In this video I turned day into night using a colour gel and some flashes!
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 today, well, you join me out in the
woods, because we are going to a shoot in the daytime but I'm going to try and make it look
like we're working at night. Now it is a summer's day here in the UK which means
it's gray, overcast with a little bit of drizzle in the air but I'm not going to let
that put me off. I can still turn day into night using a few tricks with flash.
So today I've been joined by Kerry who is suitably attired for the woodlands here.
We've got this nice little archer shoot in mind. Now, I'm going to be using
flash for this but let's just start with a simple shot just with the ambient light just to
show you what we're getting with natural light. OK, Kerry, so if you'd like to sort of
aim it towards the camera, I suggest. Yeah, that's lovely.
And as you can see it's a perfectly fine
if a little bit unexciting shot. So to add the sense of drama I'm going to use
flash and I'm gonna overpower the ambient light. Now today isn't a lovely sunny
day so that shouldn't be a problem for
pretty much any flash gun that you've got but I'm using the Adorama Streaklight 360
as my main light and I'm using an Adorama Glow Softbox.
I've removed the outer baffle so it gives a bit more direction and shape to my light.
So let's start with the ambient light meter reading. How much light is actually here?
Well, I've switched to manual mode because whenever I'm shooting flash I'm going to
work in manual mode that's kind of a given and the best way to go. I've chosen f4
as my aperture that should give me enough depth of field to make this
interesting but I should be able to blur the background if I need to so if I
point my camera at Kerry, and I let the meter figure things out, it'll tell me
correct exposure one-tenth of a second
and that looks like a fairly ordinary shot. It looks the same as it did before.
What I want to do is overpower the ambient
I'm going to increase my shutter speed to reduce the amount of light that comes
through. Let's increase it by one stop, that means doubling my shutter speed to
20th of a second. Let's increase it again by another stop. So that's doubling it once more to
a 40th of a second and that's okay but for this to look like nighttime
I am going to go the extra step further and a double this once again
eightieth of a second, three stops under ambient exposure, and everything is
looking really dark and really sinister
So remember the settings, 80th of a second f4. I need to make this flash produce exactly that
amount of light so let's get my flash meter and I'm going to set the shutter speed
to an eightieth of a second ISO 200. Press the test button on my remote and when I hit
exactly the same exposure from the flash, as I've set in my camera, I'm good to take the pictures.
Right, let's just take a shot like that. So, same as you were before, Kerry. That's lovely.
And as you can see Kerry is now perfectly lit but that background
remains as dark as it was before.
We've overpowered the ambient. That's the first step done. Now one of the problems when
you shoot against a dark background is that your subject can just merge in with
a background and they don't really separate. So what this is, is a
background light or a separation light. Now this is just literally going to go in behind. Where you
put it is entirely up to you. I'm going to put it over here though.
OK, so I'm going to come in at the side, pointing this back towards Kerry. Let's
work out the meter reading for that. So, because I only want to meet at the
background light I need to make sure the little white cone is pointing at the
flash I want to meet at. So it's still set exactly the same as before. I'll pop this
just above Kerry's shoulder. Press the test button. I can see this is F 2.8. Now I
think I'd like to balance out the amount of light on her shoulders with the face
I want one more stop of light from that little Speedlite and again I can do that
here on the remote I just switched channel to the one that the speed light
is on, I can increase the power. Three clicks is one stop. And bingo I'm on F4.
So I've managed to do that. Of course if you don't have a remote control like this you can
just walk over and change it, but it just saves a little bit of leg work. OK, let's take a test shot. See how that looks.
And that just gives me that nice little bit of rim lighting around the side of Kerry and that
separates her beautifully from the background. So whilst that's giving me the lighting
that I want it doesn't give me the feeling of night.It's just basically
dark. So I'll switch from the normal auto white balance and I'm going to go to
tungsten or incandescent and that should make everything look really blue. Let's see
how that goes and that is very blue indeed. It does feel like night time but now
Kerry. All those skin tones are wrong on the model. It looks a little bit weird. Great
in the background, not so good on the skin tones. So to counteract the blue on
our model I'm going to put a gel in the main key light and I'm going to put an
orange gel which should be the opposite in the color temperature to the blue. Now
if you want to do this precisely you can buy perfectly color balanced gels that
will work and give you almost no post-processing at all. I'm not quite
that lucky. So I'm just going to pop this on to the flash, tighten it up.
Here we go. And we'll just do a nice little shot, just of that bit. Thank you very much.
That picture will come in handy later. I'm also going to re-meter as well so
let's figure out whether the light is now correct with that gel.
A little bit like a sunglass, it just stop some of the light coming out so we're looking
for F 4. I'm actually F 2.8, I have lost the stop of light with that gel. I've just got to
remember to move my remotes. I'm adjusting the right light. I can add a
stop more light and I'm back to f4. OK, let's take a test shot.
That looks really good and of course warm light on Kerry from the main flash but that
background light adds a cold splash of light because its unfiltered. And I think that
looks fantastic. So those shots look really good but for this to really feel
like night we're going to add one more exciting and dynamic part to the shot. We're going to add
some smoke or mist. Now if you want to see how I do smoke go check out my previous
video where we covered how to do smoke away from the studio and you can find
that on the Adorama Learning Center. Now I'm going to light the smoke I'm going to use my
second Streaklight to do that and then I'm going to take it way back.
So smoke really looks best when its lit from behind, especially if you're after a sort
of a moody night time shot. I'm going to put this in behind Kerry, so I'm going to
try to figure out where I'm going to stand and put it there and the reason I've
put it behind Kerry is two-fold. Firstly I think it will look really nice with a halo
coming around her, but also if it's hidden behind Kerry I won't have to
Photoshop it out.
That has got to be a good thing. OK let's try this.
A few seconds to get going. Here we go. Let's do a test shot first of all.
Now that looks fabulous.
Wow. So those came out really well. They look fantastic on the back of the camera but there's still a little
bit of Photoshop work to be done. So, let's jump into Photoshop and do some editing right now!
So, setting up the lights and getting the white balance changed and putting a gel onto the flash, that all
takes time. But the advantage of doing that is
that I should now save a lot of time here in post-production. Now it
doesn't mean to say there's not going to be any Photoshop there's always some
Photoshop work to do but hopefully less than you might imagine. Let's have a look at
this is the shop that I want to end it and it looks pretty good straight off
the camera. I'm really pleased with that, however there is a definite warm tone to
the face I would like to remove.That's where this picture comes in. Now, you might
remember this one it was sort of a grab shot but this is the bit I'm interested in.
That's the gray card that can help me to get close to the right white balance and to do it
I just get the eyedropper tool here- the white balance tool- and click anywhere on this
gray area and that should remove the color casts and give me a color that is technically
correct. Now did you notice the word technically in there? Technically correct
and aesthetically correct. They're not the same thing. This will get me close
but there are a whole other things that will change that might mean that I'm not
going to keep the technically correct answer. The color of the smoke had an
impact there was some daylight contamination which was all part of the plan.
Little things can just tweak the results. But let's have a little note of the
numbers here. We've got 2350 for the temperature, -4 for the tint. I jump back to my
main image. I can type those exact numbers in ( 2350, -4 ) and then have a review.
Do I like the effect? Am I happy with the colors? It's close. I reckon it's still
just a little bit warm on the face so maybe we'll just take that down to 2250
so we'll take a hundred off the temperature. That looks slightly green so
maybe we'll just put a little bit more magenta in, there we go to zero, and I reckon
that is good. That suits the look of the image that i want.
Now, everything else could be changed if it needs to but I think we got it more or
less right in camera maybe just a little bit more clarity in there that's always
a good thing and we'll just push up the colors a little bit just have a nice
good base of strong colors. Now I do find the blue maybe a little bit too strong
so I'm going to jump over to the HSL/Grayscale. I'm going to come down to the
Blues. Well, let's go to the saturation first of all and then I'll take the saturation
for the Blues down. I'm not going to go that far but it's good to know that you can really
change this if you want to and we'll just bring the Blues down about -20 something
like that. Once I'm here let's jump over to the luminance and just increase the luminance of the
oranges which of course skin tones and that just adds an extra level of brightness
on the skin tones. Now, I'm happy with that so I can click on Open Image. I can
leave camera RAW behind and jump into Photoshop. Now you've probably noticed
these two bits here there is the edge of the softbox and also the light
stand leg is in the shot. Because I wanted a wide shot these things are just
going to creep in sometimes but fortunately they're really easy to remove I'm going
to use the spot healing brush just to remove the leg there. There's another little
something there. This is a little bit bigger so not going to use the spot healing
brush for that. For the larger parts I will use the patch tool to just draw roughly around the
thing I want to patch and then the lovely thing with the patch tool is you
can move the the sampled area but you get a preview and I can line up the edge of the
tree, something like that and that looks
OK. Let go and there you go, that looks pretty good. Bit of fine tuning required with the
spot healing brush just to take away a few little weird bits and bobs. And I'm also going to remove all
of these little parts too so this is where the daylight was just coming
through the leaves and if this really was at night time, of course the sky would be
jet black so they don't quite fit in with the feel of the image but are nice
and simple to remove. OK, and there we are. There it is, my daytime to nighttime
image completed and its looking rather super.
There we go! The final picture really does have that nighttime feel and I absolutely love the effect.
Now if you want to 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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