Hi you're watching AdoramaTV,
in this episode we're going to work
in a tiny space.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV I'm Mark Wallace and I'm
joined by Fanny Belladonna she was one
of the most spectacular models in all
of Paris, really in all of the world and
so we're going to be shooting in a tiny,
tiny space. This is a hotel room here we
have just a little nook, I'm converting
it into a studio so Fanny any of you go
right back here by the window, I'm going
to show you, sort of,
what we're working with
and how we're converting this into a
working studio. So let's get started.
I'm going to show you around using my new
Karma Grip here and a wide angle lens on
my GoPro HERO5 so Fanny is back
here against this window and what we've
done is we've just have pulled the blinds
shut to give us a background and I'm
using a Profoto Softbox on a B2
head and this is really awesome because
the B2 is so small you can take it just
about anywhere. It's very, very portable so I've got
that, and then we're shooting into
Lightroom and so that allows us to see
exactly what we're doing as we go,
and of course I'm using my
Leica M Type 240,
and that's about it. Now that you've
seen how small this space is let me show
you what I'm doing with the light, to try
to make it look a little bit larger.
So back here,
Fanny's against this, this curtain and
I've put the Softbox to the side going
to get nice sidelight to give us some
contrast and because I can't really move
the light very much,
Fanny is actually going to move to the
light. She is a professional model
and knows how to pose and so she's going to
be working around and playing in this
light and I'll be shooting right here
I'm not doing that right now
because I'd block your view,
and what we'll also do is we're going to
shoot really tight, so we get some nice
tight head-shots, and then we're going to
shoot some, some vertical shots to see if
we can get a little bit of shape, we'll
shoot some black and white, we'll shoot
some color and then maybe we'll take the
Softbox off and shoot with hard light as
well and so that gives us a lot of
options in a small space; hard light, soft
light, really tight horizontal shots,
a little bit larger vertical shots,
color and black and white
all in this tiny space.
So that's a lot of stuff that we need to do,
so we're going to start shooting
right now!
Let me show you one of the things
we're doing here because they're just
really aren't a lot of options for this
tiny space, but we can do is control the
contrast of the light and so what we've
done is, we've played a little bit with the
light. I've added a grid to control that
light and what I've noticed is when I move
this back a little way, so closer to this
curtain, I can get some contrast on the
ripples of the curtain and by changing
how Fanny is looking at the light
we can either get a more contrasting
portrait or something that is really sort of
nice and soft, so not only have I been
playing with the direction of light
I've been playing with the intensity of
light, so we were shooting at f8 but then I
took that light power way down and then
I started shooting some stuff around
about f1.8 so we get really nice shallow
depth of field, so her hair is going to
start to fall out of focus, but her eyes
are going to be nice and sharp, just to
get a lot of options. We don't have a lot of
options in this consideration of the
space, but again we have a lot of options
in hard light, soft light, depth of field
and framing so that's what we're
concentrating on.
Alright, well we've done our photo shoot
what I'm going to do now is we're going to
throw all that stuff into Lightroom.
We're going to choose one or two winners.
I'll do some editing and I'll show you the
results right now.
Let's take a quick
look at the results of our tiny space
photo shoot, we were able to do the things
that we wanted to do, in other words we
shot horizontals and verticals,
tight shots, black and white photos,
all of those things that we said were important.
It was sort of difficult when I look through
all of these images to choose just a few
to retouch but I was able to do it, so
let's take a look really quickly at a
few images and we're not going to go
through all of the steps I used to
retouch them, but I'm going to tell you about
some of the secrets that I used when I
was re- touching them.
We're going to start by looking at these
two images. These were shot with no
Softbox, unfortunately in the video I
don't show myself shooting these but it is the
exact same setup, except no Softbox.
I wanted a really high contrast, grungy
look and I got it. Now the thing with
these images, if I go to the develop
module, was that her shirt was the same
luminosity as her face and so there was
no central focal point to these images
and so you can see here when I go to my
adjustment brush in the develop module,
I can hover over this so you can see that
I have painted over her shirt and that
adjustment that I used was to take the
exposure down by a little bit more than
half a stop, now if I turn that off you can
see that the shirt is about the same
luminosity as her face that means it's
competing with her face, I don't want
that, so the adjustment brush allows me
to fix that issue, so I did that with
both of these images. I think the results
turned out pretty well.
Alright, let's talk about another choice
that I made and that was to, look, take
these and make them look like they were
shot with Tri-x black and white film,
so that is something from days past.
The key to that was a
high contrast, black and white
image but the other thing that
I needed to do was
add some grain to these images.
The grain is what people love about
Tri-x film because it makes everything just
look sort of dreamy, now to do that in
Lightroom it's really simple you just
hop over to the develop module and then
go down to the effects panel in the very
bottom and then you just need to take
the grain and then turn it up so I used
a setting of about 51 for the grain
the size is 38, the reference about 50.
Now if I wanted this to look like a high ASA
grain then I would use a larger size,
a larger roughness, a lower ASA grain
I would use a smaller size and a smaller
roughness. If you don't know what that is, it
doesn't really matter just move those
sliders around until you get something
that looks pretty cool. I love this look
So it feels sort of that throwback look.
The other thing I did to these color
images is make some different choices
for images that were almost identical, so
this image here because of the way the
light is falling and the way she's
posing, I didn't do a lot of retouching
but you can see she has sort of a dark
circle under her eye,
I thought it was fine in this image,
however in another image
this one right here,
same exact lighting, set up the
same exact adjustments in Lightroom you
can see that we really, this really draws
some attention to her face and it
doesn't look very flattering
so on this image I decided to throw that
into Photoshop and then use the healing
brush to remove that dark circle, so on
one image I thought the dark circle was
fine another image I decided to remove
it because it was just too noticeable.
Speaking of retouching and doing sort of
something over the top, I decided to do
that as well so notice this background
color if I go to this next image,
it's a totally different color even though we
shot in the same place and you can see
that I did a lot of retouching on her
face, I did that using a technique called
Frequency Separation Retouching in
Photoshop, it's an advanced technique
that would take us a long time to
explain but I just wanted to point out
that in a small space like this if you
shoot some good foundation images you
have a lot to work with and you can do a
lot of different things and get a lot of
different looks. So if you look at all
these images that we shot we got some
cool stuff in one space in a very short
amount of time.
Well thank you so much for joining us
for this episode of Exploring Photography.
Thank you Fanny for all of
your hard work today, we had a really
amazing time.
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I will see you again next time.