In this episode I'll show you a technique that will help you add punch to your portraits!
Adorama TV presents exploring photography with Mark Wallace
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of exploring photography right
here on Adorama TV brought to you by Adorama. It's the camera store that has
everything for photographers and videographers and audio engineers you name it
they've got it check them out at Adorama dot-com. Well today I'm going to be
showing you one simple trick for increasing the quality of your portraits
It's very easy but to show you the start of this, I want to show you the key light and this is our
giant seven foot parabolic umbrella made by Westcott and shooting a ProPhoto
into that and that's our key light and I'm shooting this with my Leica at
135mm lens and we are going to be shooting the star of the show which
is not this stuff but she's actually right here and this is Hannah. Now Hannah is
a fantastic model but if we don't have the correct light well her portrait is not
going to be very good. So one of the things that you can do it's very, very
simple you can do this with speedlights you can do this with studio strobes you
can even do it with reflectors, if you do it just right but we want to do is we
want to add what I call kicker lights and what these will do these two lights
right here they are actually going to come and add, so look straight ahead so
if your model is looking straight at the camera, you're going to add a highlight on the cheek bones,
on the hair, on the shoulders and that is actually going to sort of shape what your
model's face looks like. Now this works great with anyone that has a strong
jawline, great cheekbones, pretty much anybody is going to look good with this
kind of light. Now to do this what you want to do, is to have two soft sources
of light, that are set at an equal distance, so equal distance on each side of your
subject shooting forward into the camera and what that is going to do is just
going to sort of feather some light across their cheeks and it will look
fantastic. Now to do this we have to meter everything and so what I'm going to do here
is I'm going to grab my meter. Now to meter the key light I'm going to meter straight
into the camera which is right there and I'm going to set this right here.
Now I'll meter that and that meters right at f11 and what I want to do as a starting
point is I want to make sure that these both are also at f11. In other words the
lighting ratio should be 1:1, now once you do that you don't have to stay there
what you can do is you can make adjustments to your lights so you can take
these lights up or down. Basically you season to taste by shooting and looking
at the photos on your computer to figure out exactly how much light you have falling
on those cheek bones so some people a little bit more light works great
others not so much. Now to really make sure that you can see how this is
working in the effect it has on our model, we are shooting on a dark background a
black background ideally we'd be shooting on something that has a little
bit of color, maybe outside, but for right now I would want to make sure that
you can see the effect of this but we are going to make sure that we meter this so to do
that what I want to do is to take this Lumisphere put it down and make sure
I'm only getting a light that's coming from this light source. So I'm going to put
the Lumisphere down. I'm going to point it at that light and then I'm going to meter this so
when we do that, that also meters f11 I'll meter the other side again that's
metering at f11 so we know the exposure is the same so I've metered all three lights
My key light and my two kicker lights or f11 and then we want to take some
pictures and make sure everything works out now here's one other thing that we
didn't leave set up here but it's a very important thing to note when you have
lights like this,
the light is going straight into the lens of your camera so that can cause
issues with lens flare and so normally what you'll do is you'll get a flag, something
like this and you block the light that's coming into the camera and you'll make
sure that it still falls on your subject. You're doing this to block the light
from the camera, see there it is going into the camera, here is blocked out but the
light can still hit the model. You want to do that and it's as simple as having
somebody hold this like that or if you have some fancy flags you can put those on
C-stands whatever, we left those out so we could actually show you the lighting setup but in
the final shots that I will show you we had those flags in so let's take a look
how this works, so here is a shot of just our keylight, now it looks a little
under exposed but if you look at the second shot this is the shot of our
kicker lights you can see that we actually have some spill that's falling onto
the front of Hannah those two lights combine here's our last shot shows a
proper exposure with those beautiful highlights on her cheeks
and everything looks great!
Well now that you've seen how we've set this up I'm going to shoot some pictures
and we will show you the results.
Well you can see by these pictures that a simple technique can really add some
punch to your portraits!
The awesome thing about this technique as you can do it without all this fancy gear, you
can do this with Speedlite, you can do it was studio strobes, you can even do this with
natural light if you have some really strong backlight you can add a
speedlight to fill in the front of your model and you get a similar effect.
Now make sure you meter everything and then sort of season to taste you're going to
increase or decrease the power of these kickers to either add or subtract light
it really depends on the shape of your model's face and how things are working
out and so you can really play with this to get some awesome effects and the
other thing that's really cool is you can shoot this in a small space were
shooting in a converted two car garage and so you don't need a big fancy studio
to do this. You can do this on location or wherever you are
well thank you so much Hannah for this awesome photo shoot and don't forget if you want
to learn about metering or lighting or some different lighting techniques
are shooting in small studios, you can learn all about that at the
Adorama Learning Center it's absolutely free!
Make sure you check that out and also don't forget to subscribe to Adorama TV
again it's free so why not do that we don't want you to miss a single episode.
Thank you so much for joining us and we will see you again next time.
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