Aaron Nace: Welcome to behind the scenes of our latest beauty portrait involving sparklers.
Hey guys, welcome to PHLEARN. My name is Aaron Nace. You can find me on Twitter at aknacer.
Welcome behind the scenes of our latest portrait shoot involving sparklers. We have a lot of
challenges to overcome in the shoot. We’re going to talk to you a little bit about lighting,
the concept, how everything came together and how we overcame some of our challenges.
Our goal was to create a really interesting portrait that was both beautiful and a little
bit unique at the same time. Usually when creating something like this you want a couple
of different elements to be in place. First of all, you want to find a model who
is relatively expressive with their facial features and how they pose. Someone who is
just staring at the camera blankly really won’t work most of the time if you’re
looking for something a little bit more than just your standard beauty shot.
The next thing we’re looking for is really interesting lighting. For this we went all
over the internet looking for references, and in the end we decided to go with a lighting
setup that we’ve never used before. It created a lot of challenges, but in the end it created
a really beautiful light. We’ll talk you through that lighting setup.
The first light we used is a stripbox, that’s camera left. The reason why we used a stripbox
is because we wanted our lighting to be relatively contained. All the lights in this image have
grids on them or very, like a small throat. That’s because we didn’t want one light
overpowering the other light. We’re mixing colors and in this case the light off to the
left with the stripbox is gelled red and that’s what’s creating that red cast on the background
as well as on our subject. The next light is all the way camera right,
and this is behind our subject. This is gelled blue. It’s in a medium sized soft box and
this time it’s just hitting the background. What we’re getting is the light from the left
with the red gel, the light from the right with the blue gel and where they mix in the
middle kind of creates that really nice purple color. Our third light is a beauty dish
and that’s located right above and behind our subject. It’s got a quarter CTO gel
on it. It’s a little bit kind of orange, and it warms the image up a little bit. It
kind of plays off that purple in the background color and gives it a bit of a rim light around
our subject. The last light that really ties everything
together is actually boomed out right in front of our subject. It’s in a 7-inch reflector
that’s gridded with a 40-degree spot grid, and that has a cyan gel on it. I’ll explain
why we did all those things. The reason it’s gridded is because we wanted it to
just hit our subject. We didn’t want it to hit the background, and for that matter
not even our whole subject, mostly just her face. We used the cyan color so it would balance
out the warm colors coming from the rim light in the background, that beauty dish that we
use. Again, you kind of have a play between warm
and cool that work together. It’s got a really tight follow off that was hitting her
face, but by the time it gets down to her mid torso you can’t even see the light anymore.
It really does give a focal point to the image and you know exactly what to look at.
The next element we use to create an interesting portrait is usually some kind of prop. This
can be anything. This can be an animal, it could be even another subject kind of used
as a prop or it can be just an everyday object. In this case we tried to play around with a few
different things. We used flowers and some fabric and eventually we came upon the idea
to use a sparkler. We had a few left over from the shoot we did before, and we thought
it might be pretty interesting, especially with this lighting, to kind of put a sparkler
in the shot. Having your interesting subject and interesting
lighting, make sure you include a prop because that will give your subject something to kind
of play against and add that little bit more interest into the photo.
We’re shooting with the sparkler and everything looks good. It’s a little bit crazy and
it smells horrible and it’s getting all smoky in the studio. We’re taking the pictures
and everything looks great and in one of the frames we notice that one of the sparks from
the sparkler actually came and tapped the subject right near her eye and it kind of
fell off. We happened to capture that on camera just purely by luck. We’re looking through
these and we’re shooting tethered so we can see everything that’s actually on the
computer screen while we shoot. Looking through this and everyone saw this shot and they’re
like, oh my god, that is so cool. We decided then we were going to go ahead and push that
boundary a little bit. After some tests using actually myself as
a guinea pig holding a sparkler near my face and a little bit farther to figure out kind
of about how close I could get a sparkler to my face without it hurting. It turned out
you were able to get it really, really close and it didn’t really hurt at all, which
is great. The next piece of the puzzle was getting our
subject to feel comfortable holding a sparkler that sparks were going to come hit her face.
This is something that really don’t try to force the model into this. If the model
gets excited about the picture, she gets excited about the concept and she wants to do it,
or he, great. Then you have a really nice collaboration. But if someone’s like, no,
I’m not going to do that, please don’t force anyone to do something like this because
it’s a little bit dangerous and you want to make sure that the person involved is really
comfortable doing it and, in fact, they do want to take care of that.
One way we go about giving confidence to our subjects is to kind of show them the pictures.
That’s why we shoot tethered so they can see the pictures as they’re coming up and
they can see, oh my god, this is looking amazing, and we’re like, okay, wouldn’t it be even
cooler if these sparks were coming out and hitting your face and they’re like oh my
god, that’s scary, but yeah it would be really cool. We try to inspire that confidence
in our subjects as well and that’s how we usually can push the boundary a little bit
farther than most people. We decided we were going to have the sparks
from the sparkler go ahead and hit our subjects face. I know you guys are like you are absolutely
crazy and we need to shut down Phlearn, you’re endangering people, and I promise it really
was not as bad as it seems. We wanted the sparklers, the sparks to kind of touch the
face of our subject and one way we went about doing that is create … we actually brought
in a wind machine just to the right of the camera. As our subject was standing there
she had her eyes closed, she was braced for this, and she was basically holding the sparkler
and we used a wind machine that was going to blow the sparks in and have them bounce
off of our subject’s face. All of the pictures you see here are straight
out of the camera. These have not been retouched in any way. The subject actually did go through
this and she’s a boss because of it. Ashley: Definitely, it was hard to keep my
face pretty still because it was so scary to have it close, but it didn’t hurt so
it ended up being okay. I got used to it by the third time. Aaron: Yeah, you were very
brave. Ashley: Sweet. Aaron: Awesome job. To make sure we had the maximum effect we
wanted to use a longer shutter speed, and that would mean it would capture a lot of
the sparks coming and hitting her face so it wasn’t like one or two. What we wound
up doing is cranking our shutter speed down really low, down to one second, and with that
it was completely dark in the room. We turned off all the lights, we’re using a long shutter
speed and when you get to that point sometimes your cameras might have a little bit of problem
focusing. We have a small flashlight we keep on set and we can aim that at the subject
for a second or two, go ahead and get the focus, move the flashlight down and then shoot.
We were shooting in complete darkness. The only thing was the sparkler kind of going
on her face and it was a really, really cool shoot to witness and the images turned out
amazing. None of this would’ve come together if it
wasn’t for an amazing team. That’s one of the biggest things that I would promote
is try to get someone you really love and trust to do hair and makeup and get them onset
with you every single time you shoot and you’ll kind of work that bond. If you’re really
familiar and friendly with your hair stylist and makeup artist, if a model comes on set
and everyone else is already really familiar and happy with them it’s going to help them
calm down and get cool as well. Work with a good team and work with a team
who really cares. We probably went through four or five different hairstyles on this
shoot alone. The first one we shot in and it was just like, no it’s not exactly right.
We have a very dedicated hair stylist who wanted to do it over and over and over until
they got it right. Having those kind of people on set really does help out. Do what you can
to find an amazing team. Guys, thanks so much for watching this behind
the scenes look at our beauty portrait involving sparklers. Look forward to a tutorial coming
soon and please don’t go out and set people’s hair on fire with sparklers. Thanks again,
guys. I’ll PHLEARN you later.