In this video
I defy gravity to create a really eye-catching portrait.
Adorama TV presents
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching Adorama TV, brought to you by Adorama,
the camera store that has everything for us photographers
now I always say if you want your pictures to stand out from the crowd
try altering reality and in this video I'm going to alter reality
by altering gravity to make a really eye-catching shot.
So I guess there really is two ways that we could defy gravity
in the photos, one way would be to build a fantastic gravity-defying
set, the other way, well it's a bit easier
all I'm going to do is get my model to lie on the floor
and then light it accordingly. It's not quite as simple as just getting a model
to lie on the floor
you have to think about the direction of light. And easiest way to do it is think like
this...
how would you light the scene if your model was just leaning up against the
wall?...
Well whatever lighting would do just rotate that ninety degrees
and should be more or less in the right lighting pattern, so in this case
I've got a boom arm, so I can just rotate it around ninety degrees,
bring it out like that, and hopefully
that should be my lighting more or less right. As well as the key light there is
actually going to be at least one more light. It's going to be
this one right here and it's like isn't to light the model,
despite how it looks in the video this light is purely for affect.
Just to really make that anti-gravity feeling
come alive. Now all it is is just a standard household light, a 60-watt bulb
on a light switch and then I've only got a short cable so this is just an extension
cable back to the wall.
I've mounted it on a boom arm so it's a little bit out of the shot,
But more usefully it means I can loosen this off and change the height
and move this around to create lots and lots of bulbs
in the final picture because I don't want one bulb, I want lots of them
but
I only own one of these. So this is going to be repeated over and over again
to create the final shot. So this bit
is really important the final picture has lots of lights created from a
single light
which means I'm going to move around at the end of the shoot. To make that work
really smoothly in Photoshop
this camera needs to be rock solid still, no movements during the shoot,
no movement after the shoot. This, that's not solid enough, so
I'm going to add in a beanbag just to make sure that that is now completely
rock-solid.
I would use a remote release but I don't actually have one for this camera so
instead
I've tethered it up to my windows 8 tablet and I'm using the Olympus capture
software to tether directly.
I can remote fire I get a live view and that's really great
however if I was using my Canon camera, of course I would use Lightroom to do the
same thing
and with Nikon the same would work too. So today I been joined by Freya who's
going to be my
amazing gravity-defying model, well she's going to be lying on the floor anyway
and the first thing to do is to set up the lights.
Now I'm going to be using my StreakLight 360 flash
as the main light source for the shoot even though we're going to have a light
bulb in it.
This is very similar to the motivated light,
that we did a few videos back. You can go and check that out on the Adorama
Learning Center
if you've missed it. So first thing to do is take a meter reading.
Now my ideal setting for this is f/8
So let's just see what we got at the moment. I've not got a clue let's just
take a meter reading by
putting the flash meter by Freya's chin, pointing back at the main light
and I can see I've got f/5.6.
I'm actually a little bit less than my target f/8 and I want a f/8 because it's
going to give me a really good dept of field
for this shot. Now I could adjust the flash here or I could do it using the remote
so let's just increase that by a stop. Take another test meter reading
and yet I'm on f/8.
So I've got exactly the right exposure from the flash.
Now this little light looks like it adding to the shot - well
lets put it all up to full power. Here we go.. Now it looks like it's really adding
to the shot,
but the thing to remember is a light bulb, this is a 60
watt light bulb. This is a 360 watt
flash, but the flashes watt's in seconds the lightbulb is watts in
hours. So it is much, much, brighter
the flash - than the light bulb. Let's see if the two will actually record
Lets take a test picture. Here we go .....so f/8
at 125th of a second,
yep I can see the exposure on Freya is perfect and there is still a glow
from the light bulb as well so that is a perfect combination.
Now that looks pretty good but the background looks a little bit empty and a little
bit dark so I'm going to get a speedlight
and this is just the the Flashpoint Speedlite and I'm just going to pop this round the
back
So what I’ve got is this set pretty much to its lowest power.
1/64 if its full power I've got it on 105mm zoom
and that should give us a nice little beam of light just to add a glancing blow of light
down the background.
I’ll angle it away so it doesn’t actually light Freya herself.
Let's see how this looks. Now this is one of those shots where you gonna take a
picture and review it, rather than actually meter for it
and that looks excellent. So we’ve got a nice bright light back there. Just a little bit of
a splash of light to separate the background on our light bulbs.
So with all the lights set up we're ready for the main part of the shoot and this
is perhaps the most important bit because
this is gonna form the main section of our picture and then I'll
add in some extra light bulbs at the end. So let’s give Freya a little prop. There we go.
Of corse because I’m tethered I can take the pictures here
from the tablet. So Freya he’s go. So you can open the book.
Lean forward just like your
not on the floor.
Roll onto one shoulder.
So the main shot is done. All I need to do now is just to move the light bulb around and
take some different shots. I don't even need Freya in the shot this but
I do need to make sure that that camera and tripod does not move.
Well after a bit of sifting through the images,
I chose my favorite base image of Freya and I think I’ve got about 8
extra pictures of light bulbs. Now because of all the planning stages of things
the Photoshop stage should be reasonably quick and simple.
Especially if we use a few nice little shortcut tools
built into Photoshop. Let's have a look. So I've already gone through the pictures
and they’ve all been processed through RAW in exactly the same way
and they’ve all been turned on their side. So I've got a picture of Freya here
and I've got lots of random pictures of light bulbs ,and you can see they are all
exactly the same there's no difference
shot to shot. So what I need to do is get all these individual pictures together
as one. I do it by going to file,
scripts and then almost off the screen. You'll probably be able to see half of it if
you're lucky
but there isn't option that says load files into stack.
Now stack image is just another way of saying layers.
So I'm gonna add in the open file. So that’s the 9 that make up
my sequence and then I just click OK. So Photoshop will go off and do its thing
and get each of the images and put each one
on it’s own separate layer. Then all I need to do is just
blend them together. Now there might be a little quick shortcut for this but I'm
gonna do this
old school with layer masks. Honestly only take a couple minutes.
So here is my layer stack, i'm looking for this image, this is the most important
one. That's the main picture with Freya in it,
I’m going to drag that right down to the bottom. I'm then gonna turn off
all of the other layer visibility's by holding the Alt key,
or the Option key on a Mac, clicking on the visibility
eye icon and that will switch the, all off temporarily.
Okay let's start adding them back in 1 at a time. Let’s start with this layer.
We'll click it to make it active. OK so we’ve got a light bulb over here, we’ve got to remember
where these are, that helps.
Then I'm gonna add a layer mask I'm gonna hold the Alt key
or the Option key again and click on the layer mask button,
and that will create a black layer mask, known as a hide
all layer mask because it's all hidden. Here comes the fun bit.
I just get a paint brush, I make sure the brush color is white,
the opposite of the layer mask
and I paint where it was. There it is and it magically comes through.
No special blending required, no cloning because all the images are identical
in position and lighting it just blends in.
Okay let's turn on another layer. Let’s go grab this one.
Okay remember where that is, just off the centre. Hold the ALT key or the Option key
and we'll bring that one in as well. There we go, Lovely.
Do another one, okay this ones sort of small and at the
top. We’ll add that in, so thats gonna come in here somewhere,
lovely and I'm just gonna build this up one by one.
That one is sort of in between them I might need a smaller brush to make
sure I don’t accidentally erase anything else. What else have we got here.
Okay, yep that’s over there. So as you can see I moved the light around, but I also changed
the height
as well. It's the same bulb every single time but every single time it's in a
slightly different position. Ok, let’s bring that
through, and if you do make any mistakes you can always swap to black
and just paint them back in again. That's fine. What else have we got/
Okay, now this one's a bit more of a challenge. That once sort of slap bang in the
middle.
If I start to trace this one back through,
it comes in here somewhere and it goes down onto the book.
I quite like this one. I like this idea that it was going to be in front in the
book,
just adds an extra level of debt and interest to the shot.
It just helps with the whole selling
of the the anti-gravity shot because
it looks like it was there ,it really does. Okay, how many more have we got to go?
We’ve got one more to go, we’re nearly there. So last one.
Click it to make it activate, it's down at the bottom,
just to fill in that little gap down there and there you go.
So there we are. We now have lots of light bulbs
and a gravity-defying image. All I need to do is just a little bit more
tidying up of the image and that'll be the final picture
completed.
Well there you go. You see what you can do with a little bit of imagination. Well if you
wanna 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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