Hi, this is Jay P Morgan.
Today on the Slanted Lens I'm gonna take you through what's going through my mind when
I'm shooting a two or three-hour shoot for company.
This one I'm doing for SKB.
I was in Idaho.
I had gone there, flown there with Jolene.
We were there for a family event.
I shot about 4,350 frames.
That's raw and JPEG, so about half that is the number, so it's over 2,000.
But I'm gonna look at the last half of this shoot which is kind of tells the story of
the shoot.
Now first off, when I do these kinds of things, when I come back and look at them, I back
everything up to two LaCie drives.
So I have it in two different places, and a lot of times I'll just leave it on the cards,
so that I now have it in three places when I travel back and I make sure that they're
not gonna be any problem me losing it.
So here's how I did this shoot.
I'm working by myself, so I have no one there to help me.
No one is holding reflectors.
But we walk down the river, so I put all my equipment into an SKB backpack, and we walk
down the river, and we work.
Now before I start this process, I always calibrate my monitor with my Spyder 5.
So I make sure I've got a properly calibrated monitor so as I look at the images I know
I'm looking at the correct exposure and everything is in the proper order.
So let's go ahead, and we're gonna take this off.
So here we are.
Some of the first images I took with the, you see the 70-200 millimeter lens down there.
I don't have 400 ISO.
I'm at 7.1 at 160th of a second.
First shot I took, I'm going, "Wow, it is way too in focus in the background, way too
in focus."
So the first thing I do is I went to the longer lens, and I dropped it to 2.8.
You saw before at the same 7.1, and now the background falls out of focus and just looks
far nicer.
I'll shoot burst because I don't want to miss focus on something and I know I'm gonna lose
some, is I'm hand-holding a 200-millimeter lens which means I'm gonna lose some for camera
movement, I'm gonna lose some for auto focus missing.
So I shoot first all the time, and I had him just walk, walk away from the car.
I'll do that over and over again.
I dwell on things too long.
I know I do.
But in the end I'm pretty comfortable I've got something that's going to work from that
little sequence the minute I feel that, okay, let's go on to the next set up.
So now I had him throw his case on the ground.
Now I'm still at that 2.8.
I played with him opening the case there.
I always get them to look into the case and then look off like what's going on out there
like the reaching out and looking at the world, I wanna conquer the world, I wanna go do something
with this case.
I wanna be able to use it and make it a part of my life.
I always try to think about products in terms of, what does this mean to the manufacturer?
What does that mean to the product user?
It isn't just about carrying fly fishing equipment, it's about the adventure and the experience.
And you wanna feel that as you're shooting these kinds of things.
I had him walk off a few more through that little fishing net on the side of the camera
so I could see it against the case kind of made it a little more believable and I shot
a whole another series of these.
Then the last thing I'm suddenly going, "Why don't I do a quick product shot of this?"
Just the case with a couple of items that show fishing, a lot of times I'll prefer 2.8
and let the shutter fly but also under-expose it on the compensation by a stop.
And all that does it just makes them a little bit richer, but I can shoot away, and I know
the exposure varies a little bit.
I'm on auto white balance as well.
I'm letting the white balance just kind of find its way, and I'm okay with that because
it's nice.
I may change that as a day goes.
Now as I get down to the river here, I'm looking at him.
I always shoot horizontal, then I shoot some vertical, and vertical spine have a lot of
head space because you put type and copy in there and it works out really nicely.
I did like this setup very much because it's the light I'm down in and deep.
I didn't have a reflector.
I had no way to get light on the side of that case.
And so the case just really wasn't popping the way I wanted it to in these shots.
I mean, it was okay.
I did some broad shots.
Well, first of all, I looked at it I was going, "Whoa, that's way too bright."
I'm looking at these things all the time.
So I brought the exposure back a little bit, and I'm going, "Well, he's a little dirty
down there.
I'd love to have a strobe light here, but I'm working on my own, so I try to find a
compromise where it's just a little brighter but not too over-exposed."
Sometimes it's a little hard to be working with a guy who's not a model because he just
wanted to fish.
[inaudible 00:03:57] Remember that part where I said you just get to fish for three hours?
Well, you get to fish when I tell you, you get to fish, and how I tell you to fish, and
where I tell you to fish, and I need to work with him to make sure he gives me pauses in
the action that he aligns himself to the camera correct.
And I'll just let him walk around.
Otherwise, I'd lose him a lot.
So I put that backpack on the edge, so it just didn't feel like a lone case in a case
shut out in the middle of the river.
Then I started thinking, "Well, what about if I'm trying to look through the case at
him fishing?"
So I see some of the fishing stuff in the foreground, the case is open, we see him in
the background.
So I went to 24-70 and I'm showing more of a vista of everything that's going on in the
scene and eventually I'll get this to where I'm focusing more on just the case and not
so much on him in the background.
I thought it doesn't hurt to have some where we see him a little more in focus back there,
the case a little more in focus, started to do some verticals that didn't look very good,
not seeing much of the case, not seeing much of him kind of a dorky set up.
If all else fails and I don't know what to do I do a high angle because now I'm looking
at the case and looking at him and it gives me a lot more to work with.
When I shoot at 7.1 at 200th of a second like this everything's in focus.
It's just it's a big Vista.
It's okay.
I don't love the look, it's not my favorite.
But sometimes if you've got a case and a person you wanna hold enough focus you kind of have
to do that.
And still at that 24-70 which is not my favorite lens to do this stuff with.
I like the 70-200 much more.
It just drastically changes the look of things.
It brings the background in.
It kind of compresses the image.
The case becomes more obvious because the focus falls off much quicker.
You see how focused the background is at F11.
I wanted to shoot some of those is just a variation, but I really like it better when
I get back to like four here and see the difference I got from 11 to 4.
I think it isolates the case, it puts him out of focus in the background, he just becomes
mood to the shot.
If I brought him up front with that same focus there let him be in focused and next the case
with the background fall way out of focus.
I like those because it gives us some isolation of him in the case.
But then I also through some of those where I made that background way more in-focus isn't
estimate 70 millimeters F4 horizontal, the background isn't out of focus that much, whereas
at 200 millimeters therefore the background is way out of focus.
If you want to understand that principle better check out my movie feed "Change your Perspective"
lesson which will help you understand that you can't just zoom if you want the background
to change in relationship to your subject matter.
So check that out.
As I get in tight, these horizontals are pretty.
You see the mountains in the background, you see the case just has a really beautiful sense.
He's very close to us.
I thought that looks really nice, worked out really well.
There on that one you just barely see my reflector, on the right in there you see it.
So I'm about two-thirds of the way through the shoot now, and at this point you start
thinking, "All right.
I've shot this case a lot of different ways.
I'm not sure exactly what comes next here."
But I've learned that if you look to the light to find different lighting, move the case,
find a different spot, it changes everything.
And I mean it does get hard.
I know that the lights changing now and it's getting softer and nicer all the time.
I use that backpack several times to give me some with the backpack and some without
the backpack.
He's looking into that light that's coming down.
I've got him facing towards the sun where the lights going down so I know I'm gonna
get a nice light on his face.
I keep playing around with different things.
I'm going to F10 here now, light in the background will be more in-focus.
So I work on focus a lot when I'm shooting.
Very narrow depth of field to more broad depth of field.
I like all those different options.
I wanna see those as we go.
Just some individual case shots there as well.
And then the sun starts to just disappear on me.
And it just all of a sudden was gone because it hits the tree line just like it's gone.
And I was watching it, I knew it was coming, but it dropped pretty fast.
Once, so I guess this kind of contrast.
It's pretty hard to get anything without using strobes or something.
And I have...I was working by myself.
So I just opened the camera up.
I'm at F4 now and plus one on my exposure and I'm allowing it to just be a nice open
exposure.
So as soon as I go through here and I've shot everything and I get back and sit on my laptop,
I'll go through and start put a one star on all the ones that I like.
Now, I don't take and protect the client.
I give them just everything I star, so I'll put 400-500 images up at least.
Anyway so there's a look at kind of the process to what I'm thinking.
I'm just shooting and searching and changing and always trying to change this focus and
the background and the shot and just get as many as possible.
In the end, they'll probably be happy if they have six or eight shots.
In the end, I'll probably give them 100 shots that will work.
So I really want them to be overwhelmed with the number of images I give them.
And they feel like wow we really got our money's worth out of this.
I try to do this when I travel.
I'll be in New York, and I'll call him up and say, "Hey, send me that case out of this
hotel."
I'll run out and shoot somebody down Times Square something doing something interesting.
And I'll do this little three or four hour shoots for them, and it's a nice way to pick
up some money when I travel and also help write up my travel expenses and get their
cases in different locations around the world.
I can do this for a lot of different companies and products.
You can't always afford to send someone to Rome, but if you're gonna be in Rome it's
a great time to say, "Hey, you can take your product, take these pictures, pay you a little
bit of money, and it takes you four hours one day, and you get a shot."
So there's a little bit of my process.
I hope you found that interesting and somewhat insightful and hopefully it will be of benefit
to you.
So keep those cameras rolling and keep on cooking.
Our Stop Motion download from Trisha's zap has been one of the most popular downloads
we have ever done.
And Trisha's back with a longer two and a half hour workshop, advanced stop motion techniques.
You'll love the things she talks about, a tasty video, the banish [sp] logo.
So great techniques on how to light, how to use Dragon frame.
So get over to theslantedlens.com.
Check it out.
[00:09:43] [music]
[00:09:57] Subscribe to the Slanted Lens like all my
buddies here did.
You could come and hang out with us.
We have a wild time together me and my buddies here, my mannequin buddies.
We have a great time together so come and join The Slanted Lens.
Subscribe.
You can be friends with us too.