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- Stick around till the end of the video. We've got two portable speed light kits
from Photoflex to give away.
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- For today's Slanted Lens lesson, we're shooting out at Luke Air Force Base in
Phoenix, Arizona. We want to get shots of fighter pilot, Josh Moffett. His nickname
is Chunk with his F-16. What an incredible airplane. I really do love this sort of
thing. Here are our obstacles. The airplane is aiming the wrong direction and
we can't move it. Secondly, my view requires me to light the side of the F-16
with 400 watt second light. It's pretty hard to fight the sun with 400 watt
lights. And last of all, it's 105 degrees out here. When we arrived, the airplane is
aimed at the wrong direction. I had hoped it would tailed towards the mountain so
we could be looking north. That would have given me a great front view of the
airplane with no distractions in the background. I can't shoot the tail of the
airplane, so we're going to have to shoot the side of the airplane. That's going to
be our best option. So the west side of the airplane looking back towards the
covered areas was not very nice. There's too much distraction and the plane is in
very broad light. Looking west, the setting sun will be over his shoulder and
will wash out the background, unless I expose
the sky and light the airplane. Let's look
at the camera settings. I'm going to shoot at 100 ISO because that is as low as I can
go and I need a little exposure as I can get. I'll shoot at 1/200 of a second.
That's going to help darken the background. And last of all, I'm going to
set my aperture at f13 to balance my exposure. We're looking slightly northwest
and here's our first image with just the ambient light. I'm going to set four
strobe heads. Head number one will be on our fighter pilot. I'm going to use radio
slaves to able to sync all these heads together. I'll use the PocketWizard. Our
first head is a small octodome with a FlexFlash. That's going to be our key
light on our pilot.
Here's our image with just the first light. Head number two is a triton that's
going to be aimed at the tail section. I'm using a triton with just a reflector so I
get all the power out of it I can get that's going to help brighten up that tail
section. So now we have our key, our ambient and our tail light. We're slowly
starting to build the light on the airplane. Head number three is a FlexFlash
that only has a reflector on it. It will be placed on camera right and light the
midsection of the wing of the airplane. That brightens up the midsection. We're
getting very close. We'll just need to have a light on the front of the airplane.
Head number four is a FlexFlash only reflector. It will be placed camera right
and light the nose of the fighter. I tilted it up slightly to keep it off from
the ground. It was brightening up the tarmac just a little too much. Here's our
final lighting. You know, it took three lights to do it, but it really looks nice
in the background. Let's take a quick look at that lighting build-up one frame at a
time.
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- Now, here are some of the images with no retouching. We photographed him standing
and kneeling around the airplane. We shot as much we could. It was very hot and he
was in his flight suit. He was a trooper. He hang in there all the way. As we were
finishing up and packing up the equipment, I took him around to the other side of the
airplane and shot some more images. This turned out to be a great angle and a lot
easier to light, for sure. Here's our first shot with just the ambient light. I
brought the FlexFlash around with a small octadome just to open the image up and get
a little light on his face. In Nik software, I took the image in it and added
a dark contrast layer. And then I used subtraction points to remove 70% of the
effect from his face and his body. I then add a straight contrast and desaturated
the image in that layer. You know, I'm very pleased with this look. So here's
some of the edited images.
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- This was a great shoot. I love the location and the subject matter. You know,
it's just not that easy to light a large object like that with small strobe heads.
But you know, in the end, it was very doable. So it's something we just have to
go after and make it happen. So keep those cameras rolling and keep on clicking.
This month in Slanted Lens we're giving away two portable speed light kits. This
is two small octadomes, two stands, two brackets to be able to set up your speed
lights, put it in the octadome and two of the speed rings to be able to set up your
octadomes. It comes in this great carrying case so it all goes together. You can put
your speed lights in there and you're ready to go. So we've giving away two of
these. Go to TheSlantedLens. com. Make sure you sign up to win a portable speed
light kit. We're also selling this portable speed light kit at
TheSlantedLens.com. It'll be a B&H prices and we'll throw in free a digital download
of our DVD series called Mastering Strobes. Great information, $79 value.
We're going to add it to this kit if you buy it from TheSlantedLens.com. So make
sure you sign up to win. And if you don't win, make sure you purchase it from
TheSlantedLens.com.
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