Okay now step one point your flashlight out into the yard and get your camera.
Are you recording? Recording.
Now on three go WOOAAAAAAHHH!!!!
One, two, three!
woooooohaaa.
No, man, not woooaoaoaoa.
WOAOAOAOOAOAOOOH!!!!!
WOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOAOOAHHHHH!!!
Oh my GOSH! Look at all that light! That's Amazing!!!!
Okay if that right there is how you're currently shooting beam shots then I
have some good news for you. You've already got the most important thing
that you need, and it's not the flashlight. I'm gonna show you how to
take that passion and go from this. To this.
One thing that you are gonna need so we can jump into this you'll find right in your kitchen grab that box of salt and pour
some into your hand because I want you to take everything I say with at least
one grain I'm fully aware that my videos are not professional quality I'm not
under that delusion and I don't want you to be either but Peter McKinnon doesn't
make flashlight videos so we've got to do our best to help each other out okay
tip number one is choosing your spot you want to pick a spot that does the best
possible job of showing depth and I don't necessarily mean you have to be
far away from something but you need to make sure that you're shining your light
at something you don't want a lot of empty sky in your background and I
realized that not everyone lives in the Hundred Acre Woods in a place where it's
ideal for taking beam shots but your options might be better than what
think for example this is the view that I have out my front door we've got a
wide open space and we've got a few rolling hills here and a couple of trees
out there and then we've also got further back that second set of hills
that's way out there so we've got good distance here but this is a horrible
place to take beam shots all of the landscape lines are running in a
horizontal direction across the frame and there's really nothing to shine at
there's all this wide-open sky up there and just not right it's just not that
good of a place now here we've got a little better we've got more to look at
we've got some trees to bounce off of and a few size reference objects so this
isn't terrible I do shoot from here once in a while just to change things up but
watch what happens if we go from here and all we do is turn around and shoot
from the exact opposite direction you've probably all seen this shot in my videos
we've got plenty of range here we've got a nice framework of trees all along this
edge and over here and we have our leading lines that come from here down
the frame and here at kind of an angle instead of just across the frame like
this we've got a few structures for some side reference and the best part is in
every direction we've got something for the light to
splash off of even out here at the very top we've got kind of a minimal amount
of black sky space this gives us something in every direction to shine
the light at this is also the place where you've seen me do my little speed
walk to show some additional depth and the shot which brings us to tip number 2
get in front of the camera doing first-person shots is a good way to show
some perspective and I really like those two but it doesn't hurt to set the
camera on a tripod and get out there and move around this is going to give your
viewers a richer perspective on what it actually
feels like to have this light in your hand my third tip on choosing your spot
is this get out of the darkness people tend to think that pitch black is what
you're looking for and that's really not the case obviously you don't want a
street lined with a bunch of thousand watt lamps but you also don't want
complete darkness either introducing some ambient light into your shot is one
of the best things that you can do for your video here's the shot of my yard in
pitch black and now here it is with some additional light introduced it not only
gives us a better perspective on the environment it's going to help reduce
the noise or that grainy look that you get in your footage one of the hardest
things about getting an accurate representation in beam shots is that the
camera always tends to blow out the hot spot and dumb down the spill and that's
not what it looks like at all in real life adding some ambient light to the
shot is gonna help you with that I I don't know exactly how to say this
correctly but basically what it does is reduces the range of lights and darks
that the camera needs to capture in the image and so it just kind of takes some
of the workload off of your camera if I'm in a place where there's really not
any other lights I'll even bring my own sometimes I'll use other flashlights or
little portable lights that are battery-operated that I have in the shot
that I showed you earlier where it was my two porch lights there was actually a
third light in use right there off on the one side I also used a small box
light like this you really can't even hardly see it in the shot but bringing
that extra light in is still really helpful in getting a crisp image with
enough of it you can actually bring the ISO down on your camera which is really
what starts to clear up the image okay moving on to equipment this is the part
of the video where I'm supposed to tell you the equipment doesn't matter you can
do this with anything and that's really just not true at least not for this I
shoot my beam shots on a Canon 5d ii which is a full-frame sensor camera in
2018 is worth if they go for probably six to nine hundred dollars plus the
lens that i have currently i have one that's about a hundred and one that's
about four hundred that I use for shooting the shots now I totally get
that most people cannot spend that kind of money to make beam shots and so what
we're gonna do now is I went and bought the cheapest possible DSLR that I
thought might potentially have the capability to shoot some decent beam
shots and it's the Canon t5i now I've paid three hundred and sixty six dollars
for this camera on ebay which I realize is still a lot of money now I wanted
this little flip out screen so if you can use your phone for vlogging and just
want a dedicated beam shots type camera for about a hundred dollars less than
that you can get the T5s one other thing you need to realize for in that
budget is that you will need an additional lens this kit lens that comes
with this or even on nicer cameras you're not going to shoot beam shots
with that they're too noisy the the damage you just won't be happy with the
image quality so I recommend buying a prime lens what you want to get is one
that's as wide as possible and as fast as possible ideally what you would want
is something that's f1.4 capable for the aperture but those are they're
expensive you can save a lot of money if you just jump back to F1.8 and I've had
pretty good results with that you don't want to point eight or three point five
those are just not gonna do it on my full-frame
I got away with using a 50 millimeter lens for a long time because it was like
a hundred bucks on this camera on the aspc size sensor you don't want that it's
it's just to narrow your shots are gonna be like looking through this little hole
the closest thing I could find that was fairly wide and fairly fast and fairly
cheap was this lens for $89 for this video I'm just gonna use the F1.8
lenses that I already have now I know a lot of you probably want to film on your
smartphone so we're gonna do a comparison between the t5i and about a
$400 smartphone John's phone is the MotoZ2 play which is what you saw the
shots earlier on for the settings on our camera what I recommend is to set the
shutter speed down to about 1/30th of a second because that's going to allow
more light in aperture as wide as you can go F1.8 in our case and then once
we get outside I usually adjust the ISO up or down from there with a powerhouse
flashlight like the ACEBeam X45 and this camera I'm thinking probably around
3200 if we're lucky we might be able to get away with 1600 one last thing I
found that really helps with this is to go into the camera settings and create a
picture profile specifically for beam shots I like to bring down the contrast
a few notches and then bump up the sharpness just a little beam shots are
extremely high contrast so doing this is going to allow the camera to show spill
and the surrounding area a little better I think okay first up is the footage on
shot on his motoZ2 play using the techniques we learned in this video he
captured what I thought was a pretty decent image it was fairly stable -
considering he didn't have a tripod
now here's a look at the footage from our t5i using my 20 millimeter F1.8
lens honestly I was expecting the t5i to destroy the Z2 play in this footage
but looking at both of them I don't see that much of a difference
the t5i footage is brighter because we have the significant advantage of full
manual settings but as far as clarity sharpness graininess in the image I
don't see much of a difference I'd like to hear from you guys in the comments
what do you think looks better now the title of the video does say how I shoot
beam shots so we are going to take a look at some footage shot on my 5d to
look at the level of detail in the trees in the grass in the equipment in the
shed the first time I saw the footage from this camera I was ruined it was
like stepping up from a plastic Walmart flashlight to my first hotwire a mag 74
by the way this camera captures amazing footage that's clear and sharp and it's
a good low-light performer recently I was watching youtuber flash a holux
Channel and I saw what I thought were some pretty good beam shots there using
a combination of some of the better spots he could find and ambient lighting
he did a great job of showing what his imalent DX80 was capable of I liked
these shots because they not only show the power of the light they really
convey the way it feels to have it in your hand
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