In this video I turn my small home
studio into a laser field mini disco.
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 you join me in my
small home studio. Except this isn't
going to be a studio for long because
I'm going to turn it into a mini disco.
Now for disco we need things like smoke,
that's coming and of course lights. I've
got lots of lights to play with I've got
the excellent Flash Point Evolv 200.
We'll use that towards the end.
I've got smaller lights as well
like this little guy.
This is my pocket LED torch
which is rather good fun
but the thing I'm really
excited about is this. This is a small
home laser system. Yes sounds exciting
watch this. Wow look at that effect. Yeah
good innit, however what we're going to
do is fill the room with smoke, we'll beam
the laser through and we'll use this as
a laser background and it should look
amazing. Now you might have noticed I
said the word laser in there and that
might be worrying however there's lots
of health and safety information printed
on the laser and in the box. Read it. It's
really good advice. This laser is 17
milliwatts in power. Well technically
there's two a red and a green one.
Having said that it's split into hundreds of
small spots so each one is
pretty low in power. Nonetheless there's
no way of knowing whether the power that
it's claiming to be is accurate so my
advice is to buy from a brand that is
known from a supplier that you trust
like Adorama for example. Now there's
still somethings I would not do I would
not stare straight in from close range
to the source of the laser that's not
going to end well and I wouldn't put my
camera this close pointing into the
laser either. Now I have pointed my
camera at the laser and it's been fine
but my advice would be make sure you
have something between you the laser and
your camera. That's what we're going to
do when we shoot these pictures. So having said
that lets get a model in, let's get a
light in and lets get shooting.
So to help me
with this shoot today I've been joined
once again by Beth
who's going to be the model
for this and as you can see we've
got the studio set up as a really dark
black background in fact for this shoot
to work you want your studio not to have
just have a black background but it
needs to be dark, really dark.
A bit like this,
but as you can see if we do that
well it doesn't work well for the video.
So what we're going to do is we'll shoot
the video with the lights turned on
and then I'll shoot the photos that you see
on screen with the lights turned off.
So let's talk about camera settings.
I'm using my Olympus E-M1 mark II and I've
got a wide-angle lens but the key for
this is the fact that it's an f/2.8 lens.
I need as big an aperture as possible to
gather all of the lights from this
fairly dim laser. I'm going to use an ISO
of 400 and that leaves me one more thing,
the shutter speed which will be a
quarter of a second or there abouts. Now
a quarter of a second means that I need
a tripod to get a stable shot and it
also means that Beth can't move during
the shoot. I need to get her to stay still
when I press the shutter otherwise
she'll come out soft and blurry. Okay,
that's everything set, let's get some
smoke in this room and we'll start
taking some pictures.
So Sam's ready to put some smoke
in the room but a word of
warning, you want to build your smoke up
slowly. don't just suddenly fill the room
with smoke and that's quite a powerful
smoke machine for a small studio. Also
I'm not looking for textured smoke I'm
actually looking for haze so I don't
know shoot straight away I want the
smoke to dissipate and that should give
a much better look to the laser beams. So
Sam are you ready? Okay let's try a bit
of smoke. So that's perfect just enough smoke to
get us going. Okay let's turn the lasers on.
So I need to make sure that Beth is
blocking the path of the laser back to
my camera. So this laser wants to be
right in behind Beth's back, like that.
I'm going to try and center it up the
best I can on her which is tricky to see
from this point of view so let's go
around the back of the camera see how that looks.
Yeah that looks really good okay let's
take a test shot like this to check the
exposure.
That looks perhaps just a
little bit underexposed so I'm going to
bump up the ISO and try again
That looks much better.
However do bear in mind that when we
add more smoke and we add in more lights
that the exposure might change so be
prepared to adjust your exposure as the
smoke in the room changes.
So this laser
has very limited controls but one of the
controls is the ability to make the
lights move or stay static. Now at the
moment I've got the lights static.
Let's have a look at this.
Here we go Beth
and that looks really nice.
you get very sharp edge lines from the
lasers, however with a long exposure like
a quarter of a second I can actually
change the settings here and make use of
that exposure time by getting the
beams to move around. Now the way this
particular laser is designed some of the
laser lights move and one or two are
static. Watch how this changes the shot.
okay Beth once more.
As you can see what we have is some sharp lines and
then during that quarter of a second
exposure we have some blur from the
moving laser lines
as well and that works really nicely.
Okay, so let's take some shots
Well the fog is really starting to build
in the studio which is exactly what we
need for the laser although it might
make it a little bit more difficult to
see us in the video. However I'm going to
add an extra light so we've got the
laser going I'm also going to turn on
the little LED torch in the background
and put that on a nice low power and
that should give a lovely kind of glow
to go with the lasers.
Okay let's take these pictures.
So far we've shot silhouettes and we've had
to ask Beth to say absolutely still but
that's how much fun as a model, we like
a bit of movement in our pictures.
However if she moves she's going to be
blurry and I could put more lights into
the shots for example the eVolv 200
here has a built-in LED that would
put some light on to Beth's face so we
can see her but it's not enough to
freeze the movement. If you want to
freeze the movement you need flash. Now I
know what you're thinking flash isn't
that really really bright, well yes it is.
But we're going to have the eVolv 200
on its lowest possible flash power 1/128th
and hopefully that should be enough with the ISO 400
the f/2.8, the shutter speed, well that's going
to give us a combination of both flash and
ambient and should give us some really
good moving pictures. Okay let's take a
few pictures like this, see how it goes.
It has taken quite a while to get the
smoke out the studio but it was worth
the effort because the pictures, well
they were great fun to shoot and they
look amazing. Now if you missed it don't
forget to watch the health and safety
advice at the beginning of this video if
you want to have a go yourself but more
importantly of course if you've enjoyed
it leave me a comment below and
subscribe for more videos to myself and
the other amazing presenters right here
on AdoramaTV. I'm Gavin Hoey
thanks for watching.