In this video I take on another card themed shoot, but this time with a multi light setup.
AdoramaTV presents, Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by
Adorama, the camera store that has everything for us photographers,
and in this video I'm going to do a shoot here in my
small home studio. So there's a concept behind this shoot
and it's a continuation of the last one where we had playing cards
in the shot, well this time I've gone all out. We're going to have a full on poker
game here
and we're going to try capture a range of emotions across
the set of pictures. Now to do this I'm going to welcome back Brian to the studio, say hello Brian,
and he's going to be our poker player who's going to have a bit of an interesting
roller coaster ride,
there's going to be thrills, spills and ultimately
I'm afraid Brian, you're going to lose all your money, such is the way of the world.
Ok, but to do it we need to set up some lights so let's set this up one light at a time.
So whenever you start up with a complex light setup at least
anything with more than one light the best place to begin is with your key
light, your main light
and for this my main light is going to be, well this guy right here.
This is the the FlashPoint Streaklight 360
and I've just got it on a small beauty dish, so this is going to be the key light that lights Brian
but I'm working in quite a tight space here and I need to think about
where I position the light. Now knowing something about the
inverse square law means that I know if I keep this light
nice and close to Brian it will light him really well,
but the fall off will mean that the background will stay quite dark
and that's important to me because it means I can light that background separately.
Now if you want to find out more about the inverse square law check out the Adorama
Learning Center where there's tons of information about how this inverse square law thing works.
Once the light is in roughly the right position, I reckon that's probably about right
there, we need to meter, so lets grab the light meter,
we'll pop it underneath Brian's chin, pointing back at the light
and I can get a flash meter reading here, so I'm getting
f/16 so thats just a little bit bright, I think I want to an aperture
of about f/11, so let's just dial that down one-stop
and I can do that here on the remote, take another meter reading
and sure enough it says f/11 so
that set the light correctly, I'm going to dial
f/11 into the camera and we'll take a test shot and see how it goes.
Ok Brian here we go.
Brilliant so there we go, that works really nicely you can see that Brian is nicely lit, we've got some
excellent illumination but that background has stayed nice and dark
it's kind of a contrast-y light, but that's the look I want to go for
for this shot. So the second light in this setup is actually two lights, I want
two equal an identical lights just to rim light the
edge of Brian just to separate him from the background. So I've got one of my Rovelight 600's
on one side, and I'm going to add the second one here and try to try to get it
exactly the same, same power and roughly the same angle
and height. But before I do that I need to make sure its turned on which it is
and also set it so it can fire when the Streaklight 360 fires.
So these are different lights, they have a radio trigger but they don't work together
so instead what I'm going to do is switch on
the optical slave for the Rovelight
so when it sees the Streaklight fire the Rovelight fires as well, and most
flashes will have this function.
Once thats turned on, I'm going to just elevate this up, get the angle about the same
I'm just trying to get it so the light just hits the the side of Brian's head
that's just coming, just slightly from behind as well and I'll get some spill
onto the table to add a little bit more light there too.
Ok lets just take a meter reading for these and see what we get
so I'm to meter just for the the sidelight,
I'm going to get my meter reading from Brian's shoulder pointing back at the Rovelight.
So that's reading f/16 so that's roughly one stop more light
on the shoulders than on the face, that should give us a nice glow on the shoulders
but there's only one way to find out, let's take a shot!
Yes so you can see that that really gives some lovely highlights around Brian's shoulders
there's a little bit of light in the hair
and again it adds to that slightly contrast-y feel
and the innovated lighting positions adds to the whole mood of the shot.
So the last light is just going to be
for the background only really, its another one of the Streaklights, this is the
lower watted 180 Streetlight and it's just going to fire
a little light up here just to light that part of the background just behind Brian really.
How much light does it need? Well it needs as much light
as your background requires so if you had a a white background, you would obviously need
less light than if you had
a black background, this is a grey one so its something in the middle.
I don't know what the right power is, let's take a meter reading and see what it says
f/22 well
that sounds pretty bright compared to everything else,
remember I'm shooting at f/11 throughout but you've got to remember I'm
lighting a dark surface here so
that might be right, it might be too bright, might be too dark, there's only one way to find out
take the shot.
And I reckon that looks just about right
there's just that little circle of light behind Brian just two separate him out from the background
without overpowering the background and overpowering the shot.
So there we go we've got everything ready, we've got our set prepared
our lights are ready to go, Brian are you ready to go? Yeah. Ok we're going to do a shoot, let's do it!
So there we go that was great fun to do, did you enjoy that Brian?
Yeah. Fantastic, we've got chips everywhere, we've got cards everywhere
but what we're going to do now is we're going to get my favorite picture into Photoshop
and we'll do a little bit of work on it, and we're going to do that right now.
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Well now I've had a chance to sit down and look at the images,
I can see that Brian did a brilliant job at showing a
range of emotions as a result I think the images look best
when you see more than one, when you see that range of emotions
through the shots. So how am I going to do that in Photoshop?
Well I'm going to create a triptych, three images
on one single sheet of paper or one single
image. Now I've gone through and I've sorted out my favorite images so let's have a look.
I think these three kind of sum up the whole emotional roller coaster.
So let's just select one, hold SHIFT select another,
hold SHIFT to click on the 3rd and then I can right click and choose
open in camera RAW, and that'll open
all 3 images in camera RAW and that's handy because now I can do the same
thing
to all 3 images. In fact I've done a little bit of playing around here just to get us
going but
if I click on the Select all button you'll notice that
all of the three images on the left are now highlighted,
and that's important because it means that I can do one thing to the image on
screen
and have it affect all of the other images at the same time,
and what I'm going to do is come over to the effects here
and I'm going to add in a border, because when these are joined together I don't want them
just to bang up next to each other
I want a nice little curvy edge border, and I can do it here in RAW
which means its non-destructive. So I'm just going to increase the
amount of the post-crop vignetting, all the way up to maximum,
and I know your thinking that's absolutely hideous.
It's actually going to get worse before it gets better because now I'm going to change the
midpoint
all the way down to
zero, like that, and yes it has got worse. Then I'm going to take the roundness
and I'll take that down to the left as well, minus a hundred
and now you can start to see this border starting to take shape.
It's a little bit soft and fuzzy at the edges so let's just take the feathering for that, and
remove it
all the way down to zero to get that nice hard
edged border, and you'll see that all three images
have the same border treatment, although I've only had to do it
to one, and that was because Select All had been checked.
There's one more thing I want to do and that's to make sure the all three images come out
exactly the same size
and I can do that here in RAW as well, so again non-destructive,
I'll just come down to the workflow options at the bottom and here I'm going to change the
the resize
I'm going to resize this down, so the longest side, the
width in this case, 3000 pixels that's fine.
I'll open up the images and that will open all three images
into Photoshop. Once I've got the images into Photoshop we can do the
next step which is
to gather the three images together in one long
thin single image. Now of course its' worth noting
which is going to be your left, your center and you're right
image. In this case the most important one to work on
is the middle image, so let's go find it. I reckon that's the right one,
that's probably the middle one, and yes that's the beginning. So let's go with this
one this is the middle
image that's what I'm going to use. What we need to do is make enough space
either side of this image to make room for the other two pictures,
and I can do it really simply by going to image
Canvas Size, now on Canvas Size there's a couple of things I'm going to change.
First of all I'll make sure my units are a nice easy percent
because that just makes the maths much easier if I have it
on percent because if I need three times the width that is now,
well three times a hundred, will be 300.
Next I'm going to change the
anchor point, so I'm going to make sure it's dead center just like this it doesn't
want to be any of these corners, none of these
just click in the middle if it's anything else other than that.
Finally the extension color,
well we've got this white border so it kind of makes sense to have the rest
of the brand-new
area white as well but of course you can change it
if you wish, I'll click OK, so that gives me room for the other two pictures, now I just
add them in. So let's go grab this one in Select All,
edit and copy, close it down, edit and paste,
and we can paste it straight in and because we did all that resizing in RAW
I can drag it to the side knowing it's a perfect fit and same with the first one
copy it, close it down, and pasted it in,
and remember because most this happened in RAW
all of this is non-destructive so of course you could change it
at a later stage but for now, there it is, there's my
three images all on one sheet of paper
Well if you enjoyed this video and you would see more videos from myself
and the other amazing presenters here on AdoramaTV
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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