Hi everybody.
Welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace in Madrid,
Spain in tactic studios, and today I'm
going to first start with a very basic
lighting setup with an exceptional model,
her name is Anabel.
Come on out and
Anabel speaks zero english and I no
hablo espanol at all...
and so this is going to be exciting.
Thank you for google translate!
so what we're gonna do
is we're going to begin with a very, very
basic lighting set up, an umbrella that's
it, but i want to spice things up a
little bit using basura...
which is Spanish for trash!
That's right!
I have literally taken some trash out of
a trash can, and just chopped the bottom
out of this translucent bowl.
I guess we're gonna use this as an
unusual light modifier to spice things up, to change
things from good, to a little bit better.
So without further ado... let's get started right now.
All right... well we have our
umbrella set up.
This is gonna give us a
nice soft light.
It's gonna give us images that aren't bad
but they're just sort of boring, and so we
need to build a foundation with this sort of
boring setup. So it's just a single umbrella, a
beautiful model, and now I want to meter
this, so I'm gonna give my little meter
here to Anabel, and then she's just
gonna hold that under her chin. I'm gonna
trigger this using my Propfoto remote.
So I'll click that, and that meter
is at exactly at f/2.8,
that's exactly what I want, I want a nice
shallow depth of field.
So that later on when I'm using my
trash, it's out of focus, but let's start
with just our normal lighting setup.
Just so you can see how that looks,
well that is a pretty good lighting
setup. If you have a fantastic model,
which Anabel is, and so that is gonna
work nine times out of ten.
But I want to spruce things up just a little bit to
get some unusual effects.
I don't want my images to look just like
everybody else's.
What I'm going to do that ... well my
secret weapon...
and that is this.... it's a piece of trash!
So all I did is, I took this little ball
here, and I cut the bottom out, and so
then I can put that in front of my lens.
And it's going to create some
interesting effects. Now the key to this
is I have metered at f/2.8, which means
that when I put this in front of my lens,
it's gonna fall out of focus, and it's
not gonna be a piece of trash, it's just
gonna be some specular highlights, but
this has no color, it's just translucent.
I want to add some color to this.
So let me make some changes, and walk through
exactly how this works. So let me just
set things up really quickly, and then
we'll fine-tune things. So I have a
secret weapon and that is this light
right over here, now you've seen me... that's
a little bit heavy.... you've seen me throw
a light into a lens to get lens flare a
million times, but that is not what we're
doing here. What this light is doing, it's
got a blue gel on it.
I could put a blue gel, or a red gel, or a
green gel, or whatever I want, and that
color is going to be hitting my little
piece of trash. So that's gonna be
hitting the piece of trash, and the
highlights of that are gonna change to
whatever color this gel is. So you can
use any kind of light, a speed light a
fancy Profoto light. It doesn't matter,
just need something to throw some color
onto this piece of trash. Anabel is in
place, and our lighting setup is very
simple, we have a Profoto medium sized
umbrella, it's giving us a nice soft
light, but the key to this is this light
right here. That's got a blue gel you can
use red or pink or whatever you want, to
put some highlights on a piece of trash,
and then that piece of trash needs to be
translucent, and you place that right in
front of your lens, and move it about to
get different effects as you're shooting
your model. So as Annabelle is moving
around, I'll be doing this, and then based
on how much I move
I will get different effects inside of
my lens and on the exposure, and because
I'm using a really shallow
depth-of-field.
It will just show up as a blob.
We have to do a bit of post-production
to bring out all the goodness that our
cameras captured. All the details that
are in these files, and so what I'm going
to do here is use the develop module in
Adobe Lightroom, or you can use Adobe
Camera Raw in Photoshop.
Either way this will work the same in both
cases, so we're going to be playing with
our our radial filters.
So again in the develop module...
zip over to your radial filter...
we're going to apply two of these guys.
So I'm going to click on the radial
filter, and the first thing I want to do
is change the exposure. So I'm going to
click the effect.. choose 'exposure' and
then I'm going to set that exposure to
negative 1. So you can play with this on
your files, but online about negative 1
works pretty well. I don't want to change
the exposure on Anabel's face,
so what I'm going to do here is...
I'm going to click right on her face and
then drag outwards, and you can see I'm
leaving her face alone.
I'm just changing the
exposure on the outside of this filter,
on the outside of this circle. So it's
darkening the edges, but it's leaving her
face alone.
I can click and drag this around,
just to make sure I don't change
the exposure too much on her hand,
and her hair etc. Just the outside edges of
this. It's sort of like a vignette but
it's specific to the entire image, except
her face, I want to do that again, except
for this time, I want to add some more
saturation. Again I don't want to change
the saturation on her face to make her
skin look weird. I just want to really
saturate these colors that we captured
in the camera. So I'm going to zip over
here. I'm going to click on new, and then
the effect here is saturation. So I will
click on saturation, and I want my
saturation to really be saturated. So I'm
going to take that up to around 70, and
then again I'm going to click on
Anabel's face and drag outwards.
So I'm going to go way out here, about like
that I'm gonna drag this down just a
little bit, again I'm keeping the
saturation on her face.
The same but I'm really saturating these
colors outside of that. So we can see all
that stuff, that was in the reflection of that
little piece of trash. All right our two
radio filters are finished, I'm going to
click close a couple of the things that
I want to do here.
I am going to add a vignette,
so I'm just gonna add a very small
vignette... something about negative
20. Something around there...
and this is going to add a nice burn around the
edges, and you can see that's really
pulling some stuff out, and then to give
this a little bit more filmic look.
I'm going to add just a touch of grain so
I'm going to bring that up to about 16, 17,
the size you can play with. I'm gonna
leave that to 20, 21,
then the roughness about 15, that's all
there is to it.
I'm going to hit the Y shortcut key, and
you can see the before and after, just a
couple of radial filters, a vignette, and
some grain really makes a difference to
our image. So let me show you how the
rest of these images look.
Well thank you so much for joining us
for this episode of Exploring Photography,
where we took this piece of
trash and made it into an interesting
light modifier, but I think our results
had something to do with our fantastic
model Anabel, and you can find her on
Instagram at @anabelladb...
Perfecto... and I put that right here so you can see
exactly how to get her Instagram feed,
It's really pretty spectacular...
Well thanks again for joining us...
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Thanks again, and we will see you again
next time. Adios.