Hi everybody, welcome to 'Exploring Photography'. I'm Mark Wallace here with
Maria and we are continuing our series of basic studio lighting principles and
in this episode we're going to be talking about soft light. Now, you might
not know it but there are different types of soft light and they are created
by either a large light source like a soft box or diffused light which is
light that's being bounced off of different things like walls and floors and
ceilings and things, and it gives us different types of soft light.
So in the last episode we learned about hard light and soft light well you can
actually get different qualities of soft light as well.
Now why is that important? Well when we look at a person's face or a still life
or a scene in nature, the form of that subject, the thing that makes it look
three-dimensional are the shadows and so the more we have shadows sort of shaping
something, we can feel that two-dimensional photo become three
dimensional or we can take that away.
Now that is what we're going to be doing so on the scale of light we have hard light,
really, really contrasty shadows,
lots of form, to soft light that's maybe done with a soft box, that has much
softer lights, still have some form, all the way over to the other spectrum in which
we have really diffused light and we lose some of that form but we get really,
really pretty, soft light. So how do we do all that? Well what we're going to be doing is
Maria we're going to shoot her against this support structure right here in the
studio and normally I would be shooting against this big white cyc, but we have
a pretty cool studio here so instead of shooting against this cyc, what I'll be doing
here in a second, so I'm going to take this light and I'll be turning it around and
I'll be bouncing this light off of this wall. Now what that's going to do, because
this light, if we look sort of closely at it you can see it has this little disk
on the front of this, a glass disk, and that is a diffusion panel and what that does
is when light comes out of this
it hits that
and light goes flying that way, and it goes this way and down and up and all
around and what that does in an environment like this is that light then
bounces off the floor, off
the wall, off the ceiling, off the back wall and it surrounds our subject with really soft
light.
Now if we had the same light outside, for example,
we're not going to get that same diffused light because this light is going in all
different directions.
This is going to fly off into space. It's not going to wrap our subject with soft
light and that's why we would normally use a soft box like this but we're
talking about soft light in the studio and
the nice thing about that is we can really shape our light.
So this, notice that this is a nice deep soft box,
nice deep soft box, so because this is deep what's happening is our light is
going to become very directional. It's going to go out so we have this nice, large
light source. So if we put this on Maria, what
we're going to get is we're going to get nice, directional soft light but because
this light isn't going to be bouncing all over the walls and the ceiling and
everything,
we're going to have shadows that are more pronounced
which means that we're going to have form that's more pronounced. We're going to have
more an isolated, soft, little space here. So let me show you the environment
that we're shooting in so you can sort of see how I'm going to be controlling
this so our camera's going to come flying over here really fast and we have
support columns right here and I love the texture of this. So Maria is going to
be standing here. I'm going to be shooting this way,
so this way and the light is going to be coming this way and then way back here,
we're going to allow all this stuff...we're going to turn this light off. We're going to allow
all this stuff to sort of fall into... fall out of focus because I'm going to be shooting at
an aperture value of about f/2.8 and what you'll see is when we have our diffused
light with light bouncing everywhere,
that light is going to be bouncing also, all the way back here so we're going to
have a much lighter space but when we have our soft light from our soft box,
which is this guy, it's going to be much more directional and so a lot less light
is going to be hitting this back here. Now just to sort of spruce things up,
we have a makeup mirror light back there, we're going to leave that on just for
fun to give us a little bit of bokeh in the background.
Alright, enough of me talking. Let's get to shooting. First what we're going to do is
shoot with this softbox, show you some nice, soft, directional light then we'll
flip that light around and show you the really nice, soft, diffused light.
Alright, well thank you Maria for helping me out with those images but we need to look at
the images to understand those two types of soft light.
Now take a look. We have our first soft images that we shot with this octabox
or soft box and we have really nice, soft light but take a look at the shadows
that fall on the column. You can still see some shadows, you can see the shadows
underneath Maria's chin,
we have some form there. We're shaping her face with this directional soft light.
Now if we take a look at the second set of images where we shot with really
diffused light, it was just coming all over the place. You can see that we have
more light in the background and if we take a look again at the column and where
her arm is, you can see that those shadows sort of disappear. In fact, almost
all the shadows in these images disappear and so we have less form. We
have less of the shadows sculpting her face.
Now you have to be really careful when you're choosing the proper type of soft
light when you're shooting a model in the studio. In fact even with the model as
good looking as Maria, you can sort of miss things up.
So let's take a look at a picture that I shot in the last episode, actually, with again my
little octabox and you can see that we have Maria looking straight to the
camera, we have some shadows underneath her chin.
Now, contrast that to an image that I shot here in this episode where we have
the same expression but we have diffused, soft light.
Take a look at the difference. On the one where we have diffused light with no
shadows, her face looks a lot more round than the other image where we have the very
directional soft light, so be careful when you're choosing light with this
specific type of face, because some light is going to be better for some models
than another type of light so you have to play with that. So we have directional
soft light and diffused soft light and I think you'll agree that once you know
the difference,
you can really fine tune your soft light in the studio.
Alright, well, Maria is coming back for one more episode. We're going to be
working with hard light in the studio and it's going to be a lot of fun so
don't miss that next week and to make sure you don't miss it
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Thanks for joining us and we'll see you again next week.