Hey this is Daniel Norton, I'm here in my
studio in New York City with Christiana,
and we are making some portraits, so I
wanted to do something really simple,
kind of a casual portrait might use for
LinkedIn, you might use for a social
media kind of feel, which is the white
background, a white shirt, I was like
da dah... and so here, I've got a couple of
things going on. I'm in a day light studio,
so I have some light coming in, and
actually doesn't look bad, but you know
me, I always like to have some flash like to have
some control... so what I did, to kind of
keep it feeling very natural is... instead
of using like a softbox, or something, I'm
actually using like my Profoto here.
I'm actually just using this silver
bounce board, so what I'm essentially
doing here is... I got my Profoto pointed
up, and I'm just going to bounce the
light from the board over, so it gives us
like scattered look that's gonna make it
feel more natural... not so direct, and I
also threw my B2 on the background, just
to make it so it stays clean and white
as we shoot, and we'll go from there.
So here we go, I've got my 85mm
on my Canon. We're in Capture One as
always, so I'm going to first take a shot
with no lights. I'm at f/5 and I am at 250th
of a second. So this is with no light at
all, and we can see that we've actually
got some light on the background.
You know, a little bit, it's not touching her,
it doesn't matter to me, so I'm gonna
throw my lights on, I'm gonna basically
turn off my C group, so I don't have any
lights there. I've got A and B.
B's the background, A is the foreground and let's
see what we get.
Use TTL to set this up.
Okay you blinked so
would start the whole thing all over...
no so she blinked... so it looked pretty good
even like that.
I'm gonna make some
slight adjustments, I'm gonna add a
little bit of light to my A group as I
think it's a little dark, and also to my
B group. So I'm gonna bring both up tiny
bit. There we go nice and clean looks
pretty good.
A couple of things... it looks very natural.
Actually the light on her is really nice, but I do
have some light coming through the window, so
what I might do is put up my shutter speed
a little bit. I'm at 250, I'm actually
going to drop it down to let's say 125, and
let a little bit of that available light bleed in.
Think I'll go to sixtieth... she's
sitting down, you know, we're shooting
slowly so sixtieth is not gonna be a problem.
Yeah, we can see that now, we're
getting even more even light across her
face right? That looks great.
The other issue I'm having here though
is she has a white shirt, and we are already
losing the edges here a little bit, you
know. They're there, but it's not perfect, so
this is one of those times we'll use
something called negative fill.
So basically what we're gonna do is use a
black card. In this case a flag to
essentially reflect black on to the
white, this is going to give us a little
more detail there, a little more contrast,
and give us the... or reduce the contrast in
this case, give us a little detail in the
whites. This is kind of what you want to
do here. I sometimes see people talk
about negative fill, and they're just
kind of blocking the light. You don't
block the light with negative fill, it's about
reflection, and now we can clearly see
the difference.
Losing the edge... keeping the edge.
This is really popular, when you're doing
catalogs and stuff, but you can also use
it for portrait. If you happen to be
shooting one on white.
So we'll shoot few like this, looks nice,
Well anyway a 60th is really casual, it's good
Being loose with the composition, I can see the
sun's starting to blast through on the
background, but I don't care because it's
behind her... right.
As long as it doesn't hit
her we're totally fine.
Make sure you shoot like that, really subtle, really
comfortable, changing it up again, this is
like a casual portrait, and I think that
people are looking for these, these
days you know. Not so over-the-top, if she
does look towards the light, she's gonna
get reflection in her glasses. We have to
watch that a little bit, but otherwise
we're good, beautiful, like that, let me
look, yeah, that's really nice, okay!
So I can see the bottom of my frame, I've got
a little bit of my photo equipment back
there, but that's not a problem, can crop out after.
Almost never is a social media profile
picture, 2 x 3 which is the shape of the
camera. So I'm almost certainly gonna cut
something out, good, nice and pretty, nice
there, showing personality.
She making a beep lol...
All right good, okay,
there we go.
She's making me jump the
light, it's non purpose.
There we go good,
nice and casual, that's it, really pretty,
good, good, good.
A couple more like that,
oh that's good. that's good, yeah.
'Hire me for your job'... done, the thinker.
That's good okay.
I'm shooting fast today, you're
making me shoot you fast,
okay, perfect, few more like that.
Good, good, good, that looks great.
Nice and maybe I'll come in closer for a couple.
Just cause I can.
Go, really cute, that's nice, like that, pretty
pretty, pretty. Good, working our lights hard
because I can hear the fan going.
Couple more... it's warm in
here today,
So the only downside about
using a reflector like this is... you don't
have edge control.
DoubleTap okay good.
Couple more... Pretty just
like that, nice and casual.
That's it soft, very nice, good,
alright, good, and we're you know again,
this is a naturalistic feel, so if we are
getting some reflection in the glasses...
it's not a big deal for me.
I'm okay with it, and using this type of light it
doesn't feel like anything less when you zoom in
really and they're not gonna know that it's
a light source... and you put a
softbox there, it's gonna be like obvious.
So when you're making a casual portrait
you can do kind of casual lighting.
I'm gonna coin that phrase TM casual
lighting, so you know... so think about your
situation, somebody's being super casual
right, and and you know you've got this
really formal you know light, with a
backlight and the softbox right here in the way.
it can... it doesn't coincide... right?
What's that? It becomes very artificial?
Exactly see even Cristiano knows that.
So what we want to do is, we want to
kind of match our subject, match our feel
of our vibe to it, to our lighting, and
there's lots different ways to do it.
So yeah be sure to follow me ...
@DanielNortonPhotographer
I will put Christina's
information into the description,
so you can follow her as well.
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I'll see you next time OnSet.