In this video I create dramatic overhead
lighting in a small home studio
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching
AdoramaTV brought you by Adorama the
camera store that's got everything for
us photographers! And today you join me
in my small home studio. I'm going to be
doing a dramatic overhead lights shoot.
We've got a fantastic model. We're going to
have a brilliant beam of light coming
down onto him, except I'm in a small
studio space and that means there's
going to be some compromises. The first
one is just the sheer height of it - it's
not much higher than I can reach here,
that means I can't get that background
like really high up in the air. It will
mean that the shaft of light coming down
isn't going to have hard edges unless
you've got some sort of focusing system
for your lights, which I don't have
but what I do have is well, a room with
lots of black curtains so I can control
the light a little bit, and I get more
control. If i use things like grids, now
grids are great for pushing light in one
direction and I've got a small one here
which will fit onto the Streaklight
we'll be using. And a much larger eggcrate
grid for my soft box, so that's what we're
going to do.
Let's get a model in, let's get some
light set and let's get shooting.
So today I've been joined in the studio by
Anton who's gonna be the model for the
shoo, but not only is he modelling, he is also a
magician! No, he really is! So we're
gonna do some magician shots for this as
well, which is going to look great with this
lighting. Now this is going to be a
multiple light setup, but we'll get the
multiple lights in a minute. In fact if
you are doing multiple light shoot the
best thing to do is to break it down
into pieces,
So the first piece is going to be the
overhead light, the one that's going to give
this shaft of light coming down.
I'd like quite a tight beam of light and
to achieve it I've got a few different
modifiers I can fit to my Adorama
Streetlight 360. Now at the moment it has just
the standard reflector, I've metered this
out, it's all ready to go,
let's take a shot like this, see how it
looks. OK Anton, are you ready? OK here
we go,
and when I take that we get some
interesting lighting, don't worry it will
get better as the shoot goes on but
we're looking at the shape of that light
as you can see, it's a fairly wide spread
which is OK, but I'd like a tighter beam
of light. So to get a tighter beam of light,
I've swapped to the snoot, now this is
the snoot specifically designed for the
Streetlight 360, and it really will give
a much tighter beam of light, but at the
same time it will take away some light
as well. How much? Well that's what we're
going to find out, let's take a meter
reading. It's actually
three stops less than it was before and
I can remote control this three stops.
Ican add that in here, let's test that.
Brilliant, perfect! We''re back to our
target aperture. Let's take a picture and
see how that looks,
and are you ready? OK, as you can see
that is a much much tighter beam of
light to the point where it's actually
missing part of the chair, it's just too
tight. So this time, I swapped back to the
standard reflector, but I've added a grid
and the grid purpose is to focus the
light a little bit more than the
standard reflector, and hopefully they
should give us something in between the
two to get the effect of the shape of
light that I need. But when you change
the modifier you need to re-meter, so
let's just take a quick meter reading.
Yeah, that is, that is very much too bright
OK, we reduce it down, don't forget I'm trying
to hit my target aperture the same as
I've dialed into my camera.
There we go, let's take that picture
Anton are you ready? Ok here we go
and that's a really great beam of light
it's about the right size and shape to
light both sides of the chair, but as you
can see we've got very bad lighting on
Anton, and that's what we're going to fix next
So to light the shadows in this
picture, we're going to add a second
light. A fill light is this one right
here - this is the Wescott Rapidbox Duo.
It's a nice little soft box and it should put
some light into the shadow parts, so we
can actually see Anton's face.
Now, I've metered this out already, I've
switched the background light off, so we
only see the effect of this light.
Let's take a shot are you ready Anton,
here we go.... and of course it does what
soft boxes do, and gives us a nice even
flood of light, which is really nice,
normally, but it doesn't really work,
because you've got to remember, I've now light that
background, and that's got to have that
shaft of light in it, so I'm just adding
the grid, that's an optional extra on
this soft box but it's one of those
things that's really worthwhile having,
that's just going to help to focus the
light a little bit, stop it hitting the
background quite so much, but it's also going
to take away some of the light so let's
just do a little meter reading just from
the front here
OK, yes, it's taking away a stop of light,
So I can add in a stop of light from the
remote control.
Let's take a test shot, see how that
looks? Anton are you ready? Here we go.
And now that background has gone
completely black, well at least, very nearly black.
The grid has really worked rather well,
but do I actually need that much light
from the fill light. Remember this is
only going to light the shadows a little
bit, so in fact I'm just going to turn
that light down a little bit, so I get a
less intense light. Here we go,
and although that looks really
underexposed. When I mix that with the
background light, that should look really
good, and give a nice combination of
background light and fill-light. However
there is a slight downside with this
lighting scenario. If Anton was wearing a
hat as well - well he's a magician these things
do happen,
the light is still going to come from
above, but whenever you add a hat with a
brim, you're likely to cast a shadow
because the lights coming from above, and
that's going to cause us problems. Let's
have a little look, and that looks great
until you look at the face where you can
see that part of it is now in shadow.
Thanks to the brim of a hat, and although
that might be exactly the look you're
going for.
I'd like to try and put some light back into
those shadows. And that means another light
modifier. So, for the extra light I could
use a small flash, but it's even easier
just to get something like this, just a
reflector, and just bounce a little bit
of this light, back up and into the
shadows underneath the hat, fill in that
way. It should be a subtle effect, but it
should work. Let's take the same shot
with the reflector in position
Anton here we go.
Fantastic, and when you look up close, you
can see how there's just a little bit
more light in both eyes. That works
really nicely
just to fill in the shadows.
So that is the lighting for this shoot complete, two
lights, one reflector, one amazing magician
Let's take some pictures - Anton are you ready?
It's always a good idea to review the
images as you're going along, and I could
see really quickly that there were some
compromises I was making because I'm in
a small studio, but I also knew that
those compromises I could easily fix
with a bit of post-production. So let's
have a look at one of the pictures and
see what I did.
Now, I've already done a bit of
fine-tuning with this image on the
exposure and the contrast, let's look at
the colour. The colour, I love this red
chair. That's what really got this shoot
going, and I'd like a color to
complement that, or at least go opposite
that, so it's sort of a bluey feel for
the background and the rest of the shot
really would work rather well. Am I will
achieve that here in Adobe camera raw, by
going for the temperature slider, and
reducing the temperature down probably
just a little bit. Maybe, that's a bit too
much, lets bring it back up, somewhere in
the middle perhaps. Yeah, there we go that
looks pretty good, so a slightly bluish
feel to the shot. Now the bottom of the
picture i would have liked a nice
curving shadow to make it look like the
whole thing was lit just by this
background shaft of light!
Of course it wasn't,
which is why we have this flat floor so
I can achieve that by changing to the
radial tool up at the top here, and with
the radial tool I need to make sure that
my effect is on the outside, which it is
and then I'm going to decrease the
exposure by maybe a stop and a half and
we'll drag out a little kind of radial
effect, just along the bottom, something
like that with a bit of a curve.
Yeah, that looks pretty good, the only
problem is, it's not really where I'd
like it to be it's a bit sort of soft
and fuzzy if I go back down to the
bottom, I can change the feathering for
that filter, and if I drag the feathering
down, you can see I have a really hard
line. But of course, we can't get a hard
edge with this light, so slightly softer
edge is I think the way to go.
The only problem is - it affects everything, both
top and bottom, everything outside of
that green circle. So I need to swap over
to the brush version of this tool, make
sure I'm set to the minus brush, and then
minus that away, paint that away, so it
doesn't have any effect up here at all.
I can remove the effect from any areas I
like. Ok let's open up that image into
photoshop because it's always a bit more
work to do as well. Particularly in a
small studio. Things like
cloning out light stands - yeah that
always happens but there's also the
shaft of light. Now I was limited by the
ceiling height which is about eight feet
at the highest point in my studio.
I would have liked a bit more, but
fortunately I can do that with a bit of
post-production. So here it is, there's
the limiting factor. I can't see past the
top of that, I can actually see the top
of the softbox that was closer. But what
I can do is just stretch it a little bit.
I get the rectangular marquee tool, and
then just drag out a rough-and-ready
rectangle something like that, and I can
use free transform, which is found under
edit and then down to free transform.
I come to the middle handle at the top and
I can just drag up and as I drag up - you see I
stretch it ever so slightly, not enough
to distort anything too weirdly, but
enough to get that up and out the way.
Press Enter or click on the tick, select
and de-select, and with a little bit of
fine-tuning and cloning there it is, my
final image is complete.
Well that was a really great fun shoot I
enjoyed it, and we got some fantastic
pictures of the end of it as well.
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I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching