In this video I'll show you how I edit
and shoot an overhead portrait
on location.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
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everything for us photographers
and today I'm out of my small home studio
because we're going to shoot an overhead
portrait on location.
The location is a field just outside the Gatwick Aviation
Museum and I'm here because they've got
a lovely area of big green grass
and that's going to make a great background
for our shoot. So to help me out today.
I've got the amazing Jade Lyon.
She's going to be the model for this
and as you can see
we've got a wonderful sunny day
and you might think
well this is going to put
Jade in the Sun,
lie down, take some shots,
but the key to this,
is being in control of the light
and if Jade's in the Sun
when it's very harsh, very uncontrolled
light and poor old Jade will end up
squinting as she looks up into the sky.
So we're going to shoot here in the shade
and the first thing we need to do is
find a nice green patch of grass.
So we found a patch of green grass,
we put some green tarpaulin
and Jade's going to lie down on that
and we're in the shade here,
so let's start by just taking a picture,
in the natural light,
so Jay do you want
to lie down for me.
I'm going to shoot this from above
so I'm going to use some steps
to keep nice and safe.
So I've got my black rapid strap on
so I don't drop
anything on top of Jade.
Let's see how this looks.
So that picture actually
looks quite good.
The soft lighting from being in the shade
works really well but
we can probably do a little bit better
if we add our own lighting
into the scene.
So to light Jade I'm going to use
my Flashpoint Explore 600
and the position and direction of this light
is going to be critical
and different to how I would normally light,
so normally Jade would be stood up
against the background
and I'd have my light up here somewhere
but I've got to think about whole scene
as being flipped 90 degrees,
so rather than lighting from up here,
I'm actually going to angle
my light down,
from down here,
so when I'm looking down from above
this would be a similar lighting pattern
to what I would do
when I was back in my studio.
So the next thing to do is to take
control of the light, so I'm actually
going to underexpose the scene
and then fill in the shadows
with flash so before
I fire the flash,
I'm going to switch into manual mode,
I'm going to dial in an aperture of f/11
and my shutter speed,
my flash sync speed 1/250
of a second
and see how that looks
and as you can see that
picture looks really dark
which is exactly what I want
because now I can
add some more light
with the flash.
So with those numbers locked in the camera
all I need to do is make this flash
produce exactly the same amount of light.
So let's see what we're getting
at the moment,
I'm getting f/8 so I need another
stop of light out of the flash
which I can do using the remote control
and then
we'll just try that again,
f/11 so that's exactly what I need,
so in theory if I take a shot now,
it should be correctly exposed on Jade.
So that looks really good.
We've got some lovely lighting
on Jade's face,
we've got a lit side
and a slightly shady side,
if the shady side was too much for you,
you could either add a second light
or even just a reflector
but what's really important
before we get going is to have a good look around
the scene and see if there's anything
that needs to be taken out now
rather than trying to do it later in Photoshop
so let's do a quick bit of gardening
and once that's done,
we can set the scene up
and start taking some shots.
Being a modle can be quite hard work
but modeling lying down,
well that's a whole new level of difficulty
and Jade did a fantastic job
but there's a few
things she can't overcome
and one of them is that gravity
when you're lying
down doesn't work the same
as gravity when you're standing up
so I'm going to give her a very slight helping hand
so here I am inside a Photoshop
with the image I want to edit,
I'm going to go to filter and down to liquify,
now inside
the liquify dialog box,
I'll make sure I'm on the forward warp tool
and then with a nice sized brush,
I'm just going to gently nudge in her neck line,
like that I'm also going to take up
ever so slightly her chin
just a little bit
because that's really where gravity
in this shot is showing its effect
in the wrong way. So that's done
that's nice and simple,
the next things
are things that I want to do to the picture
and there's two things;
I'd like a shallower depth of field
and a sort of bleached Sun look.
Let's do the first one;
shallower depth of field,
odd thing to think about
when I'm shooting directly
above but in post-processing,
I thought this would really make a difference.
Here's how I'm going to do it.
I'm going to go back to filter,
I'll go down to blur gallery
and choose tilt shift.
Now tilt shift is a great filter.
At the top it's blurry,
in the middle it's clear
and at the bottom it's blurry again.
Now I can rotate this around
by bringing my cursor to around the area
of these small circles
and click and drag
and give that a bit of a twist.
I can also move the
position so I can drag this line in.
This solid line is zero blur.
This dotted line is a 100%
so I'm going to spread those out slightly
just to give me a slightly more of a graduated effect
and I control the strength of the blur
either on the right hand side
or I can do it right here
on the on-screen display.
What that does is it slightly blurs out
the book which i think is useful for keeping
the distraction of written words
out of the shot
but also it creates a nice
effect as almost a three-dimensional
look to this shot.
Click OK and that will apply the effect.
Now what about that sun-bleached looks?
Well there are loads of ways
you could do this,
here's one,
the one I'm going to do.
I'm going to go up to layer,
New Adjustment layer
and choose levels.
On the levels well let's just click OK first.
I'll find this little black white
slider and I'm going to come to the black
end and just move it in
until the output level says around about 30.
Now that will make sure
there's no pure blacks in this
picture whatsoever,
in fact it starts at a quite a dark gray.
Next I'm going to come to the histogram slider
and slightly move in the white point
around about 10 points,
something like that,
so I have slightly blown out highlights
and no pure blacks.
We can close that down.
What about that warm tone effect?
Well for that I'm going to go back to layer,
new adjustment layer
and this time color balance,
click OK and all I'm going to do to make it nice
and warm is pop some yellow in
and add plenty of red
and with a little bit of cloning
and a few fine-tuning changes
there it is,
there's my final picture completed.
Well that was a great fun shoot
and we got some fantastic pictures,
now if you've enjoyed this video,
don't forget to leave
me a comment below
and if you want to see more videos
from myself and the other
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you got to click on that subscribe button,
I'm Gavin Hoey
thanks for watching.