Hey what's up everybody.
Miguel Quiles here and in this episode
I'm going to
show you guys how I shoot couples
portraits in the studio.
Welcome back everybody to
The Breakdown.
My name is Miguel Quiles and
today I'm back in the studio and
I want to show you guys
my setup for shooting couples portraits
here in the studio.
We're going to be doing a two light
setup with a reflector.
It's going to be a fairly simple setup,
once you guys see how it's built
up. So I'm going to show you guys
individually what each light is doing
and show you guys my settings and
everything that you need to know.
So without further ado, let's go ahead and
get started.
Alright so before we get too far into this,
I want to introduce my
lovely models.
We have Gavin and we have Kat
and they're awesome,
professional models.
They're going to make my
job very easy today, right?
Yes.
So we're gonna have a good time.
We're shooting these couples portraits and
let's talk really quickly about the
setup here.
This is going to be a two light setup.
I'm using a Profoto Octa.
It's a 5.0' Octa, which is going to be
my main light for this particular shot.
Both of the lights are going to be
different in this case. Mainly because my
ceiling height in this studio is a little
bit low.
So what I'm doing is, on the right
here with the Profoto 5.0'
Octa, I'm using one of the new Profoto
D2 strobes, the 1000W strobe.
Which is great because it's
going to allow me to
be able to shoot at a very high f-stop.
So I'm aiming to shoot these at around
an f/16 and shooting with something like
the Profoto D2s allows me to do that.
The second light,
because the ceiling height is a little
bit low I tried to use a
second D2 but I couldn't bring this
light above them high enough. So what we
ended up doing was, we're using a Profoto
B2 and we're using that mainly as a hair
light with a 2x3 Profoto Softbox.
What we've done is, we've
added a grid to the softbox because all
I want that light to do is really just
provide a nice hair light on the top of
their heads.
We are shooting black clothing
on a black backdrop so I want
to make sure that there's a little bit
of separation between the subject and
the background.
So we have two lights.
Those are the light modifiers that are
on those.
In order to add a little bit of
light, a little bit of fill, onto their
dark clothing I'm using a silver
collapsible reflector below and that's
really for two things; it's to add a
little bit of light to their darker
clothing, it also provides a really
beautiful catch light in their eyes.
So any of the shots where they're actually
looking towards the camera, you're going
to see a nice little catch light in the
bottom of their eyes.
So that's the lighting setup.
Let's go ahead and
talk about the camera and the lens.
Alright so we talked about our lighting.
We talked about our setup here.
Let's talk about the camera and
the lens that I'm using.
So I'm using the Sony a7R II to take all of these shots
mainly because it's a 42MP file.
So I'm going to get a lot of resolution,
a lot of detail.
I've paired it up with a 50mm f/1.4.
Prior to shooting this
episode, actually, I tried a number of
different lenses to see what would give
me the best compression and what would
give me the best look and I actually
found that the 50mm focal length
actually worked great whether I
was shooting these wide or shooting
these as vertical images, the images looked
really good.
So 50mm f/1.4 from Sony
and I'm using the Profoto Air
Remote from Sony.
This was just recently released
and the nice thing about this
is that it works with all of Profoto's
lights that have the Air Remote built in.
So you're Profoto B1, B2, D1 and D2
all work with this Air Remote.
So that's how you can have this,
kind of, mixed lighting setup.
Where you have a D2 as
your main light and a B2 as your hair
light. You can control all of it from the
remote control.
You can power them individually
as well.
So that's what we're using right now
for our camera and lens.
As far as the settings, I'm trying
to aim at a higher f-stop.
I'm trying to be somewhere between
an f/14 to maybe an f/16
for these shots.
That's going to give me the
maximum amount of depth-of-field.
That way we'll get nice sharp
details in the skin, sharp details on the
clothing. It's going to look really nice.
We're going to work within the sync
speed limits of our flash.
We're going to be at a one 1/16th of a second
and an ISO100.
It's very straightforward, very simple.
The background that I'm using for this, as
well, is something a little different.
I'm going to be using a black vinyl
background from Savage and I have
seamless paper but I really like the
vinyl because it's a little less
reflective.
So I'm trying to
cut down the amount of reflected light
that's coming from this hair light even
though it has a grid.
If I was using seamless paper
you would see a little
bit of a transition from where that
light is hitting the background.
I'm trying to avoid that.
Using that black
vinyl from Savage will help to eliminate
some of that glare.
So you've got the
lighting, you've got the camera, the lens,
the settings, let's go ahead and start
shooting.
I want to show you guys
exactly what each of these lights is
doing because often times in these
videos you'll see where all of the
lights are on and you don't
really understand what's happening with
each light. So I want to show you first
what the main light source, which is the
5.0' Profoto Octa, what that's doing to
light our subject.
So we'll take one shot here.
So there you can see what's happening
with just the Profoto Octa as the main
light and as I'm looking at this I
probably could get away with shooting it
with just the one light but what I
really want to do is to have a little
bit of separation between my subjects
and the dark black background.
So what I want to do is, I'm going to
add a grid and
the 2x3 Softbox and place
it above them to add a little bit of a
hair light so that we can see if we can
separate them from the background.
So to show you guys what that
looks like I'm going to go ahead and
turn off the main light and we're just
going to use the Profoto B2 lights.
Alright so you see what the main light is
doing.
Now, what I did was, I turned off
the main light and now I'm using the
Profoto B2 and I want to see exactly
what this light is doing. So I may have
to play around with the positioning a
little bit but I think I've placed it in
such a way where I'm going to be getting
just a little bit of a hair light around
the top of Gavin's head and maybe a
little bit on to Kat's head. So let's
take a look and see if we positioned this
thing here correctly. Take the shot here.
So looking at this shot here,
you can see that you're getting a little
bit of a hair light on Gavin's head.
We're getting a little bit of white on Kat's
face as well.
Based on the pose that she has
right here but once the main light is
turned on and we get the reflector below.
This is going to blend together really
nicely. So now that you see what
the hair light is doing let's go ahead
and put the two lights on and let's see
how that's looking.
Right so we have both
lights on right now, minus the reflector.
I want to show you guys what the main
light and the hair light is doing before
we had that. So let's go ahead and take
that shot here.
Now you can see that we're
getting that nice little
separation from the background getting a
nice little hair light.
Really good highlights on both of their faces,
which is going to look good in
post-production and what I would like to
do is to try to add just a little bit
more light coming down from below.
So I'm going to go ahead and add this silver
reflector
and we're going to see
how much light we can bring back up into
their faces.
This will also help to
add a little bit more light onto their
dark clothing as well.
So here's the whole light setup.
Now you can see that we're getting a
lot more light on to the clothing. You
can see a little bit of a sheen on
Gavin's jacket, which is great.
We're getting really nice
highlights on Kat's face.
So that's it. This is our setup.
Let's go ahead and I'm going to have you
guys do some different poses and we're
going to go ahead and start shooting.
Alright everybody, there you have it.
A really easy way to use two lights and a
reflector in the studio to shoot
portraits of couples.
It was a lot of fun.
Hopefully you guys had a good time as
well.
Make sure that you follow them on
social media: Instagram, Facebook.
We will have their tags in the description
for this video.
Make sure that you follow me as well
while you're there @MiguelQuilesjr
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Thanks so much for watching
The Breakdown and I will
see everybody in the next episode.
Bye everybody.