In this video
I'll show you how to
transform your small home studio
into a mini circus.
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 in this video
I'm going to show you
how to turn your small home studio
into a circus!
Now nothing says circus
like a good
stripey background
and if you're lucky
you might be able to find
the perfect stripy fabric
but if you're only going to do this occasionally
the easiest way
is just to get cheap red and white fabric,
cut it into thin strips
and hang it from the wall.
If you're going to do this more than once
you might want to consider
investing the time in painting red stripes
on white fabric
but trust me
that simple sounding idea
took absolutely ages
but it is worth it.
So with the background up
all I need to do now
is set some lights up,
let's get a model in,
let's get shooting.
So to help me out with this circus theme shoot
I've got the amazing Brian!
Now as you can see,
Brian is dressed appropriately
for our makeshift circus background.
Now where can you get an outfit like this?
Well circus outfits
are often found in your local hire store ,
costume hire, fancy dress
that kind of thing,
often have circus looks
like our ringmaster here
or you can put it together yourself
however you do it,
once you've got your look created
you're going to want to take some pictures.
So let's start with a really simple
basic lighting
and build from there.
Now to begin with,
I'm going to use a single light.
So I've got an eVOLV 200
in a 70cm Softbox.
I'm just going to put some general lighting
on here. I don't really want to target Brian
too much because he's going to have
some flamboyant moves,
I suspect
and we need to have that
little bit of leeway
on the lighting
to allow him to do that
so I've already metered this out
for f5.6,
let's take a few shots like this
and see how it looks.
Now one thing you'll notice
in these pictures is I am not
including the floor in my shot
and there's a couple of reasons for that.
The first one is; we just don't have the space.
This is a small home studio
and I can't get far enough back
to do a full-length shot including the floor
without using a really wide angle lens
and the second one is;
well the floor doesn't look the part.
I could of course put some straw
or something down here
to create a circus floor
but if you can't see it
you don't have to worry about it.
So now I've taken the same basic setup
of a single light
but added two more lights
and they're going to be lights
right behind Brian here,
so it's just another two eVOLV 200's
pointing straight back at the camera.
This should give some fantastic flare
a real sort of theatrical look
to this setup
which I think it really needs.
Let's see how it looks.
I'm going to start with those back
two lights on their lowest,
possible power. Always start there
because it can be quite blinding.
So lowest possible power
here we go Brian
and I can clearly see
that they're in the shot.
I'm going to try increasing the power
by two stops
so from 1/128th power
up to 130 second power
and we'll take the same
sort of shot again
and that's starting to look much better.
Now we have a little bit of flare coming through
but remember ,these lights back here
give good flare in the shots
but also they light the back of Brian
so too much light from these
and I'll lose all of the detail,
too little and it doesn't quite work.
In a small home studio
with this amount of distance
this is the perfect setting
so let's take a few shots like this.
So as well as having white lights
behind Brian, this is the circus,
it should be full of color
so I think we should have some colored gels
on those lights
and maybe just a bit of smoke, as well.
We'll start with no smoke.
We're going to give you loudhaler.
Right I think it's time for some smoke!
With this shoot
you might have found
the perfect circus outfit,
have made an amazing
DIY circus background
but all of that will count for nothing
unless you've got the right model
actually you don't need a model,
what you need is an actor
and someone who can play the part
and in this case Brian played the part
of a ringmaster superbly well.
It made the photos really come to life.
Let's have a look at one
so here's the image
I want to edit
and I said earlier on I didn't want to target Brian
with the key light
by that I meant
I didn't want to have a really tight beam of light
because I needed to move around
but I want the look of a tight beam of light.
I'm going to get that here
using Camera Raw in Photoshop.
So I'm going to get the radial filter
and I'm going to get my exposure
and we'll have my exposure
maybe one and a half stops
something like that just to make it a little bit darker
as I drag out a very thin
sort of oval shape,
move my cursor outside
and I can rotate this around
and just pop it over Brian
something like that,
yeah I'm pretty happy with that.
Now that's okay
but I reckon I could do with a bit of clarity
in here as well,
so I'm going to take the clarity
and increase it
and increase,
actually I'm going to go the way up
to maximum.
The whole look of this
was a sort of distressed feel,
that's what I was going for
and lots of clarity around the outside
makes that come to life.
So I'm happy with that,
let's just change tools to the zoom tool
and go back to my basic panel
and I think the next thing to do
is color so I love the red color here
but the blue doesn't really stand out,
it is quite wishy-washy
so I'm going to re bias the white balance
to the blue side
by coming to my temperature
and moving the slider towards the blue,
I can make the blue a lot more bold
and I think that balance is better
with blue and the warmish, reddish color.
It does affect Brian's face.
I'll need to come back
and change that I think.
Anything else I need to change here?
Well lots of smoke means I have to increase
the contrast to really cut through the smoke
and the colors
and all of the photos
I actually pulled the vibrance back slightly
which might seem a little bit silly
but in fact what it does is it just mutes
the colors down
and again for this styling
it seemed to work rather well.
So those are all global changes
but having done that,
there is going to be a few smaller,
local things I need to adjust
and to do that
I'm going to use a different tool,
I'm going to use the adjustment brush
so that's a little brush icon up here
and let's start with the right hand side
because now I can see the circle
of the actual light itself.
I couldn't see that before
that was gone when I had the original shot.
I think that must be the vignette
that's making that happen,
so I'm going to get maybe one stop more exposure
and I'm going to make the whole area
just a little bit brighter like that.
Whilst I'm going let's make that a bit more "flarey" as well
because I like flare in my photos.
Next I'm going to do Brian's face
so I'll click on the new buttons
make a new adjustment brush,
reset everything
apart from a little bit more warmth
on the temperature
and just paint a bit more warmth
onto Brian's face,
not too much, just enough.
Finally it's the left handside,
the layout hailer
is the thing that's closest
to the light
so it is quite bright
so let's see if we can darken that down
a little bit, with another new adjustment brush.
This time maybe a stop less exposure
a little bit less on the highlights
all of these things can be changed
of course after
when I finish, I can always come
back and adjust them
and your pictures,
well you're going to need
to do your own adjustment.
These are specific to my shots.
Okay that's pretty much everything done
and with a little more adjustments
there it is,
there's my DIY circus shot completed.
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right here on AdoramaTV,
I'm Gavin Hoey,
thanks for watching!