In this video I'm going to be shooting more balloons in the studio,
but with a multi light setup.
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Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV brought to you by Adorama,
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and today well I'm back in the studio again and we're going to do another shoot
with balloons but this time a bit more complicated.
We're gonna set up multiple lights to create a look and a feel
that is very difficult to do with a single light but still has the feeling
of daylight. So we've got Gemma, we've got a large balloon,
we got some lights, let's do the setup. So if you're starting on a complicated set
of lights
at least anything more than one, the best place to begin is with just
a single light. Figure out what you're key light is,
what you wanted to do and set that correctly and then build the extra
lights
around it. So I want kind of a window light look, so like a large softbox
over to the side, that's going to be my main light.
We need to know how much light that's producing, so lets take a meter reading,
so I got my little flash meter here, I'll pop this underneath Gemma's chin, pointing
it back at the light,
and I'm getting a meter reading of F8.
Now that's fine, but I'd like just a little bit more depth the field, we got quite a
large area to cover,
so I'm going to add a stop more light to this key light
by increasing it, and I can do it here on the remote, three clicks that's one more stop,
let's just take a
meter reading, and sure enough for up to
F11. So that's the aperture number I'm going to dial into the camera,
F11, lets take a shot and see how that looks.
So what we've got is really
moody, dramatic lighting, lighting from one side,
it's soft but it still has an edge to it. Now if that's the look you're after
stop right now that's perfect, but for this shot I want to do something slightly
different,
I want to have a slightly more softer feel to the light,
so I'm going to add a second light to fill in the shadows.
So for the second
light I'm going to use my streak light
360, its inside of the Westcott Apollo
Orb Softbox. Now I could put it just right over the other side like this so it
directly fills in the shadows, and balances everything up,
that might work fine, but I think what I'd like is just a little bit more light to
the front.
So I keep a little bit of that edgy feel, so we'll bring the light round to the front like that,
make sure its pointing at Gemma, and make sure it's gonna be
out of my shot, so now there should be fine. Okay so let's take a meter reading for that,
see how it looks. So once again I'm going to take my
flash meter here, I'm going to point it
back toward the light I want to meet her, press the test button.
and thats giving me F 5.6. Now I don't know whether that's right or wrong, so what I'm going to do is
take a picture and find out.
That looks pretty much okay, I'm happy with that. So I've set my key light,
and I've set my fill light. So the separation light is going to go in behind,
now I've got to be careful where I put it because if I put it
right back here that's fine but of course it's going to be in the shot,
and I don't really want to clone it out in Photoshop, I'd like just to move it a little bit
so let's put the separation light back here. Now for this I'm using the
RoveLight 600 which is the same one is in the key light
as well, but it's fine you can mix lights together
Flashpoints, StreakLights, RoveLights,
you can mix them all together and still get great shots.
They can either be triggered by radio trigger or you can use them on their
slave mode as well.
Okay so that's where we wanted to g,.
I can angle that in, that looks about right. Lets just take
a meter reading there, now again I'm just going to meet her
facing the light that I want meet her off of, okay.
So that is giving me an F 8 exposure, so that's about
a stop less than our key light, lets see how that looks.
Yeah, that works really well, but
when I look at the floor I'm seeing there is a definite
spill, a definite edge from that light, so the
angle of that light isn't quite right, all I need to do is just
angle the light up, okay and I can actually see it on the floor because this
has a modelling light, I can see
where that spill is going, I can angle it up, so it hits the back of the sofa,
and the back of the balloons only. So that leaves me with just the background
to light.
and I'm going to add a fourth light and this is purely for the background only, so
its not going to point towards Gemma, its going to point towards the background. I've got it on a little
mini light stand, so we can pop this down here, we can angle it up,
and its hidden from behind the sofa so I'm not going to see it from where I'm shooting.
Okay so let's take a shot with this in place
and see how that works.
There you go, so the lights are all set, all four of them are exactly how I want them,
and we've got a little bit movement, a bit of space that Gemma can move around in and
she'll still keep within our lighting patton.
Now I think we're ready to do the shoot so what we need is a
a few more balloons and Gemma, are you ready? Lets do the shoot!
So there we go, we got some great shots at the
end of that now all we need to do is to get my favorite picture into Photoshop
and do some editing
and we're going to do that right now.
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So when I was planning the shoot I really had an idea of the final picture in mind,
and the idea was about colors, I wanted the colors to be very muted,
very pastel in tone, and although you can do a lot of things in camera
that's something that's a little bit more tricky, however inside of Photoshop
its actually quite straightforward lets have a look!
So here is the picture I've got it in Adobe Camera Raw and I wanted to do a treatment that I
could repeat
on all of the images, and this one kind of appeals to me so let's use this one.
Now the first thing I want to change actually is clarity,
I want to give everything a nice soft glow, so we'll just bring the clarity and
slide it down, just a wee bit.
Now if you're talking about strength of color
you've got to think about saturation and vibrance,
and although they appear to do the same thing they are definitely different,
and vibrance is the one I want to use. Vibrance is
a little bit different to saturation, saturation does all colors equally, where
vibrance if you're reducing it, will leave behind the most saturated colors
till last, and
deal with the least ones first. So it is a much more,
well with much more intelligent sort of slider,
even if I go all the way down to -100, it never fully gets rid of the colors,
and that's kind of what we want but not that strong, so lets come down to sort of the
60 mark something like that. So thats given me a muted color scheme but
there's a few things I want to do, I want to target the oranges here because
they're just not quite right.
So to do that I'm going to jump over to a different
tab, I'll go to the HSL/Grayscale
and here I can affect the hue, saturation, and luminance
of specific colors in the whole picture. So for example if I get the oranges,
I can make them stronger or weaker and you can see how that affects
the whole picture. Now I want to bring them down but I don't want to go too far because it will affect
skin tones and the color of the sofa in this case,
so let's bring oranges down a little bit like that.
I can also increase colors as well so for example
Gemma has got a, sort of a purpley-ish toned dress,
so I can just up the purples and I can really affect
the sort of pastely tones in her dress. Now that's fine but
I'd like a little bit more color back on Gemma's hair, so
to do that let me jump over to a different tool, I'm going to get the
adjustment brush tool, and rather than working globally across the whole picture,
this allows me to paint in local areas.
So I can increase the saturation, I can just paint
on Gemma's hair, and we'll just get a little bit of that orange color back,
if I go too far I can swap to erase, and just tidy that up a little bit
on the sofa. Right I'm happy with that, so once you're happy just
open the picture into Photoshop and you could stop here, or I could stop here but,
there's one thing that I want to change. Now I was lucky enough to have access to that
studio for a few days, and it's a fantastic place to work but
my little studio I rather like, and I particularly like the
textured background that I have in my studio, so what I want to do is I want to get that
texture you from my studio,
and put it on this picture from the rented studio,
and fortunately I've done that. I've actually photographed the texture from my studio so
lets add it in. So here it is, if I come and open it up,
and of course it doesn't have to be this texture, it can be anything it just
breaks up that white background,
and I'm just going to go to Select, and All, Edit,
and Copy. I'll close this down, we don't need it anymore and I can use
Edit, and Paste, and that'll paste it on, and there's
probably a little bit of room in here, yeah there is a wee bit so.
I'll sort of centre that up I think, and then I just need to blend it in, so I'll change
the blending mode
currently on Normal, lets drop it down and try Soft Light.
Yeah, that works pretty well, I'll just take the opacity for that and reduce it so its not
quite so
intense, and it just adds just a little bit of texture into what otherwise
was quite a bland, blank background. Well there we go, we had a great shoot and
got a brilliant photograph at
the end of it. Now of course we used a multi light setup in this but
you can do some great stuff with just one single light, and if want to see what I
did with some balloons
and a single light you can see my previous video here on AdoramaTV,
and to see all the video's of course you need to click on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching!
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