Hi everybody, welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace, hanging out with
Anabel, we've seen her
before on some of our past episodes and
today we're going to continue learning
about photography, specifically by
talking about metering, and where to
point our light meter. Now you've
probably seen me pointing the meter at
the camera... you've probably seen my good
friend Gavin Hoey pointing it at the light.
In fact when we do things together
people ask us... 'Where do you point the
light meter?'
Is it at the camera? or at
the light and the answer is it depends...
and it really depends on how the
lighting setup is used, and what you want
to do, but to really understand how our
light meter works and where to point our
light meter, we need to understand this
little dome thingy. Here this little
white thing on the front of our meter,
it's called a lumisphere, and to
understand where to point our meter we
first need to understand what this thing
is doing. So let's jump to that right now.
Well before Anabel joins us again,
let's talk a little bit about this
little white thing on our light meter.
It's called a lumisphere,
and it's it's not just by accident that
it is shaped like a half of a ball. It's a sphere
and so what it does is, it's
looking at 180 degrees and 360 degrees
around this way, just looking at all the
light that's coming in to this sphere,
and then it is taking all of that data
from over here, over here, over here, it's
taking all of that data, and then it's
averaging everything, and that is going
to give us a good reading.
If we're looking for things that are
shadows and highlights and everything in our scene,
and we can get that by pointing our
lumisphere to the camera. And so to
really understand how that works, why we
would want to point this to the camera,
and not the light to get all of that
information, I'm going to turn on this
little LCD panel here, and I've got this
little quick demo, so I'll turn this guy
on. It's going to get a little bit bright, there
we go, and now we can zoom in on this and
look at it really really closely, and
when we look at this really closely, you
can see on this side, on the light side,
we can see that the information here is
really bright on this side of our
lumisphere, but on the other side, you can
see that it is dark and so
taking the light stuff from this side,
and the dark from the other side where
there is no light, and it's averaging all
of that stuff together, and it's telling
us what a proper value is to make sure
that we have detail in the dark side, and
in the bright side.
So we're preserving the shadows, so this
would be what the the equivalent of
pointing our light meter toward our
camera, if we had a light to the side now,
let's pretend that we are going to
point our light meter to the light, so
when I tilt this, now notice we're only
getting the values from the light, we're
not getting any of the shadows from the
other side. So that means that our light
meter doesn't know about the shadows, it
doesn't know how to a verge those things,
and so what we're doing essentially is,
we're making sure we get a proper
exposure from the light, but we're
ignoring averaging the dark values, so
we're preserving the highlights, and
ignoring the shadows, and so that really
will help us understand if we should
point our light meter to the camera, or
to the light, because when we point our
light meter to the camera, then the light
meter is going to get the values of the
light, coming from the light, it's also
going to get the values of the light,
that's coming from nowhere. In other
words the shadows, it's going to average
that out, or preserve those shadows, that
the highlights are going to be a little
bit brighter. If we point our light meter
to the light itself, well it's not going
to see those shadows, and so it's only
going to tell us what to do to make sure
that we have a proper exposure for the
highlights. Now the question is what
about this lumisphere up or down?
Well when we put this back down here on the
table, and so we have that where you can
see this light coming across. You can see
that because the lumisphere is extended,
we can see the values coming in from all
different directions.
In fact, if I put my hand to the side you
can see that it picks up the reflection
of the light coming from my hand.
If I take that away, it ignores that
reflection, so it's really cool how that
works, but what if we really want to make
sure that we're only seeing the light
from one specific source, and ignoring
everything else. Well if we tell this guy
to hide, then what we're seeing is, we're
just seeing the light that's hitting
directly on top of our light meter, and
ignoring everything that's coming from
the sides, and so that's what that is for.
So it's saying, hey I want to make sure
only to see the light coming straight in but
ignore everything coming from the sides.
If you want to make sure to see
everything, you put your lumisphere up.
It's getting the bright side, it's
getting the dark side, it's getting
everything. So it can average all of
those values. That little lumisphere is
really well designed, and it's really an
amazing thing. Well now that we know what
this little guy is doing, what our
lumisphere is doing, we can start
applying that to a very basic lighting setup.
Now for this setup, my camera would
normally be right here, but leaving that
there.. well I sort of block Anabel's
face, so I'm going to move this to the
side, just so you can see what's going on
back here, and then I'll bring the camera
back out, and take some photos, but what
we need to do is learn how to decide.
We're going to point this to the camera,
or to the light based on what we know
about our little lumisphere.
So we have a very, very basic, lighting setup.
So let me just shoot a camera overhead,
so I can show you this. Our Key light is this
Profoto softbox right here, this is the
3-foot octa-box that's just going to be
our main source of light.
We're also bouncing some of that light
off of this reflector that's opposite
Anabel, so that's going to fill in some
of the shadows on the other side of her
face, and then we have a hair light, that
big strip box in the back there. That's
just adding a little bit of light to her
hair to separate that from the gray
background. This is a really simple
lighting setup, but we're not so
concerned with the light and the photos.
More we're concerned about how this
works, and where we point our light
meters. So think about this more than the
photos that we're getting back here.
We're gonna start by only using our key
light, our Profoto three foot octabox.
Now this could be any key light, it
doesn't really matter.
Remember we're talking about where to
point our light meter, that's what we're
learning today...
not a lighting setup, so we're gonna
start by zipping back here and Anabel
if I can have this little remote...
so now I have my little remote control,
I can turn lights on and off, the first thing
you want to do is only meter this key light.
Now I want to show you the
difference between metering to the light,
and metering to the camera.
You're basically standing, you're looking at me
where the camera is going to be when I
take the photos.
So when I first meter
this with a lumisphere up, I'm going to
get a reading.
I'm gonna point this at this light right here
and I'll hit this, and that is reading 4....
so I'm getting
f/4 as my meter reading, now if I step
back here I'm going to point this to the
camera, so I'm gonna point this to the
camera take a reading, and now that's
reading f/3.4... that's a half
stop difference. Now that doesn't seem
significant, but it is, because what this
is doing is when I'm pointing it to the
key light only, it's just looking at this
light, and it's ignoring the shadows,
because of that, I'm going to make my
aperture smaller f/4 which means that the
shadows on this side of Annabelle's face,
if I didn't have a reflector or
something kicking that in, those will be
darker than the meter reading that I
took, when I pointed this to the camera,
f/3.4, the aperture is wider,
so when I point my light to the camera,
remember my lumisphere is looking at
this light, just looking at the shadows,
it's looking at the light bouncing from
this reflector over here.
It's averaging all of that, and my meter
is smart enough to say... hey, when I'm
looking this way and getting all these
different values,
I need a wider aperture to make sure
that my shadows aren't too dark.
I'm trying to preserve those shadows, I'm
only pointing this to the light this way,
it doesn't see this reflector over here,
it doesn't see these shadows, and so it
ignores those, and so let's just take a
look really fast, I'm gonna take some
photos and show you f/4 versus f/3.4,
and you'll see that the shadows change
slightly, and so do the highlights.
Well when we look at these images that I just
shot the differences aren't that
significant. First let's look at the
image that I shot metering toward the
light, that is preserving our highlights.
Now when we meter toward the camera
it's only a half stop difference, so you can
see that our shadows are a little bit
more preserved.
We see a little bit more
detail in the shadows, but the highlights
are a little bit hotter, it's not a huge
difference in this setup, because we have
a really nice soft light. We have a
really nice reflector balancing a lot of
light in, but in a more contrasting
scenario that difference would be much different.
Well in that lighting setup
everything works pretty well almost
every single time, but what happens when we add
more lights, and our lighting setups get
a little bit more complicated, that's
where it gets to be specific, and so to
show you this, I'm gonna get rid of this
reflector really fast, just so you can
see what I'm doing back there with our
hair light, and so I've got this strip
light right here, you can see that I'm
going to turn that on. So let me grab
this, and this, alright so I'm going to
turn on this strip light right there,
that's going to add a nice hair light.
Now the question is, should we have our
lumisphere... this guy right here, should it
be up, or should it be down, well I'm
going to prefer to put that down, so that
I'm only getting light that's coming
directly in to our light meter, not all
of the stuff that's bouncing around off
the floor etc, that way I can be really
specific about what light I'm metering.
So again, I'm gonna put my lumisphere
down, I'm going to sit back here,
this light is coming this way to
Anabel's head, so I'm going to take
this, I'm going to put it right where
it's hitting her hair, and then I'm
pointing this right directly at this
light, and then I will get a meter
reading. Now it's metering at f/4, I've
already set that up, that exactly matches
what I'm getting from my key light, but
the point here is, for this we want to
make sure that we're only metering the
light that's coming from this light, we
don't want to get anything that maybe
would be bouncing off this reflector,
coming off the floor, coming off the
ceiling etc.. so lumisphere down right
where the light is landing, point the
meter right at the light, and take a
reading. So now that we have that, let me
just take a quick shot.
I'll put the reflector back, and we'll show
you how it looks.
Let's review.
Our lumisphere when it's up..
it looks all around for all of the
different light values, the shadows, the
highlights from a single light or
multiple sources, and averages that light
to give us a proper value.
So if you're metering for multiple sources
or if you want to make sure that you're including
shadow values, make sure that luma... the
lumisphere is up, and you're pointing
your light meter at your camera.
If however you really only care about a
single source of light, and that's all
you care about, you don't care about
those other values, then you point your
light meter at your single source of
light. If you have multiple lights and
you want to look at the different values
to make sure that those match, or look at
ratios, then it's lumisphere down.
Point the meter at each light source and take
those readings to make adjustments as
necessary, but in the end you're still
going to have to meter to the key
light to establish what your overall
reading is. So in our instance here, we
meter to f/4 and then we dialed
everything accordingly, that's why it's
called a key light.
Everything is based off of that key and
that is all there is to it.
I know it seems complicated, but
get into a studio, and practice a little
bit. Add one light, make it really
contrasty, meter toward the camera,
towards the light, and see for yourself
what's going on, and then once you have
that dialed in, add a second light, add a
hair light, add multiple lights, add
lights on the background, play with your
light meter, then you'll be able to see
what's happening by just reading the
numbers on your light meter, and it'll
make a world of difference to your
photography. Well thanks for joining us
for this episode of Exploring Photography.
Make sure you check out Anabella on
Instagram her Instagram is @anabeldieguezbailen
All right we put that right here... and I
know in the past a couple episodes the
Anabel has been in the Instagram link
is incorrect because somebody changed it,
it's our fault but that's the correct
one, and we've also included that in the
description of this video, also make sure
you check out my Instagram feed because
I'm always posting behind the scenes
footage and things that are happening
when we're filming these episodes, and
photo tips from past episodes, and I'm
also taking your questions for ideas for new
videos so get over to instagram...
follow me make sure that you're doing that so
we can interact and have lots of fun.
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Thanks again for joining us and
we will see you again next time.