Today we’re going to take you on a journey as we go through the process of imitating
master photographer Martin Schoeller. Hey guys. Welcome to Phlearn, my name is Aaron
Nace. You can find me on Twitter @AKNACER. Today we’re taking the journey as we imitate
some of the amazing portraits by Martin Schoeller. Let me tell you a little bit about why we
did this and then we’re going to talk about how we did it and our process all the way
through. This is part one and then part two which is going to air tomorrow we’re going
to be doing the retouching on this image. The reason why we did it, it really helps
in photography to find an image that you like and try to repeat it. As long as you credit
the person that you’re actually going for it can really help to push you. Maybe you’re
stuck doing the same lighting setup over and over and over again and you’d see a photograph
and you’re like, “Wow! That’s actually really cool. Maybe I could do that lighting
setup as well.” In doing so it’s going to cause you to … there’s some trial and
error. You’re going to be doing some things at the beginning that you’re really not
that comfortable with. You’re probably going to get it wrong to start off with but if you
keep on going and going and going you might wind up something with a lighting setup that
maybe you’ve never done before, a portrait style that you’ve never done before and
you might wind up really, really liking it. That’s what we did. We set aside, push ourselves
how we can create a lighting style a lot like Martin Schoeller. We’re going to take you
guys through the process. We started off, our lights look nothing like what we wanted
them to. We thought they were going to look pretty decent from the start but they really
didn’t. We went through multiple iterations of lighting setups to finally get to something
that we like. We’re going to show you guys these with some behind the scenes images and
we’ll just go through the whole process. Here in lightroom, this is actually the entire
photo shoot and you can see where we started up the beginning. We wanted to take these
portraits for our website for Phlearn for the bio page. This is actually Chris, he’s
our CFO. This is where we started off with the lighting for our shots. Basically with
two strip boxes either side. Now in looking at Martin’s work a lot of the catchlights
are right on the sides of the people’s eyes. That’s a really, really great way to analyze
lighting. Look deep into a person’s eyes and if you see reflections of lights you can
probably guess about what the lighting is. There’s an umbrella actually right here
lighting me right now and you can probably see a reflection of it in my eye. It’s really
great way to see the lights that might be around your subject. Being that they were
lit from the side, we started to put two strip boxes both the right and the left of our subject
and we could see … let’s just zoom in to about here. You can see the light right
there in his eyes as well. There were a couple of problems here. The light really comes in
from the sides really nice but you get this dark space in the middle of his face; dark
face space. That might not be horrible, maybe that’s what you want in your image but the
Martin Schoeller images did not have that at all. Then we switched up from there, still
working with our lighting. We’re still using the strip boxes that you can see here lighting
on the side as well and we’re shooting with a 50 millimeter 1.4. Now the lights are turned
really, really down in power because we wanted it relatively shallowed up the field as well.
Now the next change we made is you can see here the background is relatively dark because
there were just lights on our subject but there were no lights on the background and
in all the portraits that we saw the background was a little bit lighter. We decided to put
a third light and that’s a soft box there on the right. This is the soft box you can
see and it’s actually lighting up the background as well. Still they look pretty horrible,
no offense Chris but it’s pretty much our jobs to make it look better. That’s one
of the big lessons I’ve learned as being a photographer is a great portrait of anyone
is totally out there. It’s your job to make it. If you deliver this to a client they’re
really not going to be too happy with you because it’s not as good as it could be
but you’re probably just a couple of lighting setups away from a great portrait. Keep trying
if you’re not there just yet. Scrolling through these we decided to put
… it’s like well maybe the lights coming too much from the front so we put the strip
boxes behind the back and then coming even back around the front a little bit more. We’re
shooting a little bit wide here and it’s at 50 millimeters with the 1.4 lens. It’s
relatively wide, a little bit wider than a standard portrait but it’s the look that
we wanted for these images. The lighting coming around towards the front, maybe trying it
a few angles. We’re trying this over and over again and
it’s like … the catchlights are not that far off but I just really didn’t like the
lighting. It was much too … dark in the center and too bright on the outside. It just
really didn’t come together that well. What we did is basically tried to switch everything
up. We went from here in the switch to 200 millimeters. You can see what the difference
that which is shot at 50 millimeters and that which is shot at 200 millimeter. It’s going
to really compress his face and make a lot more flat. I thought it was way too much,
way too wide at 50 millimeters so we went to 200 and I was like, “Well, I don’t
like that either. Trying to zoom in, going something like 70 but I really didn’t like
that either. We went back to the 50 again and then bringing the light out from the front,
we’ll talk about this in a second. You can see during a photo shoot a lot of
things change. Now often times you’re not going to have time when you’re actually
working with your subjects. You are actually photographing a celebrity or something like
that. You’re not going to have the time to go and change your lighting five or six
times. What I recommend doing is getting your lighting setup with a test subject who’s
wearing something similar to your actual subject, similar skin tone and things like that. That
way you can get everything set up with your test and then the real subject can come in,
you might have one minute to shoot Jay Leno’s, first person that comes to mind for some reason
but if you have one minute to shoot Jay Leno you’re not going to spend that time getting
all your setup. You want to do all your setup beforehand and then shoot your subject.
Continuing all with that we decided that the soft boxes were a little bit too small of
a light source so what I did is I switch to a parabolic reflector which is just a giant
light source and you can see it here in the reflection of the eye. That’s me standing
right there in the middle of the parabolic. With this as well you could see our exposures
weren’t exactly perfect in all this. The same thing with this as well, the lighting
was just a little bit too flat. It wasn’t that interesting and it wasn’t falling off
really well. Continue on going … I know some of these
aren’t exactly exposed perfectly but we decided to keep on going and we put the strip
boxes back on the lights and instead of having the strip boxes come from the side we decided
to put them directly from above. Looking at the reflection in the portraits we still wanted
those strips in the catch lights but instead of coming from the side we did basically directly
from the front. Now what we found out working is front pointing in really lit the sides
of his face but if there each like very close to his face and they’re both pointing at
basically his nose what it does is it creates a really nice highlight here in the center
of his face with a nice fall off out towards the edges. Here we’re just starting to get
actually what we want out of our shots. This is the lighting that we came across and you
can see it really is quite a bit more dynamic. We tried a couple of things like having Chris
cough in the middle of the shoot just because it was funny and then he laughed which is
some great portraits as well. I always try to do stupid stuff in the middle of a photo
shoot just because you never know that might be the best photo of the day. Okay, the
next thing we did is we put actually a neutral density filter in front of the lens so he
was so close to the lights that the lights were really, really bright but we still wanted
to shoot at a shallow depth of field. In this case we’re shooting at 1.4 but there is
a three stop neutral density filter in front of the lens so it’s really cutting down
the amount of light that’s coming from the strobes that are literally right in front
of his face but you can still get a correct exposure.
The lights that you see here off to the sides, both these … let’s just make this medium
gray so you can see how it gets really dark towards the sides and the reason that is is
because that’s literally the strip boxes in the frame. I had about a gap maybe two
or three inches wide in which I was shooting through and the strip boxes were literally
right to the left and right of the frame. Getting that close turned out to be the key. This
is an exposure that happens if you forget to put your neutral density filter on. This
is properly exposed and this is three stop overexpose. That’s a really big difference
and a neutral density filter can really do a good job with that. We’ll put links to
all the stuff down below in case you guys are interested. Then we kept on doing some
interesting shots and this is actually the shot that we wound up sticking with in the
end. Let me just disable this. Okay, this is the shot that we wound up sticking with
in the end and you can see it’s a really nice portrait, everything is really close
cropped and the eyes were in focus, we have a really nice catchlights and it’s basically
what we want. What we want to do now is I’m going to go
back to our grid view and I’m going to pop open, let’s actually pop open the develop
module. I’m going to go over here, lens correction. Now since we’re shooting at
50 millimeters, it’s so close it’s really going to cause a lot of distortion, not only
that but we’re shooting at … in this case 1.8 which is going to give you a lot of vignetting
around your edges as well. Any time I’m doing something like this I always make sure
to go to enable profile corrections, click on that and what that’s going to do is it’s
going to fix a little bit to that perspective distortion and it’s going to help out with
my vignetting right around the edges. If you want to even add to that you can fix it even
more right here in lightroom without having to go into Photoshop or anything like that.
Very cool effect there. Now what I can do is I don’t want to have to do that with
all these images so what we’re going to do is I’m going to go over here to … let’s
just bring this back over here and I’m going to hit command A. We’ve got this selected,
command A is now going to select all of them or you can hit sync settings. Those couple
of changes that I just made, it’s going to apply them to everything. We’ve got all
these checked, you can hit either check none or check all. I usually leave like crop off
just in case I did some custom cropping and then we’re going to hit synchronize and
then you’ll be able to see that it’s actually just changing all of them at the same time.
That is basically how we went through the photo shoot, how we got to this image from
going through many different lighting setups that really didn’t look that good but in
the end we came up with something that was really great that we liked a lot and we even
went through an outfit change. I don’t know if you guys saw that earlier actually but
earlier we were wearing … not we; Chris was wearing a blue shirt with a red shirt
underneath it which I thought just a solid color would work just a little bit better
and match his hair. Little changes like that throughout a shoot can wind up making a big
difference. That’s how we actually did the shoot. Join
us tomorrow for editing this image; we’re going to make it really standout and a real
piece of art. Thanks so much for watching Phlearn, I hope you learned a lot and I’ll
Phlearn you later. Bye everyone. In case you guys are wondering why lightroom was really
yellow, I have this program called Flux which basically warms up your screen to help your
eyes accommodate to something at night. That’s what I disabled in the middle of the episode.
Don’t edit with Flux on.