In this video
I turn my small home studio
into a mini music venue.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
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the camera store that's got everything
for us photographers
and today you join me
back in my small home studio
except this is actually going to be
a mini music venue
as I'm going to take some pictures
that look like they were taken
on a small stage
in a pub or bar.
Now to make this happen
I thought I'd black out this end of my studio
and honestly I thought it would look better
than it's come out
but it doesn't matter
because with a bit of careful lighting
and lots and lots of fast dissipating smoke
we're going to hide this really well.
For lighting there's some fantastic
stage lighting kits out there,
I haven't got any of those
but what I do have is my eVOLV 200
and Flashpoints speed lights.
Now the reason I'm going to use Flash
is they are incredibly bright
which means I can shoot at lower ISOs
but moreover I actually already own these.
I don't need to get anything special,
however stage lights have one advantage
they move around and do effects,
these don't, so what I'm actually going to do
is do three different setups
using everything from just a single speed light
to all of my lights.
So let's get some lights set,
let's get a performer in
and let's get shooting.
So to help me out today,
I've got the amazing IF-E,
IF-E is a grime artist
and he's going to be performing
in my mini music venue.
Now to start with we're going to kick off
with a single light just a speed light
and the speed light is going to go right here,
behind IF-E pointing at the back of his head.
Now there's a couple of reasons for doing this
firstly it should give us a really great lighting effect
but also if the light is coming in this way
then the light isn't going to illuminate
my rather dodgy looking blacked-out area
back here. Now the only downside with having
a single light facing towards the camera
is if IF-E's facing me
then all I'm going to see is just a silhouette
of the front of his face
and it's all going to be black
and really not work.
So the solution is IF-E
your audience is out there.
Okay let's take a test shot
and see how this looks.
Okay we're going to do a single test shot
first of all.
As you can see
it looks okay.
It doesn't look spectacular
so to make this amazing
we need the secret ingredient
and the secret ingredient is Sam
on the smoke machine
so she's going to put some smoke
behind IF-E but in front of the light
and that's going to do a couple of things.
It's going to make the lights spread out
much further but it's also going to reduce
some control because smoke
does all sorts of weird things
so be prepared to adjust your shooting
as the smoke changes in the room.
Alright let's get this warmed up.
Let's get IF-E some music
and let's get shooting.
The exposures on these I'm doing by eye
rather than metering.
If it looks right,
it is right.
So all that smoke is cleared
and we're ready for the
second setup. Now this is either
a two light or a three light setup
depending on the look
you want to achieve.
Now I'm going to start with a two light setup
and they are back here,
two eVOLV 200s
both of them have a grid
and a red gel.
The red gel is there
for a little bit of color
and the grid is a bit of direction.
Once again I want to try
and avoid getting light spilling
onto this background
and illuminating it because it's not that good.
Let's have a look
and see how this looks.
Again we'll take a picture without any smoke,
so whilst that looks really dramatic
it does have a couple of problems.
First of all it's a very strong red color
and it's coming from behind
so there's really no light
on IF-E's face.
Now to solve both those
problems I'm going to use a third
eVOLV 200
this time it's got a standard reflector
and another grid. Now the grid is there,
so I can push light forwards
but trying to avoid it spilling
onto the background.
It's white light,
there's no gels here
but I need to try
and make sure that this light
actually reaches IF-E.
It's going to go really high
because the higher I can put it,
the more down I can direct it
and the more away from the background
it will fall but I have to ask IF-E a question.
IF-E, if you look at that light
can you see through the grid
and see the light?
Yes I can.
Okay so from IF-E's point of view,
if he can see the light
the light can see him
and we're good to go.
Let's have a look at this.
That just adds a little bit
of balance back to the lights
and I think that looks really good.
Once again the thing that's missing
from this is some smoke,
so let's get some smoke into the scene,
let's get some music running,
let's take some more pictures.
So for the third and final setup
I've gone all out with literally all of my eVOLV 200s,
so this is a five light setup,
so I've got two eVOLV 200s down here,
they're the same ones that were up high
but now they're lower down.
These should add a little bit more light
down to this lower area of the shot
where it's a little bit sort of missing
in the previous three light setup.
To fill in the top,
I've got two eVOLV 200s up here.
Now these have these standard reflector
and they've got that
for a couple of reasons.
The first one is it will give a much wider
flood of light
and the second reason
is it comes with the optional
grid and gel kit.
Now I'm just going to use the gels
and I've got the blue gels in here,
I've got blue gels
from the eVOLV 200s
down at the bottom, as well,
they're not quite the same tone of blue
and I think that adds a little bit
but I'm going to be prepared
to change the colors anyway
because if this was a real lighting scenario
the lights would be changing
color all the time
so I've got some red gels
that I can swap out for the blue gels
halfway through IF-E's set.
Let's try this without any smoke
and see how it looks.
Okay here we go.
As you can see there's still a little bit
of smoke in the atmosphere
and that looks actually really good
so we're going to add a lot of smoke
in here which is going to make it tricky
for you to see in the video
but it also makes it tricky
for me as the photographer
because the smoke really does affect the exposure
that I get from these lights,
now the big advantage
is I'm using the Adorama R2 Pro trigger
which means that I can juggle the
illumination just by pressing the buttons
and quickly moving the dial around
so I'll need to be on my toes with this
but that's exactly how it would be
if we were shooting a real live event,
so let's get some smoke going,
let's get IF-E going,
let's take some pictures.
That went really well
and although the music
is very different
to what I would normally listen
to in my studio,
the end pictures speak for themselves
but of course there is a bit
of Photoshop work to do,
so let's have a little look.
What I want to do is just tidy up
some of the background.
Now on the right hand side
where the smoke was thickest
I can't really see any of the background light stands
or anything back there at all
but on the left-hand side,
I can clearly see this light stand,
so I'm going to remove that
using either the clone stamp tool
or my favorite the healing brush.
Now the healing brush is great
all I need to do is hold the Alt key
and sample a good area
and then I can just sort of paint over the top
of the light stand
and it sort of heals.
It's really rather good.
Now some areas need a little bit more work.
It's always a good idea
to move your sample point around
when you're doing something like this,
so you can resample from different areas
that looks pretty good
and if you got a really straight thing
to do then all you have to do is sample first,
then click once,
hold the shift key
and when you click again
it'll draw a straight line between those two points,
so that can make something like this
much quicker to sort of heal.
There we go really quick.
Now what about the edge here
I can see the background
a little more than I want it to,
well I like the fact that the smoke here
covered it up so the plan is really simple.
I'm going to take one of the
other pictures that's got smoke in,
take the smoke from that
and fill in the gap.
To do that I'm actually going to take the
very next shot
because the smoke changed that quickly
and all I need to do is just get my selection tool,
drag down a rectangular marquee selection
like that and then I can go up to edit
and copy. I'll go back to the other picture
choose edit and paste
and that pastes it in
and I can get the move tool
and move it around
but it doesn't really work
because it's back to front.
The smoke is reversed
so I need to flip this whole image over
or at least the the bit I've just pasted
and to do that I go to edit,
transform, flip horizontal.
Now the positioning of this makes sense
because I've got these lights here
like them to be in the same place
and to make sure that they actually
do make sense, I just drop the opacity down,
I can see I've got one light
and two lights
and if I sort of bullseye them together
something like that,
that looks pretty good
and then I can bring the opacity back up again.
Now there's a fairly obvious join going through here,
so my last job is to remove that.
I can do it really easily
because we've got this on layers.
I can go back to layer.
This time I'm going to choose layer mask
and I'm going to choose a reveal all,
that will put this white rectangle next to my layer,
that's the layer mask
and all I need to do is get a paintbrush
make sure that my foreground color
is the opposite of white which is black
and then just paint down there.
There you go.
Look at that. It hides the join really quickly,
yes I can still see a little bits to the background
but I'm absolutely happy with that
and with a bit more finessing,
there it is there's my final picture completed.
So despite its appearances
this mini music venue
actually turned out really well,
mostly thanks to the smoke machine,
now if you've enjoyed this video
don't forget to leave me a comment below
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I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching.