Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on
Adorama TV I'm Mark Wallace and I'm joined by Amy we are in Cape Town South
Africa and Amy is a fantastic model and I want to shoot some pictures of her
next to this Lake here at the golden hour. Unfortunately Amy can't stick
around that long she's got places to be and things to do and I'm supposed to be
doing a meet up tonight and so we can't actually shoot at the golden hour but we
can fake it and we're going to fake it using two things. The first is a variable
neutral density filter on the end of my lens now I did an episode about this
with my niece in Cusco Peru about shooting with the variable neutral
density filter so you can shoot with a wide open aperture. We're going to shoot
around f1.4, f22.8 something like that we want this background to sort of go into
that dreamy boca feel, sort of mushy feel back there and focus all our attention
on Amy, but what I also want, is I want it to look like that the sun is low in the
sky. Right now it's not low in the sky. It's right now 1.20 in the afternoon and
we have hard shadows, its melting our eyes right now. it's really nasty and so
what we need to do is we need to take that sun and make it lower in the sky
and we're going to do that by using a studio strobe this is a Profoto B2 head
and to make it look like it's golden hour I'm going to put a gel on that flash.
This is a CTO gel that turns this into a 3200 Kelvin color temperature and so my
camera is actually going to have its white balance set to daylight but we're
going to be throwing tungsten colored light onto the back of Amy's head and
all of that combined; the shallow depth-of-field, the fake golden light,
we're going to do all of that we're going to get a lens flare by having this
come in to our cameras lenses the angle and we're going to fake a golden hour
shoot, so what we're going to do now is I'm going to throw this on to my studio
head and Amy you can close your eyes because I know it's it is so bright out
here and we've got a white building behind us that you can't see but yeah
we're crying because it's so bright and I need to walk you through
how I'm metering all of this stuff.
This strobe right here I just have it on full power
I'm just going to let it go and so it's going to throw this golden light onto the
back of Amy's hair and onto her shoulders and it's actually going to
overexpose a little bit so we're going to get that. The other thing I'm doing is
I'm going to try to expose for her face but I'm actually going to overexpose
just a tiny bit and so the way that I'm doing that is I'm going to put my
aperture on f2 I think I'll start at f2.8 and then I'm just going to dial my
variable neutral density filter so my cameras built-in meter the TTL metering
tells me that I'm just about a stop over exposed maybe half a stop just slightly
overexposed then that makes sure that we have this angelic look on her face and
the background is going to fall away so that's all there is to it.
Neutral density filter, a CTO gel color temperature orange, a good way to
remember that nice strobe, full blast and then we're going to shoot into that light.
Rght now going to start shooting let me walk you through exactly what's
happening my lens is at f2.8, my studio strobe is at full blast with the
gel and so now the first thing I need to do is focus on Amy and you can close
your eyes if you need to. I want to make sure that I get all my exposure and
everything set and now I'm going to roll my neutral density filter so I get that
underexposed reading on the natural light and voilà, we're going to shoot
just a couple more. Now the thing that's sort of interesting and difficult about
this if I'm shooting at f2.8 or f1.2 notice how Amy is moving about was just a
little bit it's really easy for things to fall out of focus and so you might
want to use a tripod and maybe get something to lock your model down, if
possible or use continuous autofocus if you've got a camera that does that and
so we're going to shoot just a few more and we'll show you the results now the
other thing to note is this right here this light stand. I have to be really
careful about my angle, because if I get it wrong I'm going to have that light stand in
the middle of the shot. I'll have to photoshop that out but if i do it just
right I'll still get the effects of the light without
having to worry about doing all that post-production.
Well we were able to shoot in the golden hour even though it didn't exist and Amy
pointed out if you don't have the light that you want you can always make it if
you have the proper tools and remember we had a variable neutral density filter
we had a just a normal orange gel on a flash now I have to point out you can
use just about any orange gel any kind of gel that converts daylight to tungsten.
That's what this is and so you can have something on a speedlight you have
something on a studio strobe it doesn't really matter the point is to have
something that throws that golden light. Make sure it's down low, so it comes in
gives us a little bit of lens flare and then you can have that amazing thing.
The other thing that we had to battle with on the front of Amy's shoulders here if
you move your hair just a little bit, we were having light coming in from behind
and it was giving away the illusion of golden hour because the shadows
weren't matching what we were getting with this, so just make sure you're
paying attention to the shadows that are falling on your subject so that when you
show that picture people don't go that is not golden hour, that's something else.
That's all there is to it.
Well thank you so much for joining us don't forget to check out the
Adorama Learning Center, it's absolutely free
and subscribe to Adorama TV I did it did you do it?
yeah you did. Of course I did.
Ok then we will see you again next time.