In this video, I use a reflector, which is probably the most important
lighting tool you can have in a small studio. AdoramaTV presents
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey,
where you'll learn how to take stunning photos and then polish them in
post-production.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and your watching Adorama TV brought to you by Adorama
the camera store that has everything for us photographers and your joining me back in my small
home studio.
Now today we're gonna do a shoot using my a single Flashpoint Streaklight 360 Ws
a brilliant light for a small home studio. Now one light is really good,
but two lights is better, but if you're not quite ready to invest in a second light
or even if you have one,
a reflector can give you the look of a second light
without the cost and it's a must-have gadget for
any studio. Now reflectors come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
They vary from the the pretty small reflector like this one.
Right the way up to this sort of giant reflector that I have there too.
They can even be completely free if you're in a small home studio with white
walls
you're surrounded by reflectors but the reflector I use most
in the studio, is this one right here.
This is a 5 in 1 foldable
reflector, its small it collapses down,
but it has five reflective surfaces. Let me show you
we've got the silver side here but this is just a zipped on
thing. So you can unzip it and reverse it and if you reverse it,
you would get a gold surface so different reflective surface.
On the other side you get a white reflective surface,
similar to the silver just not quite as bright, and there's also the
translucent surface as well.
What's the fifth reflective surface? Well it's actually the black.
Yeah I know black doesn't really reflect light in fact it does completely the opposite.
This is known as a flag and you use it to block light,
and in my small home studio here that's fantastic
because it means I can control where the light goes and stop it bouncing and hitting my
model.
If I wanna make sure that I really get some shadows. Okay so
let's zip this back up again, and we're gonna do a shoot
using the five in one reflector. Don't forget to check out Adorama's latest
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So today I'm joined in the studio by Dan. Say hello Dan. 'Hey'
And he's gonna be the model for today but before we get in with the shoot itself,
let's just use the reflector and see how it works to
add light into our scene. Now I've got a basic
one light setup here, the lights basically at 90 degrees to Dan's face,
and you can imagine how this is gonna look even without taking the picture,
but let's actually take a shot and see for ourselves now I'm gonna use the 5-in-1
reflector and I'm actually gonna start
by using the black side to make sure none of the light bounces off my white
wall and
contaminates the scene a little bit. So that's a nice little use of the
5-in-1 reflector. We'll pop that there. Okay
let's take the shot and see how it looks. Okay here we go
So nice happy smile.
so as you can imagine in this picture
half of Dan's Face is lit and the other half is in shade,
and it really is in quite deep shade as well. So we're gonna make it better by using
the reflector to
add light into the scene. So let's spin it around
from the black side to the silver side. Now
the silver side and the white side of the reflector will give different looks
but as a very basic rule of thumb the silver side will bounce more light
back into the scene. So let's see how this goes. Okay Dan so same thing again,
big happy Dan smile, haha.
Brilliant. Okay so with that
shot, yeah we can see now we have some light on the shadow side of the
face.
But there's not much of it. Its there and it's definitely helping
but maybe what we want is a little bit more. Now you can think of this as a
second light source effectively it's adding light from a second direction,
but is a light source we can't control as easily as our normal SpeedLights
but we can control it and we can control it by moving the distance.
The closer it comes to the main light.
The more light it will bounce back. So in this case I'm gonna put it as close as I can to
Dan
without it being in the scene and about there should be good and we'll see how
that changes the shot.
Okay here we go. Same thing again coming in.
More of a confused face that one.
Brilliant so there we go with that shot you can see how the lighting
is almost balanced, it's almost even although there is still a lit side
and a shady side. So using a reflector is a really great tool, you can use it to
block light
or you can use it to reflect light and you can control the amount of reflected light,
the brightness of it by simply moving it into your scene.
That's the basic setup, let's actually do a shoot.
With this first shoot we're gonna do a lighting setup that's
a little bit different. We're gonna use overhead lighting and we've given Dan a
hat and theres a couple of reason's A) Dan look pretty cool in a hat
but mostly because when it comes to lighting hats can be a real problem
hat's cast
shadows at the best of times and if you wanna see the eyes then
your gonna need a reflector. Let's start without the reflector and just see how
this goes.
First thing I need to do is actually meter for the light that's coming out
of the lights there so I'm gonna meter up here
I'm gonna meter off the top of the hat. There we go so I'm getting
F16 as my meter reading that's a bit too bright I really want F8.
That's kinda my go to aperture for this shoot.
So here I can change it because the StreakLlight
has a the radio trigger that allows me to change it. 1 , 2 , 3.
that's one stop less. 1 , 2 , 3 , that'll be f8.
But we'll just double check. Yeah F8
absolutely brilliant. Okay so I've got my lighting where I want it to be,
now we just need to do the shoot . So let's see how this goes.
I'm gonna come down here Dan and Dan's going to do the moody mean look.
That's pretty good. Okay now that look's great. I mean I've got beautiful lighting
on the hat and there's some lovely texture coming through on the shirt.
But the eye's there really deep and in shadow.
Now that could be exactly the look that you want, brilliant
stop if that's the look you want but in this case we want some light in Dan's
eye's
and that's where the reflector is gonna come in. So I've just got it on a little lighting stand.
Gonna pop that underneath like that. Now you could get the model to hold the reflector
but often that does some weird things to their shoulders and arms, so if you can get it on a
little boom
arm like this then that's better. Okay we'll do the same thing again.
Brilliant.
and this time we can just see the little sparkle the eyes the hint of what's
going on there,
and compared to the normal shot that's considerably better
okay so that's pretty good. We can do a little couple of shots like this.
So that works really well we got some really nice shots
there really simple setup. Let's just change the lights around once more,
and we'll give one more shot a go. So this time we've just changed the lighting pattern
little bit more and we pushed the light backwards a wee bit.
And we're gonna go for more of a full length shot. But if I've moved the light I need to re-meter.
So got my meter let's just pop in under Dan's chin
and I'm getting a meter reading of F5.6 I still want my F8 aperture .
So I need one more stop of light so once again I can change my
settings here on the FlashPoint remote. Three clicks that's one stop.
Double check. F8 so I'm back to my target aperture away we go.
That really was a great fun shoot to do and as I was taking the pictures in my
head
I was thinking black and white. So let's do a really quick and simple black and white
conversion
inside of Photoshop. So I've got my picture is been through raw
it's had some basic editing done, but you can see how the the lighting has works really well.
If I go in you can see there, the little catch light in the eye there which is of course
is the catch light form the reflector
which is lighting the face. So the photography side of things
big success. For the processing making it black and white, well there are so many
ways you can do it.
I'm gonna use image adjustments and
black and white, but I'm gonna do it in a non-destructive fashion.
So rather than doing it directly on the image I'll choose to do as a layer.
New adjustment layer and black and white, that's the difference between the two.
One is destructive and the other allows you to make some changes.
Now there are a bunch of presets you can try and some of these are
pretty good and some of them are
a pretty awful. I'm gonna stick with the default option and then
apply my own custom settings because the shirt is quite a strong blue-collar.
One of the reasons I like to use this is I can actually flick off the layer and just
remind myself what colors are underneath so
I could just try moving the blues and that will affect just the blues in the picture.
But is that shirt actually blue? I'm not sure.
So instead of using the sliders I'm going to use the little
finger with a little arrow left and right. And what this allows me to do is
to click on the picture
and then Photoshop will work out what color I just clicked on
and move the appropriate slider. Okay so in fact it was more cyan then blue.
And that allows me just to tweak the colors of the blue, well at least the tone of the blue.
Like so. Other colors like the hat for example I can tweak as well, but of course
they actually match
the tone of the face so if I'm am gonna move that it will have an effect of course
across all off the picture. That's perhaps one of the downside's of this slider is
it doesn't target one individual part in the picture
it does work globally, but once you're aware of that that's not a problem.
Okay so I'm happy with my black and white conversion there that looks pretty
good.
I'm now going to get rid of the the Properties panel and we could stop there
but
a nice little trick is just to make a blurry version and sandwich it
over the top which works really well with portraits. I'm gonna make a blank
empty layer and then I'm gonna hold the Alt key
or the Option key on a Mac. Go to layer and choose
merge visible and that will fill that blank layer with a merged copy
of our two layers. You can see there black and white so let's get a filter
blur, gaussian blur and we're gonna gaussian blur this up enough so I can
still see the picture
but I can, you know it's it's pretty blurry and i reckon about 30 pixels
is about but I can still see it's a portrait but it's a very blurry one.
So to blend the blurry one with the sharp layer below I'm simply gonna change it to a
blending mode.
Let's go with soft light that just add a little bit of contrast,
a little depth to the picture the only downside with that is it does
just darken the picture down slightly especially on the eyes.
So I'll go back to the layer and we'll add in a layer mask,
and we'll have a reveal all layer mask, and then with a paintbrush
making sure it's set to black. I'll just paint over the eyes,
just to bring them back may be over the top for the shirt there as well.
So there we go so that gives me a combination of both the softness
and the sharpness where I want it and that should give just a nice
final touch to my picture. So there we go the reflector really is one of those
must-have gadgets
every studio every photographer should have a reflector.
Now if you wanna see more videos from myself and the other amazing presenters
here on Adorama TV you know what you've got to do. You've got to click on the subscribe
button
I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.
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