In this video I'll show you how to shoot
a warm winter portrait in your small
home studio using 201 lights.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey,
and you're watching AdoramaTV,
brought to you by Adorama, the camera
store that's got everything for us
photographers, and today in my small home
studio, I'm gonna shoot a portrait that
has a sort of festive feel, and I'm gonna
get that feeling by adding warm tones to
my picture.
Now the warmth is going to
come from a couple of different places,
the first one is the background.
I have this lovely wood background, which until
very recently it was actually the
decking in my back garden, but it's been
repurposed for my studio, and looks great.
The floor, well I'm definitely gonna need
to do something better than what we've
got here.
I'll work on that in a minute,
but one more thing that says festive is
Christmas lights, and I have a lot of
Christmas lights, in fact in total, I've
got 201 lights to set up, so let's get
some lights set, let's get a model in,
let's get shooting.
So to help me out today,
I've got the amazing Sophie.
Sophie is gonna be the model for this
shoot, and as you can see she has a little
box of LED lights glowing down there, and that's
what we're gonna use as part of the
shoot, but they're also the dimmest
lights in this setup by far, so my first
job is to work out the exposure for
those, and then we'll work out any extra
lights from there, so to do this I'm
going to set my camera into manual
mode, and start by choosing a shutter speed.
I think a sixtieth of a second is a good
place to be, that means I shouldn't get
any camera shake, and Sophie shouldn't
move too quickly and blur, so with that
in mind, I then need an ISO.
So I'm gonna go with 400 ISO, and let's try
maybe f/2.8, something like that,
now for this to work,
I can't have the video lights on, so
we're going to turn the video lights off
and take a test shot, okay Sophie, here we
go, and those settings, well I can see the
LED lights glowing, that looks lovely, but
I can't really see anything of Sophie.
Now that might be okay, but I think I'd
like a little bit of light from those LED's
on Sophie, and for them just to appear a
little brighter, so I'm kind of lucky
with this lens, because it actually goes
to an f/1.2, which will let in much more light.
Now I'm not going to go as far as
that, let's go for f/1.4, everything else
the same, and test that so once again go
turn the lights out, take a test shot, and
that looks really good.
Now we can see a
little bit of Sophie in there.
Those lights are looking a little bit brighter,
all in all I think that's going to work
better for the shot I've got in mind.
So to light Sophie, I'm going to use a
flash I've got an Evolve 200,
I could use an LED light,
but I'm gonna use flash because well,
I've got lots of flashes in
my studio.
So that kind of makes sense,
I've got it on its lowest possible power,
we could do this by trial and error to
see whether that's the right exposure,
or I can grab my flash meter and
actually meter it out.
So I've set my flash meter up to the same
settings as my camera.
Let's hold this close to Sophie's chin,
and just see what we're
getting, and I'm getting f/1.4,
that's a bit of luck, that's exactly what I'm
shooting, so I'm good to go now, once
again I need to turn the lights out, and
take a test shot, yeah, and that looks
great, Sophie looks nicely lit.
There is a slight difference in color
between the LEDs and Sophie,
so to get around that
I'm just gonna add a little bit of an
orange gel inside of my light here and
that should help to even up the colors.
So that's the basic lighting in place, I
think we're ready to do a shoot.
So Sophie are you ready?
Okay let's turn the lights out,
let's do a shoot.
Well that went really well,
and now I get to do the post-processing.
Now luckily all of that work setting the
camera up means that I don't actually
have to do much post-processing to the pictures.
It doesn't mean there's nothing to do
whatsoever, no of course not,
there's always something to do.
Let's have a little look,
so this picture represents
many of the images I shot, especially
when I go in close, and have a look at
the LED's because I had 10 sets of LED's
and that means 10 battery boxes and some
of them are visible in the picture.
Now to get rid of those battery boxes.
I want to use a non-destructive technique, so
I'll use layer, new, and layer.
I'll call this clone, so I know what it's done and
then I'm gonna use the clone stamp tool
to remove the battery boxes.
Now make sure if you're going to do this that you
have samples set to 'not current layer'
but either 'current layer and below' or
'all layers'.
Doesn't matter which of the
two, they will both work, now I need to
sample a good area and draw it over the
top of the battery boxes.
I'll hold the Alt key or the Option key on a
Mac... click once on an area I want to
sample and then let go the Alt key,
and just click and paint over the area I
want to clone.
Just like that, so it's worth just moving
things around and just sampling
different areas, and building the effect
up, otherwise you can just have an exact
copy of what's already there, and it
looks a bit obvious, but have a closer
look, make sure you're copying everything,
and there's a few areas here, there is
definitely a battery box there.
I want to follow the line of this,
so I'll hold the Alt key,
and sample from there, let go of
Alt, and then I can line everything up
really easily on the other side as well,
which it's gonna annoy me, there we go
that's fine, okay, now I could keep
cloning and removing these bits across
the bokeh, but they were actually there and
I'm gonna keep those in,
but non-destructive editing means I can undo
this, and change it and redo it, at any
time in the future.
Now there's one more
area I want to work on, and that's the
top-left corner, which is just a bit
blank and empty.
I want to add something there, but
again I want to do it non-destructively.
So slightly different technique this
time, I'm gonna go back to my layers and
click on the background layer, make that
active, and then because I'm going to
apply a filter to create an effect.
I'll choose filter and convert this to a
smart filter, which converts it to a
smart object, which is beyond what we're
going to cover in this video, then back
to filter.
The filter i want to use is
actually the Camera Raw filter so if
you're a Lightroom user, this is the same
as the developed module inside of
Lightroom, and I could use any of the
filters here, but I'm actually going to
use the radial filter and I'm really
going to pump up the exposure to put
some flare in that top left corner.
Now obviously the radial filter gives a
nice curve, but it also applies it to the
other three corners.
I'll deal with those in a minute,
so a bit of flare looks good,
there, I think maybe a bit more contrast,
maybe if I pull the blacks back slightly,
bump up the temperature, yeah, that looks
pretty good, I'm happy with that, if I go
in close I can actually see that there
is some definite noise in that area
there, so I want to get rid of that noise,
because that's just been introduced by
the effect I've added, and I think the
easiest way to do that is just to take
the texture, and remove the texture a
fair chunk, and that helps to blend that
noise out... okay!
That's pretty good but
what about the other corners?
Well if i zoom back out again,
I'm just gonna switch to the radial filter
brush, make sure it's set to minus,
and I can just paint away anything that I
don't want, so really I'm just radial filtering
the top left corner, and there you go...
Click the OK button, that takes me back to
my main image and that's my final picture
completed.
Now you might be wondering
what the hardest part this whole
technique was, and I can tell you
honestly it's gonna be untangling all of
these lights, so I'm not looking forward
to that at all.
Now if you've enjoyed this video, or
you've got any questions leave me a
comment below.
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I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.