(electronic music)
- Hi, my name is Miguel Quiles.
I'm a Sony Artisan of Imagery.
- [Narrator] In this video you'll learn about
setting up your camera, lenses, lights, and studio space.
- Camera settings are a very, very important
part of a studio shoot.
And I like to keep things really simple.
And my goal with these camera settings
is to give you a jumping off point
so that you can dial these settings in
in your own studio environment
and hopefully land on a look that looks very, very similar
to what I'm gonna show you in this video.
First things first.
What you need to make sure that you're doing
any time you're shooting with an off-camera flash,
you need to go into your menu
and make sure that you turn off
the live view setting in your menu.
Make sure that that is set to off.
The reason being is that
if you're shooting at an f/8, f/9, f/11,
I think we shoot as high as f/13,
when you start to focus
you're gonna notice that your screen will black out
if your live view display is turned on.
So make sure that you turn that off
because it will make the whole shoot run so much smoother.
Next, we're going to go ahead
and start off at f/8, 1/160 of a second, ISO 100.
And this is a nice starting point for your camera settings,
and I'll tell you how I tweak it from there
but that's where I start off.
When I shoot this style of portrait
I have a lot of different options
to where I place my light.
And you're gonna notice that
for the first few series, segments of images,
I'm gonna shoot them all the same.
I'm gonna have my soft box very directional,
very direct to the model.
It's not gonna be off to the side or something like that.
It's gonna be directly in front of the model,
slightly above her.
And part of the reason why I set my light up in that way
is that I wanna have a really nice flat light on her face.
I don't want to have very harsh shadows
because the shadows are a little bit distracting.
For beauty close-up images, the flat lighting,
for me personally, just looks fantastic.
And so that's gonna be the very first
three segments of images that I'm gonna shoot,
are gonna be with that soft box.
Very directional, going straight ahead.
Then what we're gonna do when we switch over
to that a6300 setup with the 50 mil lens
I'm actually gonna take that modifier off,
and I'm going to put an umbrella.
And so, part of the reason why I'm using the umbrella
is that I want to be able to show you
that you can get a very easily, readily available modifier
and still get really great portraits.
For that one we're gonna change things up a little tiny bit.
Instead of having the modifier
directly in front of the model
we're actually gonna put it to my right side.
And so, the reason why I'm doing that
is now I do want to introduce
a little bit of shadows onto her face
to really carve out the details and give that curvature
that you really don't get unless you have some shadows.
But I still wanna have soft shadows.
I don't wanna have these,
the very harsh, defined transitions from light to shadow.
So using the silver umbrella and placing it off to the side
gives me a nice balance between a hard light
and a soft light type of a look.
Those are gonna be the two main setups that we're gonna use
as far as the lighting goes for these particular shots.
When you're setting up your lighting in your studio
there's a process that I follow every single time.
And it's a little counterintuitive to a lot of people,
but follow along with me here for a moment.
What I like to do is,
if you're shooting in a studio environment,
or maybe you're shooting on location,
there's gonna be light pouring in from everywhere.
In the studio that I'm in right now,
I have lights to the side, lights above, lights behind,
and these are lights that I can't really control.
I mean, I can control them to some extent,
but I can't really control them that much.
So what I'm looking to do, before I take any shots,
I'm looking to actually negate all of the ambient light.
So all of this natural light that's in the room,
and even artificial light that's in the room,
I'm trying to negate it.
I'm trying to make it to where
it does not impact my photograph whatsoever.
People ask me all the time, "Why do you start at f/8?"
That's the reason why I start at f/8.
Because naturally,
in many studio environments, in most scenarios,
if you set your camera up to f/8,
1/160 of a second, ISO 100,
your intended goal image should be completely dark.
You should have, when you take a shot,
before you turn on your studio strobes,
you should have a completely black image
on the back of your screen.
Once you have that launching off point
then you can put your studio triggers on,
you can turn your lights on.
And you're gonna notice that
now you have complete control over your lighting.
Now you can move it to exactly where you want it to be.
You can shape it the way you want,
and you don't have to worry about the overhead lights,
or the side lights,
or a television that might be on in the background
that's adding additional light into the environment.
If you take that first shot and you notice, at f/8,
that you still see ambient light
that is bleeding into your image
then that's when you go up to f/9, f/11, f/13.
Now, there's a little bit of a balance, though,
that you have to look out for,
because as you go up in your aperture
it's knocking down the power of your strobe
a little tiny bit.
So that quarter power, all of a sudden,
now you may have to bump up your power settings
in order to keep up with the aperture
that basically negates all of the light in the room.
This is kind of a dance that you have to play into
to be able to get to the point where you have an image
where you can perfectly setup your lights,
you can perfectly control them,
and you can get that final look
without having to worry about all of the different light
that's spilling into your image.
Setting up your studio space can be very, very simple.
What I like to do first is to get my lights setup,
get my modifiers setup,
have a general idea of where I want that to be.
I love to shoot tethered for my studio shots
so I will bring in my tether table with my laptop.
I will have that set off a little bit to the side
to where the model can't necessarily see it directly.
And part of the reason that I do that is
in between shots I don't want the model to be distracted
by the camera that keeps changing the images
as they're being fed from the camera.
But I wanna be able to see it.
I wanna be able to evaluate
and determine whether or not the images are in focus,
whether or not the lighting is great.
So I'll have that set off to the side
to where it's not in the way.
And then, from there, I basically have my camera.
I'll begin to put that together, put my triggers together.
I always like to take test shots
ahead of the model actually showing up
and standing in the spot,
to make sure that everything is working good.
And I tell this to a lot of starting photographers
because, a lot of the times,
photographers think everything is gonna work out great,
and they don't test anything.
The model stands there,
and all of a sudden, things don't work.
And you're setting yourself up for a little bit of failure,
or at least a little bit more of an uphill climb.
You could imagine, for example,
if you were a patient and you didn't feel well,
and you go to the doctor's office,
and the doctor walks in,
and they're fumbling, they drop the folder,
they drop their stethoscope,
you're gonna have less confidence
that this person knows what they're doing.
And it's the same thing as a photographer.
If you walk into your studio space
and you are fumbling with your lights,
you're fumbling with where your stuff is,
it doesn't look professional.
And so, the subjects will look and say, "Oh my gosh.
"This is just a crazy sideshow."
You wanna make sure that they're comfortable.
You wanna make sure that they're confident
in your abilities as a photographer.
And part of being able to get to that
is making sure that you setup everything ahead of time.
If you have a friend that can stand in
and allow you to test your lighting, that would be ideal.
Because then, that way,
you can see what the lighting is gonna look like,
you can tweak your lights,
change your settings if you need to,
and then go ahead and they can leave,
and the model walks into the set
and everything is ready to go.
And all of this really is going to help you a lot
to instill the confidence in them
that you know what you're doing,
that you are in command of your equipment,
you're in command of your lighting,
and they can focus on giving you great expressions
and not have this in the back of their mind
that you have no idea what you're doing.
So try that out, give it a shot.
Next time you shoot, test all of these things.
Set these things up ahead of time,
and you'll notice that you're gonna get way better results.
- [Narrator] In this video, you learned about
setting up your camera, lenses, lights, and studio space.