In this video I create some dramatic moody lighting
using just two speed lights.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV
brought to you by Adorama the camera store that's got
everything for us photographers and once again
you join me in my small home studio for something
that feels a bit more like a photo challenge.
Because recently I was chatting to
a fellow photographer, who said when I've got
a small home studio, but I don't do portraits
because for lights, all I've got are just two basic
speed lights and surely you need more things for
a creative photo shoot.
Well I disagree, in fact I think it can be extremely
creative using nothing more than basic speed lights
and that's exactly what we're going to do in this video.
Now to be clear, I am just going to use two
flashpoint speed lights. Well, two is better
than one I guess, however I do have a big advantage
that my studio walls are painted white and the ceiling
is white, and I have got a bit of an idea of where
I'm going to head with this shoot so let's get a model in,
let's get shooting!
So once again I've been joined in the studio by Fern,
who's going to reprise her role as Red Riding Hood
for this shoot.
Now let's talk about a lighting.
I've got the two speedlights at either side of Fern
and they are equally spaced and also right in line
with her shoulders.
Now this is going to give a very specific sort of lighting.
It's very edgy, it's very contrasty, quite heroic sort of light.
Before I take the pictures however I need to
check the power.
So I want the lights to be equally spaced but
also exactly the same amount of light hitting both sides
of Fern. So let's see what we've got.
Let's do this side first of all.
And I'm getting F4. Okay, F4 sounds like
a good number to shoot at.
What about this one?
F5.6 so I'm getting more light this side than the other
if I reduce the power of the lights using
the remote control I'm getting F4 equally
both sides. Okay let's take a picture like that
see how it looks.
That looks very edgy, very contrasty,
very dramatic lighting. But what if you don't want
that really edgy hard shadowy lighting.
Is it possible to get softer? Well actually yes it is
and we can use the fact we're in a small home studio
to our advantage because rather than
having the lights pointing straight at Fern
let's spin them around. So if I spin them around so
they face the wall what's going to happen is
the light will bounce off the wall.
It'll spread and give much softer lights onto Fern like it's
a small reflective umbrella without actually using one.
However if you change the direction of the lights,
you're going to change the power, so let's re-meter
see what we've got.
So I'm back down to F2. Wow, lost two stops.
F4 there we go, so the same thing applies to this one
let's check the the power of this light. Also F2.
And back to F4. So again same power either side.
Let's take a picture of Fern, see how that looks.
So this time we have much softer lighting.
The shadows are there but they've pretty much
disappeared, and it does look like we just used a couple
of big soft umbrellas.
However it's not just the
spread of lights that's going to make a difference
it's also the height of the light. So these speed lights are
roughly the same height as Fern's shoulders but if I get
the same lights, and I drop them right down low,
let's spin them back as well so they're no longer soft,
we'll go back to the hard lighting.
This is going to have an effect on the shot too
now it's worth saying that if you move the lights
in this way, I've got to re-meter once again
So out with the flash meter.
Let's check see what we got, let's bring it back down
to F4.
And with both lights now at F4 again
let's take the same shot.
Lighting from below gives a very distinctive look
It's sinister, it's more edgy, it's scary, it's very cinematic
in it's appearance. However it still has that kind of
hard edge fill so wouldn't it be good if we could
get that low slightly scary looking light but still get the
softness from the other shot well we can again
using the fact we're in a small home studio
What I'm going to do is going to get
exactly the same lights but this time I'm going to
bounce them off the ceiling. So with this angle of light
the light is going to come up bounce off the ceiling and
come down, but because it's still down low,
some of that light is still going to come and
hit Fern in the face and give us that edgy look
that we're after, so there should be a
combination of looks. Let's meter that out because
of course now, that light has further to travel
it is going to be less powerful.
And once again we're back to F4 for both lights let's take that shot.
And there you have it soft lighting but with
a sinister edge that works really nicely and I reckon
that's the light we're going to do when we do our shoot.
So Fern are you ready?
Okay let's take some pictures.
So there we go we've got some really great shots
of Fern there. These do look superb
straight out of camera but
of course there's always room for a bit of Photoshop,
so let's get one of these into Photoshop and we'll do
a quick edit right now.
Bouncing light around a small white studio is never
going to be the best way to give control and direction
to your light, however, I can fix some of that using
post-processing tricks. So I could do this in Lightroom
I'm going to use Photoshop Camera Raw and we'll get
to exactly the same end result. So here's the picture
I want to edit. Looking at it I can see clearly
the top is brighter than the bottom which makes sense
because the light was bounced off the ceiling and
it's also a bit brighter in the corners than I'd like as well,
and that's really because the lights work closer to
the edges.
So to fix both of those problems I'm going to
come over to the local adjustment radial filter right here.
Now the radial filter is a great way of adding a
sort of vignette to your image. Before I use it I'll
make sure that it is set to outside which it is and
then I'm just going to change the exposure. So I'm
going to come to a little minus button here and just
press it a few times till I get to minus two exposure
that might be right, it might not be, let's come
into the middle and I'm going to click
in the center of the image and just sort of
drag out just like that, and that gives me a lovely
vignette. Now I can move it around by
clicking and dragging and it probably wants to
go somewhere around about there.
That looks pretty good, okay, maybe minus two is
a tiny bit strong, let's just bring that back
a little bit like that. Okay that looks
pretty good, there are other local adjustment tools,
as well including the adjustment brush.
Now with the adjustment brush I can choose
something like clarity, I like a bit of clarity.
Let's increase that to plus 100 I'm going to
paint some clarity, hopefully just onto the background,
and a little bit onto Fern around the edges like that.
Now it's going to bring up all of
the texture in the shot. I think that looks really good
with this image, and background combination.
However I want to make sure that I don't get any on
Fern's face because in fact I want to soften that slightly
by coming up to the adjustment brush and choosing
the new option, and then going down to clarity,
and using the minus button all the way down
to minus 100, and with a smaller brush we can just
make sure we remove any clarity and soften Fern's face
a little bit.
Now that looks really good so far, but
what about the axe that she's holding now that's a
really important prop for this shoot and lighting effect
to come together, and I really want to emphasise that.
So I'm going to add a little bit more detail to the head
of the axe. So once again it's a job for
the adjustment brush and once again I'm going to come to the
to the new option here, and then I'm going to increase
the clarity just to really push some some contrast into
the head of the axe, and also while I'm here I'll increase
the shadows in that area too. Now if you're going to
increase the shadows, it's worth remembering
you might bring up some noise so I'll add in a touch of
noise reduction.
Right let's come over to the head
of the axe, and we'll just paint on that and you can see
how that just brings up a little bit of detail there,
and maybe with the same settings we'll just do a little
bit of these shadowy areas like that to add a bit of
extra detail in there.
Okay with a few other little tweaks and adjustments,
there it is there's my final picture completed.
And I really enjoyed that challenge and yes with just
two bare speed lights, a bit of planning and a bit of
post-processing it is possible to create
some amazing portraits. Now if you'd like to take up
this challenge yourself, brilliant.
Don't forget to leave me a comment below,
let me know how you get on.
Even better of course if you want to see more videos
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I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.