Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography I'm Mark
Wallace, continuing with a series of videos on the basic fundamentals of
studio lighting and I'm joined once again by Maria and we are going to show
you in this episode hard light. In fact not everything about hard light but I just
want to show you how we can use some of the principles that we've learned in the
last few episodes, how we put those into practice for a really amazing portrait
of Maria.
Now the trick is effective size of light, we learned about that a couple of
episodes ago and that basically states that the farther the light is away from
the subject
the harder the light becomes. Now the thing that is important to understand
here is that when you have really hard
contrasty light, that is the type of light that black and white photos love.
So really small light source really contrasty light, black and white and so
what we're going to do is we're going to shoot a contrasty hard light image of
you in black and white.
So we're already thinking black and white, not color.
So now that we understand that black and white is what we're going to do let me
show you how this is set up because it's pretty simple. We're just using the
principles that we learned in past episodes.
The first thing is the light itself. We're using actually the same exact
softbox that we used for our soft light episode.
The differences is it’s way up here. Which means that it is so much farther from maria.
Maria is going to be leaning against this post right here
but our light is way far away, which means that that light went from here,
nice and soft,
to harder, harder ,harder, to really hard light up here. Now one of the problems
with this light even though its way up there, is that it has some diffusion on
that soft box and as we learned in the last episode that diffusion is going to
bounce all over the place.
So what I did was I threw a grid on that light. That grid is keeping that light
from flying all over and bouncing off the walls and the floor.
So we're getting this very directional hard light on Maria. Which is pretty amazing
because it's the exact same light that we use a couple episodes ago to create
soft light, it is just the distance of the light from our subject.
Now let's talk about the black-and-white aspect of this. We have this gray column
right here that I absolutely love. I'm going to be shooting this way. Behind this
gray column, we have this door, these stairs.
Notice that we have this very, very dark, almost black, right here.
White, we have some stairs over here that are different shades of gray.
So this background here is going to look pretty darn cool in black and white and
I'm going to really turn up the contrast in post-production and make this look
really cool.
So that's all there is to it. A light that's not very close, use a grid if you
have to keep that light from bouncing around. Get a really nice black and white
sort of monotone, monochromatic background and a fantastic model and
that's all there is to it. So without further ado we're going to start
shooting this awesome image.
Well I absolutely love these images Maria.
We got the high contrast black and white images we were going for. Now the secret
to this remember, is the effective size of the light to get that light far away
from the model that makes the effective size smaller and gives us a nice punchy
hard light because we elevated that light we got nice contrast and so contrast and
hard light loves black and white imagery and that's why that worked.
Maria you've been a fantastic model in this entire series of basic fundamentals
of studio lighting here in the studio and so if you didn't catch this past
episodes make sure you look at those, and if you want to look at every single
future episode don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV it's absolutely free that
way you don't miss a single episode.
Thank you so much for joining us and i will see you again next time.