried them and
you're all saying what on earth am I supposed to do with all of these reflections so I want
to walk through exactly why you get reflections on reflective surfaces in studio and exactly how
to avoid them moving forward so this covers things like photographing your wall art for your product
guides photographing using acrylic or using glass in the images and also for photographing humans
who are wearing glasses all of these situations literally are exactly the same so I'm going to
use some math and then I'm going to do a static demonstration but all of this can be applied in
real life to your subjects in studio before we move on let me just remind you guys to hit the
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it was useful and what you're going to implement afterwards without further Ado let's get stuck in
so the reason why we're stood here at the end of the studio with a whiteboard in the vicinity
is because I need to explain something really really quickly don't worry it won't be boring
and I'm going to go through that here before we go into a demonstration now everybody who knows
I'm absolutely horrendous at maths but I did get an A in physics at GCSE no it's an A Star
it was an A Star and therefore should be pretty decent at this kind of stuff so we'll go on to
the whiteboard now so hopefully you guys can see the full board and I'm just going to really really
quickly draw what we're going to be talking about today so the theory that's in practice in this
type of a situation is the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection and what that
means is that if something comes forward and hits a plane so if that's the plane and it's coming in
at a certain angle the angle that it comes in at is going to be exactly the same as the angle that
it goes back off at now obviously that's not going to be correct if we got a protractor out
and measured it but you can kind of see that this angle here is pretty much the same as this angle
here and if we were to draw an imaginary kind of straight line out coming out this angle here
would be the same as this angle here left hand is on whiteboards you feel me right so we've got
this situation happening in practice and this is the key to avoiding reflections in studio
because what you need to do as the photographer who's going to be sat here with your reflective
surface which is this one down here is place your light in a way that that line does not come back
and hit your camera in any way shape or form does that make sense so I put a light here Dan's going
to stay there we've got a semi-reflective surface in the white board and I'm going to move the light
to the point where the angle of incidence is too tight and therefore you should see a big circular
reflection in the camera right if I move this to change the angle of reflection outwards moving it
further away from the camera round in a circle then what I've essentially done there is change
the angle of reflection so when you guys saw the reflection in here this was the angle that we were
coming in at much tighter and Dan's got it in his camera here but when I've moved it around
here we're over here so that angle is therefore much much larger now if you don't like maths and
you don't like physics then you know I'm kind of with you on that really so let's look at this in a
real life situation so that you can show what you need to do to remove reflections when you see them
so we've moved into a semi-normal setup here now you could use this setup if you're photographing
your products for your product guide or you could have a subject in here with a sheet of
acrylic it's all the same situation you could also have a human instead here with glasses on and it
would be the same situation right the reflection will always be the same so don't worry about what
we're doing here it keeps it nice and still so that you guys can see and understand everything
we also have a continuous light source just in place of a flash today because it keeps it
really consistent and super bright so that you can see it however again switch out for your
flash it all works the same and then we also have our photographer in this instance which is just
locked off on a tripod but you know everything's the same we're recording the screen for you so you
can see everything so at the moment inside the camera's screen the photographer will be able
to see a reflective surface with a reflection on it and the chances are that that reflection is
going to be somewhere around here and that's because there's an angle of incidence coming
from the light hitting the reflective surface and bouncing off but it's really tight because
these two things are quite close together right your light is very close to your camera and just
because this is angled very slightly backwards it doesn't really make much of a difference all
that would happen if it was sat perfectly plumb vertical is this reflection is going to just
move up because of physics so we've got a light hitting it's a very very tight angle of incidence
and the angle of reflection is very tight back so how do we omit the reflection well it's quite
simple really and probably you guys will be able to guess it yourself anyway all you need to do is
change the angle that the light's coming in on so we're going to change the angle to make it wider
so probably around there will be more than enough to yeah emit the reflection so there's no
reflection now and the reason for that is because we've just made that angle so much wider right so
it's off going off over yonder in that direction and we've omitted the reflection so if you get a
reflection because of your acrylic sheet because of your glasses because of your products whatever
it might be just remember just move the angle make the angle bigger or move yourself or the subject
so that the angle is distributed in a different way so in this situation we've just moved round
in a semicircle along that light and omitted that angle of reflection okay so that's the first way
the second way because we're going to cover off super super fast and it's not a situation that we
can particularly replicate in here now but let's say that you had a one light and you wanted to do
butterfly lighting and you're getting a reflection again same principle happens just in a vertical
format so if you had butterfly lighting we've got a video on that and the lights coming down
and hitting the glasses and it's coming back into the camera so you can see the reflection
all you need to do is move that light upwards and backwards and that angle will be made super wide
and you won't be able to see a reflection it's all the same stuff just physics in a different
way so hopefully that was useful for you guys please let me know if it was just look at your
angles make the angles bigger and you'll remove any reflections work with one light at a time
it's much easier and if this video is useful for you please do drop it down in the comments
below because it really does help us out and I'll see you next week for another Five Minute Friday