Hi everybody I'm Mark Wallace and I am joined by as soon Azul Sofía here in Mexico City,
and I find myself in a lighting setup that I absolutely love. It's a natural light
called open shade. So what is open shade? Well it's exactly the kind of light that
we're in right now where you have a really bright environment over here. This
is just bright hard light but we're in a shade right here and so what
that gives us is incredibly soft light right here thats directional. So it's
like this giant soft box and you'll find this anywhere that you have like a building
or something that's casting a shadow next to just a bright area, so its shade
right up against no shade. Open shade is what thats called. Now what we can do is
use this very directional light to create some really incredible portraits.
Now what I would normally do here is I would have Sofía come over to this site
so hop over here and I would shoot in this direction so we got really nice
soft light so I'm going to focus right here on her and then just take a quick
picture. Now the light is wonderful, you're wonderful but this background is
just absolutely drab
and no good. So what we can do instead is we can use this nice
directional light as a backlight and so what we're going to do is we're going to have you
stand over here on the opposite side. We’ll have you going this way. Ok now this
is going to allow us to have this really nice soft directional light coming right
here, giving us nice highlights on the shoulders and the hair and coming in
this way, and because this wall over here is white
that light is going to bounce, remember that's directional light, t’s going to bounce
off this wall and come back into her face and we’re going to have really nice
specular highlights and this only works with open shade. If that was all shady
and cloudy out there we wouldn't have enough light reflecting off this wall to
give us a nice exposure. So that's what open shade gives you is directional
light. So what we're gonna do here, I'm going to take a couple of pictures now one
of the things that you have to be careful of in a situation like this is
if I just let my camera do the metering, I'll just take a picture really fast.
What we're going to get is exactly what I would expect, we have a nice exposure on
the background but Sofía here falls completely into darkness
that's no good. We're going to overexpose the background on purpose.
So I’ve already metered this I'm going to shoot this shot about a 1000th of a second,
wide open at f/1.4 because I want that background to fall out of focus. So I’m going to
come back here,
got my metering done and then I'll take a shot and wow. Now that we know how that
works I'm going to shoot a few pictures and show you my results
Well that’s all there is to it. Open Shade allows you to shoot with very directional, soft light. Make sure you pay
attention to your metering so that’s exactly right but I’ll think you’ll see form our results that
we got really amazing shots of Sofía. Thank you so much for joining me for
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