Hey this is Dan Norton,
I'm here in my studio in New York City
with Nerlande, and today we're gonna
play around a little bit with
the lastolite highlight.
So I've got this here in the studio
it's Seth's actually, he hasn't a chance
to use it yet.
I forgot to jump on it first and use it
before he gets to it... so
it's basically large a box with
diffusion in the front, designed really
to be used as a background.
right it's kind of narrow here,
and we have our lights in the back.
I have these Profoto
lights in the back, so what essentially
happens is..
you put your lights in here
on both sides.
You're gonna light this thing up,
you get a nice clean white background all the
space that you'd need to do that but I
want to do something a little bit
different with it than that.
What I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna actually
put some lights with gel.
So I have these...
my trooper photo lights,
are actually fitted
with gels, purple gels in here,
and instead of just going straight white.
what I've got is the black fabric that
they have with it, that allows me to kind
of block it out.
What we're gonna get now
is essentially kind of like two giant
strip boxes on the side, giving her a
nice kind of wraparound of colored light,
and a black background,
so let's see what that looks like.
Anyways and we'll go
from there.
So I've got the Nikon Z6 here, this is
the 24-70mm, and I'm gonna
first take a shot at f/6.3, 200th seo 100 ISO.
What i wanna check is to make sure that
none of the light and space is affecting my shot,
and it is not.
I have a nice black frame there...
Okay. so we got a black frame, none
of the light in the space is affecting
our shot, so I'm going to actually use a
Profoto A1 here, this is going to be my
trigger, and also ultimately my key-light.
But for now, I'm just gonna make it set
up, so it's just gonna be the trigger.
So essentially i have it turned off, it's
not gonna fire, it's just going to set my
other strobes off, and let's see what
that looks like.. cool, alright.
So we can see that we have nice purple
rims coming around like that, shaping her
face now.
I'm gonna take this, and turn it on.
I've got the dome on it, and in addition
behind me I have a V flat from V flat world.
I have the white side out, they had
a white wall, you could use that as well,
and all we're doing is bouncing the
light here.
Creating a very large source
in the front, a kind of a wash of light..
Right... and that's going to give us a nice
clean light on her,
and we still keep those purple frames,
so that the whole thing looks a smidge
bright for me, so I'm going to turn this down.
Let's see... up again, so now I'm just
tweaking basically, right? Cool...
all right?
Kind of working this at 70 mm's,
Oops.. good, good, we can see
how that shapes our face nicely.
I know where we put it, come in close for one
treatment towards me.
We can play with that, right, and that's
really cool, very dramatic, so interesting..
depending on where the light is so
perfectly centered with your face...
we'll try to make it like this...
Nice, so we can see that got the nice
purple rims, nice even light on her face,
everything looks really cool and
contrasting. Right.... but... the point
of this right is to have a white
background, so let's play around a little
with that. Now you might say well you
have this purple light in here Daniel,
so that background is not gonna be white...
it's gonna be purple,
but using you know our experience that
we have with gels, we know that when you
expose a gel, if you over expose the gel
it's going to you know blow out, and
become less saturated.
If we underexpose it's going to be more
saturated, so being that this is the
background, it's going to
actually level, it's gonna be very, very
light, so we should get a pretty clean
light on her. Yeah backgrounds white...
and we still have these cool purple rims.
That's like a little added bonus right?
Gives us that little contrast now in
this one, because of the nature of it.
I think I'm actually going to turn my key light up
a little bit, so we want to play around a
little bit, even though the exposure is
the same essentially. Now look down, see
if you like that.
Nice clean shots, beautiful, like that,
cool, I'm ready for the last one,
beautiful, nice, nice, clean, actually look
right at me.
So we can get a comparable
shot, okay, beautiful, so we've got
essentially the roll back here right,
we've got our two options here, both of
them have this purple rim, but we've got
the white background, nice and clean, and
we have nice exposure on your lawn,
kind of creating two different looks.
kind of a nighttime look at a daytime
look, I don't know if that's daytime or
not, but if you go out in the day and it
looks like that, it's probably not a good
thing, but this is really a kind of a
theory practice in gels right?
Because a lot of times we use gels we
put them on people, we put them on the
background, we're always changing
colors and stuff,
but when you really think about it, you
have to kind of think about the exposure
of your light when you're using the gel.
If you over expose the light, the gel is
gonna lose saturation all the ways to
basically no saturation.. if you think
about it here, and of course by the time the
light creeped up and hit
Nerlande it's darker, so there's some
saturation on her skin, and if you, of
course you can do the opposite as well.
If you're shooting something that's more
moody, you can basically ..somebody
upstairs is probably shooting... if you do
something more moody you can, you
know create a darker richer saturation, by
lowering the power.
So I will put in Nerlande
information in the description, so you
guys can follow her, be sure to follow me
@DanielNortonPhotographer
Adorama TV of course...
and I will see you next time OnSet.