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Jay: Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan.
Today our sign lights ran a little town just outside of Boston and we're here with a band
called...
Man 1: Arc Attack.
Jay: Arc Attack, what do you guys do?
Man 1: We use two giant singing Tesla coils to perform our musical act.
Jay: I think they're federal.
I have been so personally enamored with Tesla coils forever in my life.
And this is so exciting to me to be able to do some photographs where you see the lightning
going off from the cage we have in the background, we see the lightning going into a suit, the
gels get aware.
That's gonna be fabulous.
We're gonna have Carla in the cage behind us.
And tell me why that doesn't electrocute Carla in the cage.
Man 1: Well, short answer, it works a lot like a lightning rod on the top of the building.
So when the lightning hits the lightning rod, it goes all the way round the building instead
of through it.
Jay: Well, then let me join the band.
I'm playing the triangle and so...
Man 1: It's a gun.
Jay: But the challenge I'm facing here is that we've got a lot of different light sources
on set.
And so I want to be able to get the color that I'm seeing on set when I go back to the
studio.
And to be able to get that instantaneously and not have to get into Photoshop and be
able to mess with it.
So in order to do that...and I'm going to give Carla and Joe my Gong triangle dong and
the Spydercheckr becomes my constant in each one of the shots I'm going to do.
I'll put it in the beginning of each shot.
As we change the color, change the lighting, change the situation, and now I can use this
as my constant.
I will get the color rendition that I've seen here because I have just enough clean light
in the front that is going to give me the clean color that I need.
And then once I go back into the studio, I can simply sample this, it's gonna give me
exactly what I saw here.
We have strobes, we got LEDs, we got LEDs from Lowes, we got a strobe somebody dropped
off on the corner, we got every piece of lighting equipment we possibly could find on the set
and all those different color renditions.
We like the color, and we want to see that color when we're back in the studio.
So that's why we're gonna use our...
Man 1: Spydercheckr.
Jay: So anyway, let's get started and see what we can do.
That's one mean triangle right there.
Man 1: I'm sure you're fired again.
Jay: I'm fired again.
Dang!
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Jay: All right, so the way we've got this lit here is very simple.
We've got a smoke machine on the camera left side.
I brought that on the airplane with me with a gallon of fluid and the fluid just fine
in one of the cases.
So smoke machine on the left hand side, it goes against the wall, and the fan kinda blows
it back into the scene.
So the smoke is just like it's a beast of its own.
It does its own thing.
So I have some with heavy smoke, some with just mist in the shot.
So smoke machine on the left hand side, camera left side, we have a bullhorn camera left
and we have a bullhorn camera right.
They both have blue gels on them.
And we have some stage lights here.
We got some LED stage lights, a green one on camera right and a red one on camera left.
Now, in the background, we've got our two guitar players who have to stay behind that
screen or they'll get hit by the lightning.
So on them we've got LEDs they're just shop lights we had, we needed a little bit light.
I only flew with a few lights on the airplane getting here.
So we got shop lights on them, one on each of them.
They're hanging up on the grid.
I'll probably reach [inaudible 00:03:51] those out in the in the final images.
So that's why they're in their faces.
Inside the cage now, we've got a small LED above, it's gonna light Carla from above.
And we've got a nice LED from below, which is going to give us a little bit of red on
her legs and underneath.
So she'll be in the cage where the lightning's hitting it.
And we'll do some shots also with Joe and with John in a suit, where the electricity
can hit the suit and it grounds them out to the floor and just goes in so doesn't hurt
him.
So I'm excited to see that as well.
And I wanna get in and do a shot inside the cage.
That sounds so cool to me.
Anyway so there's our lighting.
Oh, last light, there is a light behind us here it's bar [inaudible 00:04:31], and that
just gives me a little bit of clean light upfront here.
And that becomes just a little bit of...it helps kinda clean the light up upfront, so
we have just some clean light in the shot and opens up the shadows just a little bit.
I almost forgot we've got an aperture 300D light right behind the cage that's gonna give
us a great backlight for the smoke and for our talent inside the cage.
That aperture 300 LED was a great life for this.
So Carla is our model on the cage and she's really here kind of substituting for the band
because one of their members is not available.
But Carla does a lot of really interesting things.
So tell us about what you do and where we can see your stuff.
Carla: I'm a performance artist and costume designer, now based out of Austin, Texas.
And you can see my stuff on my YouTube channel or any other social media site @carlaxofficial.
Jay: @carlaxofficial, so there you have it.
Carla: @carlaxofficial.
Jay: There you go.
So check it out.
Man 2: The shoot's over, so now it's time to go bowling.
Jay: We just went bowling with our SKV kids [inaudible 00:05:49] went bowling off the
case.
And...
Man 1: And it was absolutely fine.
Good to go.
Jay: So we just got back from Houston here.
Back here at the studio and Jolene says that Texas has kinda worn off on me.
I'm not sure what she's talking about.
But anyway, let's talk about processing our images that we shot with Arc Attack.
Now, we used the Spydercheckr in the images.
We would put it like the first image of a new setup I'd had the Spydercheckr in.
And the light that turned out to be the key light from model was in the cage.
This cage is made so electricity can hit it, transfers through the cage and goes to the
floor and doesn't hurt her inside.
So actually I got inside of that.
It was pretty exciting to have electricity hitting it.
It was kinda cool.
But anyway, so the light in there was just an LED they had installed at the top of this
cage.
It looked a little, I mean, the color didn't look great to me.
So I got the Spydercheckr in there got a shot of the light that's going to be in the cage
on her face.
And I'm gonna use that to just color correct her face and to make sure her face looks right.
I do a very simple process with this, something that gets me quickly to where I want to go.
Now you can process and Datacolors software.
But in this process we're gonna show it just going through raw, Camera Raw, just a simple
application.
All right, so I'm gonna open up one of the Camera Raw images here.
You see in this shot that this is the way it was shot.
Now the light that's on her face...it just it looks it looks off to me.
There's no doubt about it.
So I'm just gonna simply go in, I'm gonna select the white balance tool.
And the second square, there's this roll, it goes from black at the bottom to the white
at the top.
Second one down is a gray color.
We're going to click on that to correct the color in the image.
It brought this thing way back, you see a lot more blue in the image, it's not so warmish
and it looks really nice.
It gives us a nice skin color on her.
If I accomplish nothing else with this, that's worth it to me because I wasn't sure what
color that light was above her head and I wanted to make sure I got a nice color on
her face.
But now from here you know that the square at the bottom needs to be at about 4%, so
you want that to be pretty dark.
So I may take the blacks and just bring them back just a little bit.
Make this a little more moody.
I don't wanna bring the whites up anymore.
I know that they say, you know, whites should be up in the 90s, like 93% 94%, but for me
I want this pretty moody and I'm not gonna push the whites up here.
If I push the whites up into that category, they're gonna be way up in here and this is
gonna be way too open for me.
So I'm gonna keep it back- to-back where it is.
Now, we've got a nice color.
I like the exposure, I like where the blacks are at.
And right there, I'm gonna go ahead here and click on the image over here and save settings.
I'm gonna save these settings in the colors arc.
A-R-C Attack, Arc Attack.
Three and we're gonna save that in our settings.
And now I've got that set now.
So any of these images I print or I process of her I can just simply make that application
through Camera Raw.
So I just simply go up the side here, apply pre-set, and there's Arc Attack 3 right there,
and I can play that to all the images I process with her.
I think this is superfast, it's in Camera Raw, I can apply this to a whole bunch of
images at once if I want to, just very easy to use.
So we've got to take an image every time our lighting situation changes.
And for me, when I went into close-up I put the Spydercheckr in.
When I went back to a full body I put the Spydercheckr in.
I put it in every time I made a change, it was fairly large.
And even though I wasn't really changing my key light, like this will probably work fine
for my full body shots but, just to be safe, I've got a full body, put it in the full body
as well.
So I'll probably just cancel out of this.
These aren't the images I'm going to process.
I'll go on to another one in another full body here just to see it we've got here.
It's a little bit hard for me, and I'll make some adjustments a little later, but this
is gonna give me my color.
So I'll go ahead and hit the white eyedropper here that sits right on the white balance
tool.
I'm gonna hit the second one down, I'm gonna clean the color up.
Now I need to open up the exposure on this one.
It's just a little too dark and I think that is good for what I'm doing.
I'm gonna crush the blacks just slightly.
And then now I'm gonna do a new preset.
Now let's go up to our preset, let's apply a preset, let's put our standing man on and
that brightened that up a lot.
And this is now in these kinds of situations, where I'm using smoke, I just can't use a
preset and apply it to everything.
I know my color's correct now.
But my exposure and things change because smoke changes on everything that we do.
So I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna bring the exposure back a little bit.
I'm gonna open up the shadows just a little bit.
And I may even take and give me just a tiny bit of clarity here just to sharpen up some
things.
So this is a process for me.
I know the Spydercheckr helped me to get my color correct on his face or her face.
That's the starting jumping off point.
Now I'm gonna go in with the exposure.
I'm gonna play with them on each image.
Because the small changes in each image you'd have to put the Spydercheckr in on every single
image and you can't do that because Spydercheckr's in the shot on every image.
So I'm just gonna have to go in now and make adjustments for the exposure and for the blacks.
But for the color I know that I'm on, I'm right on with the color when I use that preset,
I make my final adjustments and I move on.
So I think this is just a simple way to use this.
Now if you wanna take this information, this preset here, I can take the preset and export
that image out as a TIFF with this Spydercheckr chart in it.
And now I can take that into Datacolor software.
And in Datacolor software, we can go ahead and make a preset that we can use in Lightroom.
So let's see how we do that.
So I warmed up the Spydercheckr software now.
I can just drag and drop this TIFF that I made.
The TIFF that I made...it's got the chart in it, drag and drop that, there's my TIFF.
I come up with a whole selection of color squares here.
And so I just simply take and get these color squares so that they are centered.
So there you go.
So at this point now, I have a couple of options here.
I can say this as a saturated preset that's gonna change my color, something that's gonna
make a lot more saturated, not necessarily what I want to do.
I'm gonna definitely go to a portrait which is just a little softer, a little nicer kinda
profile, that's going to look nice for her face.
And I'm gonna save this to Lightroom and I'm gonna go ahead and save my calibration, I'm
gonna call it Arc Attack number five.
And there you go.
When I open Lightroom, right under here under presets, is my Arc Attack number five.
So there we have it, I'll just go ahead and open up my Arc Attack number five.
And it brightens up that image just a little bit and makes sure the colors clean on his
face.
So that's just a way to be able to do your preset in Camera Raw and Bill take it into
the Datacolor, Spydercheckr software, then apply that back into Lightroom.
And you can do this whole thing in Lightroom, you can open it up in Lightroom, you can make
your adjustments there, you can get your highlights and shadows and make a preset in Lightroom
as well.
We've done that in another video called "Why Should I Use a Color Checker?"
So if you are interested to see how to do that, check that out in that video, "Why I
Should Use a Color Checker."
For me, the process is not about Lightroom, just a little added tidbit there.
For me the process is getting into Camera Raw, getting my clean color and my key light
and now I'll make the adjustments for the images according to the smoke and things of
the set.
And that's gonna give them my final images fast way to get clean color and get to my
final image as quickly as possible.
So back to Texas for a little flashback.
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So it's been a great experience.
It's almost 10:00.
We gotta clean up and get out of here and back to Houston.
We're gonna be like 2:30 in the morning getting home I think.
So we better clean up and get going.
These guys have been great.
It's been fun to be here.
It's been fun to see them with the Tesla coils.
Like I said, I love Tesla coils.
This has been really a treat for me, and it's been nice and hot here in Austin, that's for
sure.
So make sure you follow us like us on...like us, follow us, we do all those kinds of things
on the YouTube channel.
We'd love to have you part of our community so keep those cameras rolling, keep on clicking.
Man 2: Don't estimate alone, don't stand out in the cold all by yourself.
Try to put together an estimate, go to dustlandlens.com/estimating.
I've got a digital download that will teach you everything you need to know.
You don't have to be alone any longer.
Jay: So you have a YouTube channel correct?
Man 1: Yes we do.
Jay: So what is it?
Man 1: It's Arc Attack and the link is gonna be down below in the info.
Jay: So check it out, Arc Attack like, "Arc" and "Attack," right?
Man 1: That is correct.