Hey this is Daniel Norton. I'm here in my
studio in New York City with Marisa, and
today we're doing kind of a cool
reflection portrait. I get a lot of
questions all the time about reflections,
like how to keep reflections out of
glasses. I'm not going to talk about that
today at all. What we're gonna do is talk
about shooting into a mirror. So
basically what I've done is, I've got an
old kind of looking mirror that
I had got for actually a previous job
was just sitting here at the studio, and
I have Marissa, and I wanted to do something
kind of fun. So really simple shot that
you can do, really the basis behind this
is just controlling your environment.
Right, what I'm doing is, I'm taking my
ProFoto lights, I already had them set up
from earlier, from a portrait shoot. I've
got 1 by 3 strips on two of them in the
back. They're shooting at the back of
this mirror, which is kind of a bronzey,
you know silver, and it's gonna just give
it like a rim. Right I'm lighting the
mirror. I've got them behind the mirror,
that's the simplest way to do it, to not
get a reflection from those lights in
the mirror right. So I'm just making it
easy for myself, and I've got it set to
kind of give me kind of a nice, a nice
highlight right, a nice kind of pop
and give me almost like a silhouette of
the mirror, and like the light the little box it's
on as well. Then I've got Marissa over here,
she's being lit with the beauty dish,
with a grid on it. The reason why I have
a grid and the whole way I have this
thing set up, is to keep the light on her,
and nowhere else. You can see there's all
kinds of stuff in the studio. We have
backgrounds here, we have probably
products, we have a bunch of junk up there, from
my studio mates. I'm much neater than
that! But you know, so we've got all the
stuff here. I don't want that in the shot,
so I'm lighting her this way. Very
conscious of that. So I've got her in
position, I've got the mirror in position
and how do I line everything up? Well the
secret to that is, you get everything
kind of set, and then you stand at the
position of the mirror, and you turn and
tilt and adjust the mirror, while the
model is looking at it, and when they can
see the camera.. the camera can see them!
That's how mirrors work, it's really
simple. Boom, boom, the angle, right? so once
we have that in place, we know it's going
to be good.
I've already done a quick test for
exposure. It looks pretty good, but let me
take one for you guys. I have the X1D,
the Hasselblad X1D here, with the 90 mm
ProFoto remote on top. I'm
tethered in to focus, which is their
software, and I'm gonna basically, look, I
mean, I am using manual focus for this
so I'm just gonna focus on in. I think it's just
easier when you're in a mirror to do that,
and let's see it... looks pretty
good! Here we go... nice. I'm gonna take a
quick look for exposure which is always
a good practice, and I can see actually
too that her face is slightly off-center
from where we want it. So we're gonna
want to adjust there. So we can see here
that she's got and also I'm a little bit
behind her. So we can see here that the
side of her face is a little bit
dark. I'm gonna have to turn a little bit
more towards the light. So let's do it,
turn a little more towards the light.
It's a little bit yeah let me get my
focus. Good, good, check, yeah that's
basically it. That's what I want, nice and
simple, crisp nice light on her. Everything is
good. You could make a more elaborate
lighting on her if you really wanted to.
But I kind of like this. I think it
echoes the the mirror a bit, and but I do
want to do those just to change up the
look of her face. I'm gonna have her move
first away from the light. A little bit
just the face rather. Yep. Good. Focusing..
here we go.
Okay, one more, little further, good.
See now she's looking almost basically
directly at me, but because the way the
light is, her face is gonna be mostly in
shadow. So that's no good for me, so now
look towards the light a little bit. Good
focusing, good. Maybe even a little bit
more, perfect. You know, and for me
personally, even though now this has a
nice light on her face, she's probably
looking a little bit further away than I
want her to look. Ope and she's blinking..
let's do one more you're not blinking.
Just in case she likes that shot later.
This is almost like a picture frame feel
though, one more time, she blinked again!
Good, nice, but go back to the central
position cuz that's kind of where I
liked you. Yeah!
There we go, good, good, good, here we go!
Yeah! It has almost like a picture frame
feel, which I really kind of like. You
know there she is inside the mirror, and
again because we're keeping it black
back there. You don't see anything else. I
mean obviously we could put whatever
background we want behind her. If we
wanted something you know kind, of funky
back there or whatever. We could put it
just back there and light it. It'd be as easy as
that. You could do a lot of different
things with this. You use different kinds
of mirrors, you could you know, light just
only part of the mirror. Not light it at all,
although if you didn't light the mirror
at all she would just be a little circle
in the middle, and you'd be wasting a lot
of space. So I don't think I would do
that, but that's what you wanna do, go for it!
Remember the whole concept here really,
is just controlling your space. So again
if I wanted to put something behind her,
I could. But I illuminated the light in the
space using the flash, and I'm just using
reflection. It's all about putting the
subject where you need them, and the
camera where you need them, to get that
right angle.
So make sure you subscribe
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Follow me @DanielNortonPhotographer
and I'll see you next time OnSet.