Hey this is Daniel Norton...
I'm here in my studio in
New York City with Katherine, and she
came up for the week I guess...
in New York City you don't know when
this is though because we're recording it
ahead of time.
She's a musician from Texas right...
and we decided with make some portraits
so I want to shoot kind of like a beauty shot,
but I've had this, you know this has been
a conversation a lot of times about using
a ring light, and some people like to use
it, especially beauty bloggers use them.
So people think they're good for beauty
photography...
I find they're too flat for beauty,
like you don't get enough of
contrast and detail... but, they're great as
fill light so I kind of want to show you that
so we will walk through the
process, and we'll do it...
So here we go. I'm here,
I'm actually using the the Fuji
GFX camera for this because shots...
it's nice to have a large megapixel count,
so I'm just.. I have my, just my Profoto A1
here in my Chimesa softbox, and I'm just
going to shoot with flash.
So this is going to be number one,
I'm setting up myself so that basically
there's no light in the space... being
except for with my flash right?
So I'm going to come in,
I'm shooting currently at 125, f/5.6, ISO
200, so just gonna frame this up, and we
will take a shot.
So we can see here that it's
you know while the skin tone it's a
smidge dark, but while the skin tone is
good, you can see the shadow pattern
you know is not gonna be great...
that's that's more horror than Beauty..
I think, right so..
we'll see like if that's your thing, you
know, whatever, but if not we want to fill
it in.
So there's a lot of different ways
to do that, we could put a reflector etc
But control you know, using a light
source is always a good way to add control.
So I'm gonna use the savage
rainbow arena light.
I'm gonna bring it in here,
we're not going to use it rainbow
style this time, we'll just take it
with regular white light, and what I'm
gonna do is, kind of line it up here,
and turn it on..
Now number one, that's fine,
I'm gonna turn off the flash for a second
guys so you can see what it looks like
with just the room... so it's not bad with the ring...
it's just gonna be very flat.
So the same exposure,
so we can also give you an idea
of the power right?
That's very dark..right?
So if we want to just use the Ring,
- just for simplicity sake...
I'm gonna bring my ISO up,
so I'm gonna go up to let's say
1250, it's there ...we'll shoot that.
There we go, so now it's you know,
I mean if you had either option here,
you would take neither you know,
because neither ones great...
this one's flat right...
it's fine if you want to show you know
what no shadow...
which is fine for some things,
this is too shadowy, but what we want to
do is find the place in between.
So I'm going to turn my flash back on and the
way, the best do this is kind, is to do it by
eye, so I'm gonna bring my ISO back to
where it was...
which was 200 and this is full power.
I mean you're using a flash,
and a constant light together.
The, the constant, it's almost always
gonna have to be a full power,
because it's so much weaker.
So let's see what it looks like like that,
with both lights on, right...
and that looks a little bit better right?
We're starting to get that fill, so
now the trick is just to bring it in...
what we can do to not change...
If I change my ISO, it's gonna affect both,
if I change my aperture,
it's gonna affect both,
but if I change my shutter speed...
it will only affect my hot light..
So.. my constant light, so I'm gonna go do a
1/16th of a second,
so that's one stop brighter,
right there we go now... it's nice
and balanced right?
We have shape to the face right?
I mean a sixtieth of a second,
is not so slow that we have to worry too
much about her moving, but obviously I'm
gonna tripod, and she's gonna be aware
so if you have a subject you can just tell
them we're shooting a little slower.
so don't get all energetic..
it means I should be too energetic...
good so I'm gonna come in here.
I'm gonna shoot a
few so here we go,
I'm focusing on the eye guys,
because this is really tight
and using the 110 lens here at
f5.6, which is not a whole lot
of light now.
What's nice about using a
ring as my fill, is that she's pretty
much free to move wherever she wants,
because the ring light will always be
even on her face.
That's why it's actually a really nice fill,
if you were to do like what's a clamshell
lighting or whatever, depending on where she was...
her face it might not be as even right?
Nice, good, now the other thing we do
here... that's really nice.
So that looks really nice right...
Everything was great, I'm keeping it really
contrasty, clearly you could add a
light to the background.
We actually discuss that a little bit.
I kind of like it dark, it's very, very, very
got like a cool feel to it, right...
the other thing we can
do just because we feel like it,
because I always do something different..
I never tell the model about this before we..
so they're getting the experience.
I'm actually gonna go back to 125.
I'm gonna go to f/4 now.
I just said that affects both things right,
so I'm gonna turn my flash down one stop
right... so I'm doing
this because I want to just get a little
more shot at the field.
I just want to see what that looks like,
see yeah, yeah, that's nice, right?
I'm... what I'm trying to do is
get my focus to drop off,
just as the hairline hits, because
we've got this like dark hair, so let's
really do the thing with the...
extend your chin forward, good right so
wouldn't actually have our depth of field drop
off... there we go, yeah,
that's nice so it kind of comes across
because you know you want to play
around that kind of stuff,
we could go even more.
I don't have any more shutter speed,
so if I go to f/2.8 for instance.
I'll have to turn the ring light down.
So I'm gonna go to f/2.8, and
I'm going to drop the...
this just went from a basic tutorial toward an
advancement...
I'm gonna drop the power of
the flash, and I'm gonna actually come
here, and I'm gonna drop the power of the
ring... so if I wanna drop one stop.
I should knock it down to 50%,
you know in theory assuming these lights
are exactly right.
We're just doing math,
the math is good yeah.
Well the math is working out for us
actually, you know, and by doing this
actually right, I'm starting to actually
get a little bit of the background over
there..
you guys can see that coming up, so
that's actually a good compromise,
I think, so we're f/2.8 now, let's do that
again. that's it so again I'm at...
f/2.8 so we're gonna be careful of focus..
but good oops, right there, yeah,
do this one...
That's it right there, good yeah, that
should be right on you...
yeah let's play around with that...
back, good, good, good, boom, nice, easy
like that, right, nice and pretty, good, good
good, good, good, very nice, all right
looking pretty good, right, okay, good
and I even normally, when I end you
should know, usually the last picture I
always end with a bad picture for
some reason... I don't know why...
it's like I'm... just cuz I'm done I guess,
get to press the button, and then it's like
the worst pictures on the screen when I
walk over here...
So luckily we have a good picture
on the screen, so you must be looking all
right...
So there you go right!
So Ring Light it's good I think, in my
opinion it's good for a fill light,
it's fine if you're going to try to just light
something up, and I think that's why
people use them for beauty blogging
because you just want to show everything,
you want to show all the detail right?
Because you're trying to show the make-up.
When we're making a photo, we want to
you know show depth and stuff, using
shadow.. so we don't really want to use a
ring for that, in my opinion you want to
use some kind of a smaller source.
It's gonna come down and shape the face ,
and you can fill in with your ring..
so the ring could obviously be an LED light,
this could also be a flash you know... I
just used the LED, because that's what I
got, right? So there you go...
So I will put Kathryn's information in the
description, you guys can follow her and
download her music and stuff...
be sure to follow me
@DanielNortonPhotographer and
subscribe to AdoramaTV,
and I'll see you next time OnSet.