Hi this is Joe McNally here for Adorama TV
I'm gonna talk to you in this segment about cutting and shaping your light
to map the character of your subject. Adorama TV presents
Photo on The Go with Joe McNally where you'll go behind the scenes to see how great
photos are made
Big is beautiful right?
especially when it comes to lighting we always talk about how a bigger light
source
is better for your subject it's certainly more wrapping more diffuse
there's a definitive relationship between the size of your source
its proximity to your subject to all those things are absolutely true
but there are times when you confront to face where actually maybe smaller is the
way to go
so in this instance I confronted in Iceland
a fisherman and this is a face that had been at sea
his whole life and those are well earns
sort of ridges and wrinkles in his face you know it's a it's a weather-beaten
face
has a lot of character. So I'm gonna introduced to this face
a character-driven light which means I'm not gonna bring in some sorta big studio
source like a 74'' octave
or even the full surface of the
try grip diffuser that I'm using that hand-held device can produce a very soft
box like
light if you use it in its entirety especially when you move in close to
your subject
but in this instance what I'm doing is I'm using a sleeve
that comes with that device the Tri grip
okay that enables you to create a panel
of light in the middle of it which is de facto much smaller
than the entire try grip and then by using the velcro attachments
I'm actually able to take another step further as you can see in the production
photograph
I'm cutting the light to a mere fraction of what it could have been
and that's all in response to my fisherman's face. Hi Joe McNally here for
Adorama
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So lets just take a quick look my fishermen my subject
is seated right about here I'm
firing my camera camera angle is right about here
okay looking this way and then I move my light source
in close right okay and it's got this panel
right in the middle of it which is smaller as I indicated than the entire
potential nature of the Tri grip
surface if you will but then I drop
another section of velcro over its a blackout material
and I end up with just a little sliver of light up in this corner
so that's the only area right up here that is quote , unquote hot
with exposure and there's a speedlight a hand-held Speedlite right here
firing through here now I'm using the technology that's available to me
within the camera system I am talking to that light
in TTL fashion I have a commander flash right here
firing this way it's picking up this light in telling it what to do
and by virtue of back communication
I'm able to take my lens and shifted all the way wide open
to f1.4 some. So I'm shooting at dusk
okay and I'm minimizing the background making it look even more moody
then was already starting to be and by shooting at 1.4
I turned the background ships and the harbour elements back in here
to just soft texture okay there in the background
there there but they're not really clearly defined cuz 1.4
is isolating a critical plane of focus right in here my subject size
the key to this of course as I said is limiting your light
to do this my light source is this trigrip
it's called the Joe McNally trigrip and it has
you know a big source if you want to use it as you can see
but also has a sleeve which is you know
wraps around the unit and creates this rectangular panel of light
which then effectively becomes a much smaller softbox
look anyway and then what I do is I take the
other blackout material which I can velcro to this section
and what I'm doing in this instance is I'm cutting it and I'm just leaving a small
section
of diffuser surface available to light my subject which naturally because I'm
I'm taking that surface and making it more constricted in smaller
produces a harder more edgy light which matches
the face in character that I'm dealing with
This is Joe McNally for Adorama TV
talking to you about shaping your light to match the character of your subject
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