Okay this might be tough to believe,
but this before image, as well as the final
shot were captured with the exact same
natural light, the same in camera
settings, and they were processed
identically in lightroom.
The only differences were the pose,
direction and timing.
These are all things that we're
gonna analyze in this video, so stick around,
my name is Pye, and I'm one of the
founders of Lin and Jirsa Photography,
and SLRlounge.com
We're teaming up with Adorama to bring
you a new series of photography tutorials
called Master Your Craft, right here on
AdoramaTV.
So let's dive in, so we're inside of
Lightroom, and before we dive
into working through this sequence, let
me just first gain your trust a little
bit and show you that I was not joshing you.
I like that term, my dad uses that
term, so I'm gonna go ahead and go into
Loupe View by pressing E and press I to
bring up my information, where you're
gonna see that from the before shot to
this after shot, okay, none of the camera
settings had changed 1/8000th of a
second f/1.4, ISO 50.
These were all shot on a Canon 5D Mark
IV, using a 24 mm Sigma Art Prime Lens,
so nothing changed there, now you're
probably like well but Pye,
you probably adjusted the exposure
settings and did all sorts of stuff in post,
no, let me show you.
So i actually process this image using
Visual Flows Modern HDR
Natural preset, and then i just applied
it to this image, so what you're seeing
is actually the exact same exposure, the
exact same settings, the exact same tone
curve, same HSL.
I'm not joshing, they're the same exact
shot but we're gonna work through and
analyze exactly what makes
these two images so different.
We're gonna talk about the process of capture,
the, the beautiful part about this is
that honestly, you could capture this
image, or any image like it, with any
camera that you want to, and the same
posing and directing and understanding
of the scene is gonna apply to anything
you're shooting, regardless of what that
might be, so there's a lot of tips here,
and I hope all of you guys stick around,
and let's dive into the first piece,
which is kind of walking up to the scene,
and why did we choose
this first shot, why is this our
composition.
So that brings us to the C.A.M.P Framework,
to the C piece of that
framework right we always talk about
camp the first step - Composition.
I honestly believe to do this right you
really need to put the camera down, okay,
put the camera down, walk the scene,
scout it understand the scene and what I want
you to do is to begin by identifying
your light sources, and then potentially
thinking about the angles and how you
can shoot the image.
As we walked this scene,
I'm gonna go ahead and bring up my
red pen, just so I can paint a little bit.
I'm gonna first start with just
identifying our primary light source,
right, so let's go light source 'Primary',
we're gonna label it one, it's the sun
that's coming from the top left of the
frame, and it's kind of creating this
highlight along all of the water, and
that's the rim light that we get across
their body, that edge light, and
everything.. that's that,
but we're also obviously have some light filling in the
shadows right, so where is that light
coming from? Well probably our second
light here is gonna be the sky,
that's a weird shape too, should we
try that again nope...
that's not any better, let's try that one
work with but...
oh there we go,
our number Z.
Okay so number Z says that
our next light source is coming from
basically the sky, so the sky, that blue
light is also gonna fill light into our
scene, into the shadow areas of our image,
and we can see a lot of that like in the
reflections, we can see some of those
blue tones.
If we go close on the skin,
but really we have another big helper in
the scene, and a big piece of why they're
posed where they are.
If you look at the behind the scenes video,
our third light source is actually coming
from this wall, and the wall that I'm
actually standing on is a giant earth tone
wall, that's just catching sunlight,
and filling that kind of tan brown light
back into their skin.
It's beautiful because it already
gives me like a nice golden glow to the
skin, and and it really kind of works
nicely with skin tone.
So I have them placed close to this
because that's my big giant fill light,
so that's the third light in the scene,
but what's gonna happen depending on my
timing, and I want you guys to be
prepared for this, is whenever water
comes into a scene, it becomes another
light source.
You can make it your fourth
light source, whatever it's gonna be,
but if we look at the actual settings
between these two images, again the
exposure settings, everything is
identical right, exposure is identical,
everything is identical between these
two shots, but we gain about an extra
stop of light from the water itself, as
the water comes in, it catches all three
light sources, and reflects more of it
back up into our subjects faces, so all
our job becomes as photographers at this
point when we have, you know, this kind of
thing working with us, and the same thing
happens with snow with water,
with anything, it's gonna reflect all of those
existing light sources back up and into
your shot right, but that's that
significant bump and brightness that we
see okay, so that's the light in our
scene, and those are the kind of
differences that are are there.
Why do we choose this angle?
Well, I really like this angle,
as I'm standing up here,
because it lets me see the depth in this
scene, right?
If I didn't stand up onto this, these tide
pools that are over here in the back side,
they would have kind of
been lost in the frame right?
If I got down lower, we wouldn't have seen the
depth of the shot.
So we're choosing to put them down in
the kind of the middle of the frame,
and leave this space to
kind of show splashes, to show water, to
show depth in the scene, this is an epic
shot in Laguna Beach, Okay.
So that's the the composition, so now we
place our subjects and we go to the next step....
which is gonna be our ambient light,
so we need to dial in the ambient light
exposure, which I want to set something
to maximize our overall dynamic range,
and the other thing is, since I'm
shooting wide and since I have quite a
busy scene, if I can I'd love to shoot at
a wider aperture, so I'm setting this to
f/1.4, I'm gonna do a separate video
because we've gotten a lot of questions
on how do you shoot wide open, but still
get sharp images?
Well you'll notice that they're they're still
completely sharp in this set of images,
even though we're wide open at f/1.4,
we'll talk about that in another video,
because I think there's some good tips
that we get you guys, but compositionally I want
that, because on a wide-angle lens, I'm
not gonna see that much depth anyway.
I do want a little bit of separation from
the background, and if I can use a wider
aperture that'll help me out there, so
with those two steps in I'm looking now
to kind of modify light if I need to right,
and then I'm gonna pose my subjects.
Those are steps three and four,
what you're gonna see here though is
kind of when we're using natural light,
we're gonna use the pose to play into
the modification of light, because
between this shot and the last one, in
fact if I get these, I think I adjust my
ISO up to 100 in this one, because my
exposure was a little bit dark on this
one, so I adjusted up to 100 ISO here, if
you look at these two images though, even
when I adjust the brightness of this
image up, to kind of match, the only
difference here is, just the overall pose.
That's it and what we're doing is, we're
using this pose to play into essentially
how we're modifying the light, so I love using
natural light, I love even hard light but
we have to make sure that we pose our
subjects to play into it.
So let's talk about how that's actually
working here, I have him taking a small
step backwards, so they're going into a
stack pose, and you guys can check out
our foundation posing series as well as
our complete posing course, we have the
foundation posing crash course on
AdoramaTV, we have the complete posing
workshops, everything inside of
SLRloungeworkshops.com
but you'll notice that
he's a step back in a stack pose, they're
holding hands right here, and she's
looking down and toward this side, well
we talked about that main light source
coming from here, so what that does is by
him taking a step back, he no longer
casts a shadow onto her, and now we get
that high light edge going from the top
of her head, all the way down her dress.
Right so we now create that bit of
definition on that side, she's looking
down towards the side and with that chin
direction, we have this beautiful
Rembrandt light that's landing right
there on the skin, right here, right.
Beautiful shadows and light direction,
he's looking towards her, so we have a
rim light and then the face is in shadow
on his side,
that's okay in my opinion, in my opinion
like, it makes sense for when you have a
masculine subject, it makes sense to put
their face in shadow, because having
shadows with that kind of lens into the
masculinity of a shot, so it works well
with you know a guy like this, in this
situation to have his face in the shadow,
as he's looking towards her.
She's looking down towards this side, the next
thing that you're gonna notice probably
is the hips, so when going back to this
shot right here, she's standing
flat-footed here.
I've had her adjust and we're bringing her
knee across the body,
just like this, and what that does by
pushing the knee in, we create a natural
taper point on the dress where it widens
out at the hips, and it tapers in at the
bottom and we create the hourglass shape,
and we're bringing the hand up naturally
to kind of go through the hair, just to
kind of create a bit of motion or kind
of an in-the-moment type look to the shot.
We're also allowing the hand to go
up, so that we can show the, the form on
the dress right, because if the hands are
at the sides, we can't see the the shape
of the hips right, so one hand is holding
his, one hand is up, that way we can
reveal the hips and show the form of the
dress, and and show off her figure, okay,
there's another important thing that's
happening here which is in terms of eye
lines and connections, so you'll notice
that his eyes are going down to hers,
then what are her eyes doing, her eyes
are going down to the hands, and what are
the hands doing, the hands are linking up
and sending you right back up to the top
of the frame, so there's a little pattern
here that will actually keep a viewer
kind of looped in,
you kind of look down toward the hand,
the hand comes back up,
you go to his eyes, and you kind of
stay here in focus in the center of the image.
There's a nice little trick that
we can kind of use to help keep the
viewer fixated on what's going on in the
image, but that adjustment is what makes
such a substantial difference in the way
that these two images look, and then once
they're positioned all, what we're gonna do is
cue up an expression right, so from that
position we might say a joke, we might
say something, and we might elicit the
expression that works perfectly for the
the image, perfect, I love this shot,
that's a keeper in and of itself, but the
last and final step is timing, and we
talked about when those waves come in,
what's gonna happen right?
So we have them position this tide pool in an area
that's completely safe.
The wave is not gonna land anywhere
around them but it is gonna wash in over
their feet.
So the last thing that we're doing is once we
have everything kind of timed, we just
wait for the wave to come in, and then we
shoot the exact same shots, and we might
say okay, look at each other, switch up
the pose a little bit, we might kind of
work off of that as soon as the water
comes in, but that's it, once the water
comes in, we grab our final image, make
sure that when the water is in your shot
your exposure at that point is not blown
out, so you'll actually notice that I end
up going up to ISO 100 for this image,
and then actually once the water was
washing in, I dropped it back down to ISO 50,
and that was because if you look at
the raw file for this, you're gonna see
that in this first shot with the ISO up
to 100, we've maximized out the
histogram, our highlights are pushed right up to
the right edge, our shadows are right
there, they're mostly intact, and when we
look at this shot it's the exact same, so
we had a full stop of difference when
that light came washing in, that if we
left our exposure bright, we would have
actually ended up with this shot right
here where we would have actually blown
out some of our highlights in them, in
the highlight area of the image,
okay so, just make sure that if the final
intention is to shoot the final image
with that water in, make sure you're
exposed reading is on that point, and
that's it, now I mentioned that all we
did to get to the final image was apply
visual flow HDR natural right.
I wasn't lying, watch this,
I'm just gonna take a white
balance read, okay it gets us somewhere
close, click HDR natural,
adjust a little bit of my contrast exposure,
maybe bring the white balance up a little
bit that's it.
I might add without a vignette, or just
do a subtle vignette, that's all we did
to get to our final okay, and of course
correct your horizon lines.
So we're done now you guys,
can take these techniques and apply it to
whatever you're shooting.
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I'll see you guys in the next video.
Peace.