Hi everybody, welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography, right here on
AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace and in
today's episode we're gonna talk about
this big white wall back here.
A couple of episodes ago I made a video about
high contrast black and white portraits
right here,
I have received I don't know hundreds of
emails and posts and comments, asking me
how the heck I made this white wall
black, in fact I've done this several
times, where you take a white wall like
this, and it becomes black in the photos.
How is that possible?
It's really simple to do,
and we're gonna do that today, and
to help me out I have a fantastic model
her name is Maria.
Nice to see her yeah,
and so what we're gonna do is we have
one single light, and we're not going to
do any fancy lighting setups or anything
for this video, but we're going to look
at the principle of controlling our
light, and our light fall-off, and learn
how we can illuminate Maria on a white
wall, but get even a punch to your image
by illuminating her a different way.
So that white wall becomes a gradient, it
goes to black with a smidge of white.
It's gonna be pretty awesome, so let's
get to it right now.
To clearly understand this,
first I'm going to set up our basic
lighting setup as I normally would, on a
normal background, and so what we have
here is we've had this Profoto two-foot
Octa box, and it is just a little bit
less than a 45 degree angle to the side,
and so you notice this softbox is
illuminating Maria, but it's also
illuminating this white background,
that means this is going to show up in our
exposure, so let me just show you this
really quickly.
I'll come over here and Maria... just look
right at me, beautiful,
just like that, and I'll take a shot and
you can see that this is not a great
picture, but you can see that we have a
white background, and a sort of a nasty
shadow, but that's what we would expect
with a white wall, a white background.
How do we get that white background to go
from white to black, and the answer is
simply, we just need to not illuminate it.
So the reason this white background is
white remember is, because light is
hitting this wall.
So if we remove the light,
we will make this a dark background.
So just to really illustrate this,
what I'm going to do is, I'm going
to take my PocketWizard off,
which means that the flash is not
going to fire.
I'm going to take another photo,
I'm an ISO 100 f/8, and 1/80th of a second,
so look right at me Maria, so I'm at the
same exact place I was before.
I'm gonna take a picture
with no flash, and that is a completely
black image, which means the only light
that's hitting that back wall is the
light from this flash.
None of the light here in the studio is
doing anything to that white wall.
So on video it's confusing,
because it looks like a white wall.
It should show up as a white wall,
but it doesn't, the reason is the ambient
light, the lights were using for the
video, just aren't bright enough to make
a proper exposure at f/8 ISO 100 and
1/180th of a second.
The only light that the camera sees is the
light from the flash,
and if this light from the flash is
hitting our white wall, our white wall is
gonna be white.
So how do we fix that,
it's quite simple we just need to move
the flash, and that's what we're gonna do next.
Now we've moved our single light
off axis we're almost at a 90 degree
angle, so let me just show you so Sam's
gonna move this little Osmo here, and
we're gonna walk through this, notice the,
the angle of this softbox, and so it's
not facing this back wall.
It is at a 90 degree angle from where my camera's
gonna be, so light, it's gonna be
falling on Maria, it's not gonna be
falling on this black wall.
It's black because there's no light,
there might be some light falling over
here, because of the spread, so if we zip
on to the other side you can sort of see
how we're controlling that.
So this softbox has a grid on it, this
grid controls the spread of light, so as
it's coming out, it's not hitting this
white wall.
It might hit right back here,
which would be a cool effect, because
this is going to be a lighter portion of
this wall than this.
It'll go from black, to a little bit white and
that'll be really cool, so now that we have
things set up.
What I need to do is meter and
then I am going to take this shot, so
we're going to take this really quickly,
meter the light, that meters right at
f/8, so I'll hang up my meter really
quickly, Maria's gonna look right into that.
I'm gonna come way back here and
focus this, frame it all up, just like I
want.
That looks wonderful, we'll take the shot,
and it looks exactly as I described, so
we have two on the right-hand side of
the image, a black wall but where the
light is spilling we get that contrast
of gray that offsets Maria, and it looks fantastic.
Thank you so much Maria, I love
these images, and it was really simple to
do, we just added a grid, we moved the
light to this side, we controlled the
fall-off of that line, made sure that the
light didn't get to the white wall,
except when we wanted it to, and so we
got a really cool gradient contrasty
profile shot, which I absolutely love.
You can do this in your own studio if you've
got white seamless paper, or a white wall,
just control the light.
If you want that wall to be black,
don't illuminate it.
That is as easy as it is.
Well thanks so much for joining us this
week make sure you subscribe to
Adorama TV it's free!
Follow me on Instagram,
and if you want to check out Maria's
awesome modelling work,
you can look in the description of
this video, we've included a link to her
stuff so you can see that as well.
Thanks again for following us and we will see
you again next time!