Hi guys I'm Karl Taylor - This is the photograph we're going to shoot in this
tutorial. It's a very simple softbox portrait setup. It's a 2 light setup, really easy
to do stick with me until the end of the
video and I'll give you a couple more pointers on this shoot.
This is our lovely model Sophie and today I'm going to show you some really simple portrait
lighting setups... actually going to show you one portrait lighting setup but I'm
going to do it with some really basic equipment. OK, admittedly you need some
studio lights or at least some speed lights but we often get a lot of emails
of people saying to us. "Oh, you get fantastic images, you've got all these
lovely great photos but you're using all this expensive equipment to
capture these shots!" Well, actually we can still capture great
shots on some really basic equipment. So I'm using an Olympus OM-D camera (one of
these little crossover cameras) it's got its 14-42 lens that
comes with it. I'm just using it in manual mode. I've got a flash trigger on
here to trigger the lights and then for my lighting I've got a Broncolor 75
Octabox here just to put a little bit of a gradient glow on my grey paper
background. This softbox retails at about £135 which is about $210
and remember these softboxes... they don't have to go on Broncolor
lights, you can put them on speedlights you can put them on other brands of
studio lights as well but they are fantastically built softboxes. My main
light source is coming from an Octabox 150... this is a lovely big light, a great big
soft diffuser that retails at about £175 which is
about $230 (somewhere around there) so if you had just 2 lights
you're going to be able to do this set-up. Two lights with these softboxes any
camera doesn't really matter. I'm going to shoot this on a Olympus OM-D and
I'm going to take a shot on my Canon 5D and I'm going to take the shot with just
a standard 50mm lens. This is a 50mm, 1.8 lens and we should be able to
get a great result so obviously we're using a very
attractive model here but you can do this sort of portraiture with anyone.
The only other thing we're going to use is a simple piece of white foam board / white
card to bounce a little bit of light into the shadow side of our model and
that's it! So you really will be able to see how easy it is to get great shots
even with a 2 light set-up. OK, if I can get you to hold that please Fab.
Fabienne is just holding that reflector in just for a little bit of fill I'm just
going to get into position here and I'm just getting Sophie - just to turn a head
directly towards camera, just look straight at a lens for me Sophie - that's
it, lovely and I've already taken my meter reading so I know what my exposure
needs to be, just going to zoom that in a little bit there on Sophie, I'll wait for
that to focus. That's beautiful Sophie, thank you that's good and again let me
reframe. OK, so that's on that camera. Let's switch over to the Canon... I'm shooting
this at ISO100 at F6.3, the shutter speed doesn't matter as long as
I'm within the flash sync-speed so in this case I'm at 1/60th of a
second. Just going to go up a little bit higher with this one - just turn your head
round towards me a little bit, good fantastic keep that there for me,
that's great, and again. Lovely, I'm just going to go in
a little bit closer on a couple of those. That's it good, beautiful.
And that's it! We should have some fantastic
portraits with a really simple lighting set-up. I hope you enjoyed that - we'll see you
next time. Thanks very much. So in this first result
you can see I've shot slightly wider and just so that we can see the softbox on
the background and you can see clearly the effect it's having, that lovely
gradient of light that it's adding. And then the main softbox giving that
beautiful flattering light on our model and this was shot with a
50mm 1.8 lens, then I moved in a little bit closer or a better crop on
the model, better framing on the subject very simple, very easy to achieve, just
done with the 2 softbox lighting set-up. On the Olympus OM-D camera, a much less
expensive camera, another great result, so just proving that it's not always
about the gear... this is a much less expensive camera, using its standard lens
and again you can see it's the lighting that is key. Then we move in a little bit
closer for a better crop with the Olympus camera beautiful result again.
So... not about the gear, it's about knowledge of photography, understanding lighting.
Thanks for watching guys, as you saw in this video we can accomplish quite a lot
of things even with basic camera equipment I know that the lights that I
use may have been more expensive lighting but that could have been done
with more basic lights like the Siros lights or other ranges of lights as well.
It's the modifiers themselves that made the difference and for example the broncolor
lighting modifiers can even be used with speed lights with the right
adapter. Let's take a look at the picture again, you can see our lovely model
Sophie illuminated from top right, sort of Rembrandt lighting style, that light
is caught the hair nicely on the top right illumination coming down the
forehead onto the cheeks and that lovely catch light in the eye with the Octabox
and the reflector below taking care of the film then we have that soft gradient
light coming in from the bottom left here on the grey background. My tip is
that I use darker grey backgrounds than many other photographers because then it
allows me to shoot the model closer to the background if necessary and it
it means that any light spill onto my background doesn't affect
it as much as it would if it was a grey background because if you've got a
lighter grey background in a small studio space and the spill from your
main lights is going to make your background lighter,
so I generally work with slightly darker grey backgrounds that allow me to retain
some density to the grey in the background. I hope you enjoyed that short
little tutorial thanks very much for watching. Karl Taylor