In this video, I show you how you can balance flash,
and low levels of ambient light, in the second part of the Red Riding Hood themed shoot.
Adorama TV presents,
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching Adorama TV, brought to you by Adorama,
the camera store that has everything for us photographer's. And today well,
you can see I'm not actually in my little studio. We're out in the woods,
because we're gonna do
a Red Riding Hood themed shoot, but outdoors.
Now to do this of course I need a model, so let me introduce you to Fern,
say hello Fern. Fern has joined me again, very brave,
in this lovely warm, it's lovely out here isn't it? The UK is always lovely and sunny!
We're going to a do a little shoot out here, we're going to mix a bit of flash as well so,
it's gonna be an extension of our previous studio shoot. So with that in mind,
let's get going.
So for the first set up, we're gonna do something fairly straightforward. A nice kind of head and
shoulder shot out here,
and I've got some flash gear that i'm gonna use. But let's start without flashing, just
to see what we get.
Now the lighting today can best be described as, flat,
but let's take a shot. Now I'm going to use my Canon 70-200 millimeter f2.8 lens,
gorgeous lens for portraits, and gives some lovely creamy blurry backgrounds,
especially when you shoot wide-open f2.8. Now I've got to watch my shutter speed here,
I've got nothing other than the camera and the lens, no extra lighting,
and at a hundred ISO, my shutter speed is very, very slow,
even wide-open at f2.8. So let's really bump up that ISO setting
we can go up to 400 ISO keep my shutter speed up,
and my pictures sharper.
So they work pretty well,l but they are very flat, and lack a little bit of drama,
and that's where lighting can come in. We can add our own lighting into this scene
to create our own, rather more dramatic image.
So, for the lighting I'm going to use the the Rove Light 600.
This is a studio powered flash, I mean it's a
a very powerful flash but the best bit about it, is that it's battery-powered,
so there's no cables, there's nothing here that to is gonna cause me to have
any problems
even shooting in the woods. We just need to get this in the right position,
and of course I need the little remote control to go on top of the camera,
to trigger the Rove Light.
Ok, so let's work out what we need to do for exposure.
Now I'm gonna start by taking an ambient meter reading,
so I'm in aperture priority mode, I am in my chosen
aperture f2.8, and I'm gonna drop down to
ISO a hundred, that's where I want to be. Now if I take my ambient
meter reading from here, my camera is telling me, wow,
it's telling me a tenth of a second, that's how dark it is down here, it is the
middle of the afternoon, is crazy dark.
But we can work with that, so that's a tenth of a second.
Now I'm actually gonna switch to manual, I'm gonna deliberately
underexpose the ambient light. So
tenth of a second f2.8. ISO a 100, is the correct exposure,
I'm going to go for a thirtieth a second. That's a stop and a bit underexposed,
let's just take a shot without the flash firing so you can see how that looks.
As you can see,it's a little under exposed, but we still have detail in the background
Now, we're gonna add in the flash, but we need to work out how bright to make that flash.
Remember my target aperture is f2.8.
So let's turn the flash meter on. So all I'm going to do it pop the meter
underneath Fern's chain or thereabouts, and we'll take a meter reading.
At the moment that's telling me f5.6,
that's one way too bright. I just need to turn this down,
two stops at six clicks,
and then I can take another meter reading,
and that's telling me f2.8 so I've hit my target aperture
for my flash, my flash is producing f2.8 of light,
its gonna balance with the ambient, and hopefully that'll just fill in the shadows.
and give it a shot I'm after. Ok let's take the shot and find out.
Ok Fern, here we go!
So, that's lovely.
Can you bring your hood up over your head for me.
Ok, so there we go we've got some great shots,
and that shows you that by balancing the ambient light and the flash
you can get some great shots that give you the best to both,
but give you ultimate control over the end result. Ok so let's try something
different let's move on, try another location.
We've moved to another location, we've got very different lighting here than
inside of the words. I'm gonna do a very slightly different way of working
because the lighting here is bright enough, that I might find that my shutter speed
goes to my maximum sync speed of this camera,
which is one two hundredth of a second. So I'm gonna jump into
TV or shutter priority mode here on my Canon.
My six speed is two hundredth of a second, but I always was work a little below that, so
1/160 of a second. I'm going to take a meter reading
and let the camera tell me what aperture I can work at.
My camera is tellingl me f2.8. Now 160th,
ISO 100 f2.8 would give me a perfect exposure on the background,
I wanna slightly under expose so I'm gonna shoot to F4 instead.
Ok so switch to manual,
1 -160th of second,
F4, ISO 100, that's locked in. Now what I need to do
to get the flash to flash at F4,
so Fern becomes correctly exposed and my background is slightly underexposed.
I'll come and take a test reading pointing the meter reading back at the flash.
Ok I'm actually on F5, so we can just drop that down just a little bit,
to f4, so my flash is producing exactly the right amount of light,
and I should get the shot that I'm after.
So we've moved around and I'm going to do a different shot. Now we're gonna do a wide shot.
So I've switched out to my 24-105mm lens,
and I've changed the position the light, we've now got it going much higher in the air,
a very different lighting look. I need to take an ambient meter reading first of all,
so I'm gonna go to the wide angle end of my lens to try and get a
nice ambient feeling and I'm gonna choose, we might have to go up a bit on the ISO,
let's have a little go here. ISO 100 at the moment, f4,
and that gives me an ambient reading. It's still about a tenth of a second, so it's
it's not as bad as it looks.
So a tenth of a second is my ambient and the switch to manual
and if I had a tenth of a second f4, well that would be
correctly exposed, and all of this would be correctly and nice and bright.
But to make it a little bit more night-timey, I'm going to go from a tenth of a second
to a twentieth of a second, that's one stop. A twentieth of a second,
and from a fortieth of a second, thats two stops,
and from a fortieth, well we're going to go to a sixtieth.
So that's two-and-a-half stops underexposed ambient light.
So my target aperture is f4,
just pop the little trigger back on. We need to make sure the flash
produces f4 light that hits Fern.
Let's just get the flash meter, we'll take a meter reading,
pop it underneath the chin,
and its current enemy f5.6. So that's a stop of light too much,
we can just drop it down one stop.
Take a meter reading and I'm getting f4.
In theory all I have to do is press the button, that's the easy bit.
Ok, let's take some shots and find out. Are you ready?
I've got to think about the background when taking these shots,
try get once shots, nice background
So there you go, by combining the
ambient light, the flash, changing your lens and changing your opposition,
you can create a whole raft of different pictures. Now what I need to do to get my
favourite picture into Photoshop,
and do a little better processing, and we're going to do that right now.
Don't forget to check out Adorama's latest contest!
and your chance to win amazing prizes!
It's great to be back in the warm. It was freezing out there, and everybody who worked
on that shoot did a brilliant job to disguise that fact.
One thing I can't disguise however is the lighting
on their shots, and I worked hard try get the lighting how I wanted it.
Nonetheless there's always a little bit of room for improvement inside of Photoshop, so let's see why we can do.
So this is the shot from the very last set up we did,
and although it's fine, I got the exposure the way I want it,
I'd like just a little bit more light around by Fern's feet.
Now to do it I'm going to use one of the features here inside a camera raw,
is called the radial filter. Now the radial filter I can apply all sorts of
things, let's just change the exposure for now
and I'm gonna add 1 and 1/2 stops of exposure I just drag out,
a little circle like so. I can move that around,
and I can pop it anywhere I want. It's worth noting that I got my circle set so
it's on the inside setting otherwise it would have the opposite effect.
I reckon we can go a little bit brighter than that, maybe up to about two stops.
If I go too bright it starts to affect Fern's dress, we lose detail there. So
I might need to balance up the exposure, and the highlights, just to bring some of that back as well
Ok, I'm happy with that is click the OK button.
That gives me that little splash of light around by her feet
if I had a second light I might've been able to add that in a lot easier in camera.
But one thing that would've been very hard to add would be some
rays of light because I want to show that the light is coming in from the side,
and if we'd have had a
a smoke machine we might have been able to do that. We didn't,
so we couldn't, so I'm gonna do it in Photoshop.
Now to do it first of all, I'm gonna make a brand-new empty layer, so let's go up to
Layer, New,
and layer. Now my rays of light are
gonna be a paintbrush, and the brush I'm going to use I'm actually needing to
Download first of all
and fortunately I know exactly where is, because it's on my website.
So it's a free paintbrush, if you go to my website 'Gavtrain.com'
search for ray of light brushes you can download them for free
and then we need to do is go back to Photoshop, unzip
the paint brushes, here they are unzipped, and I'll install them into Photoshop
by dragging them and dropping them, not on the picture
but on the the bar along the top where I've got all of the titles,
there, and thats installed the paint brushes,
so what I have to do now is go and choose one. Let's go find a brush from here,
and we'll go down to the bottom and you'll find that they're hidden away here,
just extend that down. I'm gonna go with this one right there.
So with one click on the brush in the middle of the frame it
adds in a ray of light, but of course I don't really want it there.
I need to move it around slightly this is why we put it on its own separate
layer because now good I can go to edit, free transform, spin this around
and reposition it, and resize it, and reshape it
exactly how I want it like that. And not only that but I can also go to the
opacity for that layer
and change it from 100% and we'll just bring it down to around about 20 ish
there about 20, 25 there you go, close enough, that will do for me,
and that just adds a hint of rays of light coming in
without overpowering the whole scene.
There you go, that's my final picture completed. Now if you've enjoyed this video and
you want to see more videos from myself and the other amazing presenters
here at Adorama TV, you know what you got to do. You click on the, it's this side,
the subscribe button right there! I'm Gavin Hoey
thanks for watching!
Do you want great-looking prints at
low-cost? Be sure to visit our easy to use online printing service.
Adorama Pix has professionals who treat your images
with the utmost care that you can count on. For a quick turnaround on photos,
cards, or albums use Adoramapix.com