Hey this is Daniel Norton. I'm out here
on the balcony of my studio in New York
City with Marissa.
I want to talk today about separating your
subject from the background and a
couple of different ways to do it.
The first way we're gonna talk about is
using depth of field. So essentially I'm
out here on the balcony, it's kind of the
most worst time of day to be out here.
It's hot, and the sun's in a bad position.
So I'm gonna use the softbox to create a
nice even light on on Marissa. But I'm
gonna start off by shooting pretty close
down. I'm going to hear like f/16. This is
like what you might want to do if you're
trying to show the environment. So if we
want to put somebody up here, and we want
to show, you know. That we're in the city,
or we want to show a location. But you'll
see if you look back there, that there's
some ugly construction, and we don't want
that construction in our shot, but I'm gonna
shoot the f/16 to start off, and we'll see
what it looks like. So let me get my
light meter using the Profoto B1X here,
with the 2x3 softbox. I could shoot TTL,
but I do not have the TTL remote with me,
so I'm going to use a meter. This is a
Konica meter okay.
Cool that's about 16, so again I'm at f/16
f/16, 100 ISO. You do kind of a relatively
tight shot here. Right? Yeah going to get you stand
like this...
Good okay, get a focus on her, there good,
nice okay. So we can see that she's lit
up with nice soft light on her. She looks
pretty good, you look pretty good. So you
gotta tell them all that. But you know
you can see all the junk behind her,
right all that blue, back to the ....color
doesn't bother me. But the fact that you
can see its scaffold against somebody's
lunch from last week, or whatever is out
there. Who knows right? So what we're gonna do
is.. We're gonna open up the lens and
since I'm only shooting a portrait of
Marisa, I don't see your whole, need to
see your whole face super sharp and in focus.
You know, I'm just gonna open up all the
way, and one cool thing about this
Hasselblad is that when you go to this
menu here, that's the touch screen menu.
is gives you the EV number, EV number of
your exposure. So I'm seeing I'm at
13.7, so I'm gonna use
that, because I'm gonna go down to all
the ways wide open, and then I'm just
gonna dial back to my shutter speed,
until I get my EV back to 13.7.
Super convenient so 1/1250th of a second
f/3.2. Now of course the flash
needs to be lowered in power by about
four stops to match up with it. I'm using
the controller to do that. We'll do
another quick meter reading because of
course the flash power is not affected
by the shutter speed. So 4.3,
it's a little bit much
That should be about right f/3.2, it's
one of those weird kind of exposures, and
we're in the middle. So we'll see, and
that's good. Chin down a smidge, that's perfect,
focusing, nice, cool. Cow we can see
background nice and blurry. In fact if I
hit the sky behind her. It actually works
that there's some blue back there. It
makes it kind of look interesting.
We still see Marissa, she still looks
great. You look great, and I think this is
a much more flattering way to shoot in
this location. So I'll shoot a few more,
because you know it's always good to
shoot more than one picture unless
you're shooting 8 x 10. Then it's very
expensive.
Alright, there we go I'm picking my focus
spot here to where I like. We're gonna
shoot a couple, nice, one more, and keep
your chin slightly down. Good right there,
if she is, you got to watch her chin
position, because if it goes too high we
might start getting the softbox in the
shot. You saw that one, so we're gonna
remember the angle of the the softbox,
versus her sunglasses is important,
Good, down a bit, good, right there, this
way, right there. I'm just looking at her and
down, down, down, down, down, down
down, down, down. Right there, actually bring them
down even lower. Like this, and then the
guy will just look over them at me. Like
hey, there, nice, see how that looks like.
There we go, it's even more dramatic,
actually the softbox is a little bit hot,
but it feels nice. It's like the sun's
coming down. It's really like it is
actually hot out here.
Oh it's boiling and it's January believe
it or not, no you don't know when this is...
So guys I'm gonna go inside now, and I'm
going to show you how to do the similar
thing by using light. Okay, so we're back
inside now. Nice and cool in here, and I
decide to set up a really simple shot.
We're here with the softbox.
2x3 softbox overhead kind of center.
This is a classic kind of beauty light for Marissa.
We'll take a nice picture with the black
background here. It's a V-flat back there.
My camera settings are the same, so
coming in, nice, cool, cool. So again, even
light on the face looks really cool.
Right really nice and smooth on the face
her eyes look really crisp. We're getting
all kinds of great light in there, but it
lacks a little bit of dimensionality.
Especially in color. I like to do take
the model and separate them from the
background more. So I'm gonna do that
here with light, because obviously I
can't do it with depth of field. If I were to
just open up even more. Which it's already
was open. You know still wouldn't make a
difference right? The backgrounds out of
focus or it's in focus. It's black.
Doesn't really matter, so I'm gonna turn
my back head on. Right I've got a 1 x 3
softbox back there. That's gonna give us
some nice separation light over her
shoulders. Let's see what that looks like?
Cool focusing, nice, now we can see that.
We've got the hair, has some brightness to it.
We've got some separation on the
shoulders right?
And we're getting a nice overall shot.
You've got kind of regular, pretty and
then you've got this next dimension. This
finished photo and I think that's really
key here, right? Is if you're gonna
separate your work from other people, you
want to take it to that next level, and
if you're in the studio especially. You
could throw one big light up, or use the
light coming through the windows. Or
whatever, but adding that extra light in
the background and kind of separate her out,
is definitely gonna raise the work to
the next level. If you're outside, are
using natural light, thinking about the
depth of field like we did earlier right?
You want to use a shallow depth of field
to get yourself in the position where
you can separate your subject. Here
you're separating with light. There you are
separating with depth of field, and those
two techniques will help you kind of
give your portraits a little bit more
kind of depth, and strength, so be sure to
subscribe to Adorama TV. Make sure you
follow Marissa on the various social
channels follow me Daniel Norton
photographer, and I'll see you,
next time OnSet.