In this episode I’m going to show you how you can use store windows to create some
really interesting double exposure effects with one click of your shutter.
AdoramaTV presents ‘Exploring Photography’ with Mark Wallace.
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of ‘Exploring Photography’. I'm Mark Wallace.
Well I’m here in a passage way, it’s sort of a shopping center in Paris, and the thing I love about this is
it’s got lots of windows and tons of reflections and this gives me an
opportunity to demonstrate one of my favorite photography techniques and that
is a false double exposure. It’s a term I totally made up myself,
but what it means is when I’m shooting into a window like this, I can either focus on what's behind
the glass or the reflection that is on the glass or maybe if there's lettering
or something on the glass I can shoot that as well and so what I get is a
photo that has different layers of a photo so I get the reflection, I get the
thing that's behind and I get the glass itself and it can create some really
unique opportunities. Now the trick to this for me is to use a lens that has a
really wide aperture, so I'm shooting with a 50mm 1.4 aperture.
This is going to give me extremely shallow depth of field and that allows
me to selectively focus either on the things in the window, the window itself
or the reflection in the window and let everything else fall out of focus into
some wonderful bokeh. So I'm going to shoot some of these, show you the results and then
there's really a trick to process these in post-production so we'll do that next
but first let me shoot a few photos and then we'll head over to Lightroom and I'll
show you how to make these look great.
Right, I just found a really cool spot. And this is sort of the joy of doing this technique is to find somewhere
where you have different levels of photo inside of the reflections and of what's inside here and so we've got
some really cool colors, a red lamp we have a yellow couch in there but there are people
behind me and you can see that are coming out from the other side of the
street and they're reflecting beautifully in this window and so I'm
getting that lamp and the color and I'm getting the people walking through and
I'm getting these are really interesting street shots that look like they're been
superimposed with other photos even though it's all with one shot so this is
a technique that can really give you some rewarding photos. So in this window
here we've got this beautiful painting here but what I'm doing is I'm actually
ignoring the painting all together and focusing on the reflection in the window
of the people walking by and so I'm getting some interesting portraits of
people looking at this picture and so it's a really neat technique. So I'm going to
shoot a few more secret portraits and we'll see how they turn out.
Well, the truth is I can shoot this all day long but we really need to get over to
Lightroom so I can show you how to do the post-processing on these images so they
really stand out so let's head over there and start that right now.
OK, before I start showing you how I processed these images. Let me sort of show
you what they have in common. Notice that they have really high contrast. The
blacks are really black. They're highly saturated, the clarity is really high on
these images. Now, each of these has sort of been interpreted the best that I can
interpret that specific image. There's no one way to process these and that's the fun of this.
You can make it whatever you want it to be and you can also see that in some of these
images you will show up. And here I am clearly in my own photo and here's Lex, taking
a video of me making this photo. So that's one thing you have to be aware of
I've seen myself in my own photos and I do this so watch out that you don't show up in
your own photo. Let's get back to interpreting these photos. I want to show you this
series of photos that I shot at the window when I was looking up, sort of, at the sky light here.
Notice that have three images, basically of the same thing and I have interpreted these
differently. I've got one that's got really nice blues so I have taken the color temperature
really down to the blue end of the spectrum. This image,
same place, I interpreted that as a black and white image. In this one I made much
warmer so it's almost a sepia and so you can take and make these whatever you want them to be
but you'll notice that they're highly...
They're really contrasted, they're saturated unless they are black and white. You
might want to do that for something that's got really, really nice strong
shape like this does. OK, so what we want to do here is I want to start by showing
you the first thing I'll normally do. I'm going to take this chandelier here, hop over into the
develop module. The first thing I'm normally going to do with an image like
this is I'm going to figure out what is the color palette? What are the colors that I want to work with and so
what i'll do with this one is I'll start by playing around
with my color temperature slider. Now, I shot everything in RAW. You want to do
that so you have the maximum amount of data to work with in post-production.
What I'm noticing here is when I get down to around the 2200 range, I'm starting to see
some blues showing up here we've got some really nice reds. This orange is starting to
show up here and so it's really nice. I really like that. That's a place to start.
I need to make this a little bit more contrasty, so the first thing I'm
going to do here is I'm going to take my blacks. I'm going to take them way down. Now don't be afraid to
sort of overdo this, because once you take these blacks way down, you can balance that out by
opening up the shadows. I will do that.
Take this back up to around a 59-60 area, something like that, so now I have really contrasty,
and I'm starting to see those blues and reds, those complementary colors. They're
really starting to show up. Now I'm going to take this clarity slider and then take that up here to
almost thirty to bring out some more of the character of this image. My vibrance is
at 15. Now when I can do is I can start doing some things down here in my
saturation sliders. So if I click on this little button right here, I can take this up and I
can click in a blue area and I can increase that. I'm going to take that way
up to about 50-60 something like that. So we have this blue that starting to show up.
The blues and the chandelier are starting to really pop. I'm going to take these
reds here and bring those way up. So I've got the reds that are coming up, I've got these oranges that
are really starting to explode so I'm really getting these nice complementary
colors and there's color bouncing all over the place and you can see that I've
started to manipulate this. I can sort of see if there's any green in here, bring that
out, yeah. We're getting this green that's sort of down at the bottom of the chandelier and you
can see that you can play around with all this stuff and really brings some
character into your photo so I'll kick that side panel out. Let's see a before and after.
You can see that, yeah, this was really sort of drab. This is really contrasty. I'll do a straight
split here and you can see that this is really an improvement over what we
started with.
Alright, so that's how I normally will approach an image. This isn't really the best
image in the series but it's a good image to illustrate how to approach it,
fine with the color palette is and then really make it as contrasty as you
can, but let's take a look at a different image. This is one that you'll see
these kind of images. It looks sort of hazy they don't look like they have a lot of
contrast because they don't. All those reflections sort of put a fog on your image so the
way that we can really pull something out of this. we'll go into the develop
module and what we're going to do here is there is a new feature in Lightroom 2015
it's this Dehaze filter right here. It's in the
Effects at the very bottom of the develop module. I can increase or decrease
this to really bring out some character of an image like this and you can see
this guys is sort of popping out. Notice that we've got a lot of oranges here, so we might not want
that. We want to go a different direction. Now I'm going to not go too crazy on this dehaze here so I'm
going to make it about it 35-36 setting because I also want to do my own
traditional contrast settings and that is to just get in here take this black
slider, take it way down again so we're up about 75-77, something like that.
We can start to see that's really coming out. I can take my clarity, take that way up so
now we're seeing super high contrast from that hazy image to a really contrasty image and
we can go in, I can start feeling out where I want this color. I sort of like that blue but not that
much blue so I'll take that down to around 3200, something like that. I can play with
the tint, see how that works out. I think around 18 or 20 looks pretty
good. The contrast could be increased a little bit and now you can see that we just
went from something that was really low contrast and hazy to something that is
really nice and crunchy and that is what you want to do. You really want to get in
there and make those images high contrast. Now the thing about this image that I
really like here is when I see
an image like this I see that it could probably be much better as a black and
white image. So I'm going to click over here to
black and white. I think it really works, but the thing with a black and white
image is you can then go in and can play with your black and white conversion and
you can take maybe this cap, and make it a little bit darker, you can make this a little bit whiter,
so if you don't know what I'm doing here, I made a video on converting images to
black and white so that's something that you might want to take a look at. We've
included a link in the description of this video and so I did play with this
quite a bit and here is what I came up with, with the black and white image. I
really like that . It's really grainy, it's got a lot of character, a lot of reflections and
this guy looks like he's just one really mean dude and I like that. One other
image I want to show you that has some techniques that you might have to apply
when you're working on these images. With an image like this we have a lot of
different color temperatures. We've got the color temperature of the interior. We've
got color temperatures of things that are reflecting. We've got color
temperatures of lights in the image so you might have to do some individual
local adjustments. It doesn't look like there's a lot going on here in this image
but let me show you two things that I've done. The first is this lady's face right
over here. It's sort of blended in with the border of the frame of this photo right here
so what I did was I actually put an adjustment brush right over her face and you can see where I've
brushed that in and I took the saturation way down so if I turn that off,
you can see that her face was just sort of red and orange. I didn't like that so I desaturated
just her face. That's one thing you might want to do, is do some local
adjustment brushes to change the saturation of the color temperature of the
contrast etc. This guy right here,
the main character in our image. I didn't like the color at all of what I was getting
there so what I did was I used a radial filter and I can turn that on. You can
see what I did, so I'll hover over this. You can see that I've filtered this entire
area that's showing up red right there.
If I turn that filter off you can see that there's just way too much of this sort of
yellow, and so by turning that on what I did was I took the color temperature and
I changed it so that it wouldn't have so much yellow in that specific area. It was
drawing my attention away from what I wanted and so I did that filter right there.
So two local adjustments so you might have to do that on your images so the
basic thing that you want to do with all your images: increase the contrast,
increase the saturation and then make them your own. Thank you so much for joining
me for this episode of 'Exploring Photography'. Shooting into reflections
like this and finding these passageways with all kinds of glass
reflections and depth, it's really one of the most rewarding things you can do
with your camera. Remember the secret to this is to get a lens that has a really
wide aperture so you can have that selective focus so you can shoot inside on the glass or the
reflection and that's going to give you the best results. Well don't forget to
subscribe to AdoramaTV. That way, you don't miss a single episode, it's absolutely
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and videos all about photography and shooting video and even audio stuff so check
that out and thank you so much again for joining me. I will see you again next time.
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