Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV
brought to you by Adorama.
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Well we are joined in this episode once again
by the amazing Nikki Nikki
you might remember her from our cinematic portraits
where you are all weepy and awesome.
If you haven't seen that check
it out it was a lot of fun.
Well in this episode
we're going to be answering some
questions that have come through email
to me and comments on YouTube about
studio lighting, specifically can I do some
deconstruction? Can I show you each
light? What it's doing and why it's there?
So that's exactly what we're going to do in
this episode. We're going to deconstruct
studio lighting. I'm not going to do
anything really fancy
but we're going to show you the formulas
that can work for every single studio lighting setup.
It doesn't matter what you're doing,
if you're using 50 lights
or one light this stuff works every single time.
So Nikki we're going to have you go back here
and be next to your stool here
you'll notice that I have four studio lights
set up, right here.
The reason I have four studio lights
is these are the same lights that you'll
see in every lighting setup, every single
time. You might not see all of them every
single time, but you'll at least see one
or more of these in every single
lighting setup. Sometimes you'll see
multiples of these, but to understand all
of this stuff we are going to fly
a drone over Nikki and show you these
lights and then I'm going to walk you
through it one light at a time.
In this lighting setup we have a key light,
fill light, hair light
and background light.
These four lights
represent the four basic categories of
lights used in almost every studio
lighting setup.
Let's take a look at each
of these beginning with the key light.
Some people call the key light the main
light. The key light is the cornerstone
of every lighting setup in most
situations there is only one key light.
Metering begins with the key light and
all other lights are positioned and
metered in relation to the key.
In our lighting setup the key
is doing most of the work,
we have nice soft light
illuminating most of Nikki's face.
The fill light helps fill in the shadows on
our subject. Sometimes you'll use it to
eliminate all of the shadows but most of
the time it's just used to gently fill
the darker areas. Normally it has a power
level that's lower than the key light
you may have several fill lights in the
lighting setup and it's also common to
use reflectors to provide fill light.
You can see how our fill light just adds
a touch of light to Nikki so there's some
detail in her hair and under her chin.
The hair light provides a highlight to
your subjects hair. This light also has
two other names. When you have a dark
subject on a dark background like I did
in my recent Beauty lighting episode,
the highlights from this light help us
separate the subject from the background
and so you call this light a separation light.
Some people also call this light
a kicker light.
This is usually the case if you're adding highlights
to something that's not hair,
like fenders on a car or sleeves on a jacket.
The hair light is usually metered the same
or just a bit brighter than the key light.
You might have one or more hair lights
the background light is used to add light to
the background
and it's not uncommon
to have several background lights,
especially if you have a large background.
The background light is usually metered equal
to or less powerful then the key light.
You can see that our background light
just gives a subtle highlight to the background,
while letting the edges go dark.
Some of the light from the key and fill
is going to be falling on our background,
so our final image will have a
background that's a bit brighter than this.
Alright that was really cool.
Thank You Nikki for letting me fly a drone
over your head. There's another thing
we really need to understand,
when we're doing studio lighting setups
and that is how do we repeat the same setup
over and over?
Now if you don't know about light ratios,
make sure you watch my video
about light ratios,
so we're going to talk a little bit more
about that right now.
Remember when you're metering for light ratios,
we're looking at the key light
and metering that
and then metering all the other lights
in relationship to that key light
and so what we don't want to do
is write down all of the exact
metered values.
So let's say our key light meter
is at f/8 and our kicker light meters at f10
or whatever you wouldn't write that down
in a notebook and a diagram
saying the exact values.
What you want to do is write down the
relationships between those lights
and to do that it's very, very simple,
let me show you how to do that right now.
This is a diagram of our four light setup,
now you can use anything
to create a lighting diagram,
a simple notebook and a pen are just fine.
It's a good idea to label your lights
and you might want to add some notes
about the modifiers you've used.
Some people write down the exact metered values
for each light but I prefer
to record the relative values instead.
In this setup our relative values
would look like this.
These numbers show us the exposure value differences
between the key light in all of our other lights.
The key light is always zero
because there is no difference between the key
and itself. In this example
the fill light meters one stop lower than the key.
The hair light is one-third stop brighter
and the background is one and a third stop lower.
Now we can eliminate our metered values
and create a chart that looks like this.
Once we know the relative values,
it's easy to make changes if we need to,
for instance if our key light metered at
f/5.6 we could use our light meter
to quickly determine the values
for the rest of the lights
and you don't have to memorize all these f-stop
numbers. Most light meters have a calculator
for metering exposure differences
otherwise known as light ratios
and I've included a link in the description of this video
for my tutorial on metering for light ratios
and once you know this technique,
it's just as easy to meter for f/5.6
as it is for f/11 or any other number.
Using these techniques you can create
your own studio lighting setups and you
can create a notebook where you have
diagrams and showing the relationships
between all of the different lights and
that will mean that your stuff works no
matter what gear you're using or where
you are. The relationships can stay the
same even though the key light might
meter differently. Now way back in the
day about ten years ago I created one of
my classic digital photography
one-on-one videos about all of the
different lighting setups that I use
using this system, so make sure you check
out that video. There's a bunch of
different setups that you can try in
your studio. I've created a link to that
video in the description of this video
Thank you Nicki Nicki for being an
awesome model in this video and holding
very still as I took all those different
pictures of all the different lights,
it was really awesome of you to do that.
Make sure you check out Nicki stuff on
Instagram, here's her Instagram right
here you can check that out and I'm
included links to her Facebook and
YouTube and all that good stuff in the
description of this video, make sure you
check that out as well. Thanks again for
joining us we will see you again next time.