these are some of the basic tools that i've acquired to
help bring my photographs to the next level quality
this is the equipment that i've got currently for taking photographs both inside and outside
i'm going to go through each one and how they may be useful for you as well
the first one is the camera obviously that's the most important thing to take in pictures
this particular one is a sony alpha 5000 i've had it a few years it's a little bit dated but
it came in a package with a different lens as well so in one package i was able to get both
the near and the far lens multiple lenses are better for when you're doing farther distance
this camera has an intelligent auto mode and it's great for someone like me that didn't really
have a lot of experience in photography doesn't understand a lot of things like shutter speed
and all that fancy stuff that the pros do but at least it allows someone like me to take a
really nice picture so i've been super happy with the camera from a modern standpoint the
one thing that i think is a bit of a drawback for this one and again it's a few years old
is that it has a qr code you're supposed to be able to take a picture of and do nfc with
it it just doesn't quite work really well so i have been successful around wi-fi getting the
pictures to show up on my phone but that is one thing that may drive me to updating the camera
is get something that i have more control of remotely for both taking pictures and for
connecting to a laptop to be able to view the pictures without just looking at a
small screen this is a simple cheap tripod i think it was literally like 20 on amazon
it collapses all the way up to here but it's got double extensions telescoping i think it's like 50
i don't know some inches tall something like that and it does have a bubble level on it to help you
with that now you'll see here you've got the screw and so if you take the top piece off here
there's the screw and then that goes into the bottom of your camera so you can take that mount
to your camera and then put it on top and that's how you keep the camera still and that way your
vibration your shakiness isn't coming through in your photographs it's all as still as can be
this is a small kit that is a combination of both reflector and this is more of your white lights
you also have on the back the ability to use gold which is going to give it a warmer tone in your
pictures and then in the middle what you have here is a diffuser so let's say you're outside
and you've got a bright light down at your target or you've got the sun and it's
casting a little bit too much of a direct light you can use this and hold it between your subject
and the light source it scatters it across a wider area in a softer light and not so direct
and you'd use a reflector in cases where let's say your subject was here the light source was
up here but you wanted to be over here taking photos then what you would do is place the
reflector off to the side so that it caught the sun or whatever the light source is and shined a
little bit back in a nice soft manner against your target so what you're doing is you're using this
to reflect the light source against the dark side of your target previously i picked up some
cheap lighting again about 20 bucks probably from amazon and they're pretty direct they're a small
source and i do see reflections of those sometimes in the target so this is a case
where maybe having that diffuser in front of them would scatter the light and make it softer but
what i've gone to now is in fact i just got this kit is the more umbrella style professional level
lighting sources you can see at the base that you have the option to put it all the way down to the
bottom or you can put it up high and that'll affect where your end point at the top comes up
and then once you have that right then you just tighten the little knobs so that one there is as
low as you can go and this one is as high as you can go with the two telescoping sections
so it's actually way tall if you want it you can put the head on with a sideways
orientation like the low one or you can put it in the vertical for maximum height if you prefer that
the bulb simply inserts into the socket and then there's a hole here where the umbrella
stem comes through and remember you want the light bulb shining
into the umbrella so that it diffuses it as it bounces back same with this one and again because
that one's vertically mounted we're able to put that one on an angle and aim downward at the top
and the last thing i have is a foldable backdrop so you may have for indoors you may already have
surfaces and walls that you like to use that are a light color or dark color depending on what kind
of photography you do but this is an option you have and this particular one actually folds up
and you can see it's got a black half and a white half so depending on what you're shooting main
thing you want to look at is make sure you have contrast so if you have something black probably
not going to capture it against a black background or if you have something white it'll probably just
wash out against the white background so that's just another handy tool to have you can see here
i've taken some object a guitar in this case and i put it in a corner over there was a little bit too
much natural light and i want to make sure that you understand the effects of the lighting so it's
a little bit of a darker corner there is light coming through some clothes shades over here a
little bit but in general it's pretty dark and you can tell by looking through the video that it's
dark here but you can also see a drastic contrast of me i look like just a silhouette against the
natural light coming through that window right so that's another thing you have to think about
is not only in backdrop of colors but in lighting especially if you've got windows in the background
all right with no modified settings i'm just going to try to take some pictures
kind of offhand like i would okay so there's five taken with just my
bare hands holding it and how shaky it ends up is going to depend on how much caffeine you've
had that day or whatever but there are my five base shots before doing anything else now let's
turn the camera off the next thing i'm going to do is mount it to the tripod for more stability
now i'm going to take a couple pictures i'll try one here
this angle
okay now there's five of those
now the next thing we want to add is the lighting
now we have more lighting and the guitar is going to look brighter obviously
the one thing you always have to watch for when you have artificial lighting like this or even
natural lighting is trying to make sure that you don't have too much for shadows because sometimes
when you put like those more concentrated lights i showed you earlier because they're so focused and
i wasn't using a diffuser they created some pretty harsh shadows and that's what you want to try to
avoid the whole point of having good lighting like this so let's try a few shots like this
you can see how much of a difference these lights make
this is with both of them on there's with that one off here's with one of them on
and that's how it looks with it off so you can see what a huge difference these lights make on the
subject all right the only tool left in our tool box is the background now i'm being a little bit
lazy because i'm not unfolding all four panels and that's kind of a little bit of a pain but
i'm trying to just show you the difference it makes on the background so we take our subject now
now from this angle we can see that the lighting should really be moved around a little bit
we're getting some shadows right in this area and that's just because the
lights were originally coming from that way because it was sort of tucked in the corner
now we get a little bit of shadows so i'm going to take this chance to show you the reflector
so if you look at it here's without the reflector and now if we come in and we
start shining some light we can quickly see it lighting up this side of the guitar
and softening those shadows a little bit depending on where we aim so they're not all going away the
really the best thing to do would be to move that light over here and rearrange the lights
but i just kind of use this to demonstrate how you use a reflector to capture an area that may
be a darker side of the subject and you can use the other light sources to bounce back into it
now again let's look at each of these first here's the picture of the guitar in the dark no lighting
here's the guitar with the tripod being used to help stabilize the photographs
here's the addition of the two umbrella lightings one from a high point one from over to the side
here's the addition of the white background
and here's how you could use a reflector to light up the dark side of a topic as well as
soften those shadows
for everything you see here in other words the camera the lighting the diffusers and the backdrop
was less than a thousand dollars now i know that can still be a lot of money and i know that
there are things like ring lights that are more practical if you're just doing talking head stuff
just selfies and whatever else but if you want to be doing a little bit more photography and have a
little bit more professional looking photos these are the basics two things are going to contribute
to better photography better experience and better equipment and i still consider myself
somewhat of an amateur photographer i guess so it's a hobby for me and i just started to
learn more about the lighting and how to make the photos look a lot better so i've invested
a little bit in some of these handy tools that will just bring my photographs to a next level
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