Hi everybody welcome to this episode of
Exploring Photography right here on
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Well you probably recognize this studio
you've seen here on AdoramaTV before,
it's Gavin Hoey's studio and Gavin is
joining me today come on out Gavin.
Gavin has volunteered to be my model, and so I
thought well... I want to do a portrait of
Gavin and his studio in the style of
Gavin Hoey! And so to do that I'm going
to take a bunch of simple lighting
principles, add them together, and get
something that is I don't know in the
style of Gavin and something that will sort
of honor your teaching, and so we're
going to try that, and so to start what
we're going to do is I'm just going to
take a very simple portrait of Gavin.
Now here's what I want to do, I want to get
something that is nice and tight, just
your head maybe your shoulders, and I
want to make sure that this background
back here falls completely into darkness,
now to do that we're going to use a soft box
with a grid, we're going to put it really close
to Gavin, we're going to have light that
falls off rapidly, that's the
inverse-square law and then we're going to
start shaping things from there so let's
start with that,
alright, so we've got this - this is my
flashpoint speed light, it's a 360, and
someone has set this right about here,
again this is nothing that's really
complicated, I've got a speed light, and
it's just headed right toward Gavin, I'm going to
meter this, I wanted to shoot this is
about f8 I'm shooting with a 50mm
lens at ISO 200 so f8 is
going to give us nice depth of field on
Gavin, the background will fall out of
focus, ok so here we go,
when I meter this, and this meters at... bam..
this meters at nine so take a half step back
just a little bit .. there we go we are at f/8 so we
were just right on the edge there and
now I'm going to take a just a test shot
and here we go Gavin look right at me..
perfect that is exactly what I want.
Alright so we got that, and it looks
exactly as we would expect it's Gavin
sort of in a sea of darkness, so I'm going to show
Gavin what he looks like here. I like
that expression!
It's exactly what I'm looking for but
it's lifeless, there's just not much to
this portrait, we need to start adding
some flavor, so the second thing I want
to do is add a vignette of light around
Gavin. Now I instead of lighting the back
of Gavin's head I'm actually going to
light this dark background here, and so I
have a Profoto B2, I'm going to
turn this guy on, I'm gonna put it right
behind Gavin and so what this is doing
is it's going to light at the background
the light, and the light stand is going
to be hidden by Gavin himself, so Gavin
stand there and then I need to line this
up, so I'm just going to take a look
through my camera, and I can see that
Gavin's there, now I don't need that light on the
back at all yet, I'm going to sort of
eyeball this, looks pretty good, that shot
I need to let elevate this light, just a
tiny, tiny, bit. I'm going to do that again
I'm just eyeballing this, so okay, now we
have that all set I think the power is
about right, I just sort of got lucky
with that.. we're going to take it!
Alright so Gavin look right at me.
We're going to take a couple shots and
then we're going to do one extra thing here
Perfect! I like that one more make sure you
didn't blink. Ok, so that looks ok but
one of the things that we can do is this
background here it's got some gray, but
hidden inside that gray is some blue, so
I'm going to force the color temperature
from 50 to 100 Kelvin which is
balance for the flash down to 3600
Kelvin, that's going to make that
much more bluish back there, but it's
going to make Gavin's face look a
little bit wonky.. we'll fix that in post
and I'll show you how to do that.
Right now that we have that, well I think we
need to take it to the next level, and
that next level is we need some props.
And so Gavin I'm going to click my
fingers, and when I do I want you to come
back here wearing something that is the
style of Gavin Hoey.. here we go,
and just like that Gavin is wearing a
bomber jacket some crazy goggles, and I
don't know where you got that, that hat,
but it looks awesome!
So what we're going to do now, is I'm going
to take a couple pictures of Gavin, and
then we're going to dump those into
Lightroom, we are going to play around, but let's just
get the shot first!
So everything's the same, we have the
soft box up, we've got our
nice light on the background, we've got our
color temperature shifted, and so here we
go, we're going to just, yeah, there you go
perfect, just going to shoot this - and then we're going
to go to the next step
Alright Gavin that was awesome.
Now the key to this, and this is
something I've learned from Gavin is
that for something like this to work you
need expressions and emotions and all
that kind of stuff, and then once that's
done for this to work I need to throw
this into lightroom, and do some playing
around, and add some texture and fix some
things. So we're going to do that
right now! I'm in lightroom, and I'm
looking at one of the images that I shot
with Gavin it was a lot of fun but you
can see right out of the camera with the
normal color this just isn't as lively
as I wanted to be. We need some Gavin
Hoey style post-production to bring this
to life, and so what I've done here is
this is a virtual copy of an image that I've
have already done some tonality changes
to, so let's take a look at that, I've
cropped this to a 16 x 9.
The other thing that I did, is I changed
the colour temperature, so I didn't go all
the way down to 3,600 like we talked
about earlier, but I did take this
down to 3,942 which is enough for me to
get this nice blue background. But it's
also enough to make Gavin look like
he's in lack in really high need of some
oxygen, his lips are a weird colour, he
needs some adjustments, so to do that I'm
going to go down here to the hue panel
and then I'm going to just take the
magenta slider, and you can see if I
slide this to the left his face gets
really purple, he needs to breathe, and if I
go to the right and see well, now
we're bringing the color back to his
skin and it looks ok. So I'm just playing
with the magenta slider here. I'm also
going to take the purple slider here, I'm
going to take that up to about the
80's, so I figured this out by
playing with this just a little bit, you
can also use this little dot here, when
you click on this you can drag it over
to the image, and then you can click and
drag on the image, and it will tell you
which colors are changing, and so that's
how I figured out this is a magenta and purple.
The other thing I want to do is, I want
to just change the saturation of the
magenta and purple as well, so I'm going
to take the saturation down, just a
little bit here,
take the purple saturation
down quite a bit, so around 90 something
like that...
OK, so now we've got our basic
tonality all set, but it's still a
little bit lifeless! So what I need to do
here is I'm going to use Nick Analog
Effects Pro 2. It's a free plug-in so I
can click Edit in Analog Effects Pro 2
this is going to give us some texture, it;s
going to give us some punch, it's going to
give us a lot of fun, and the nice thing
is a analog effects pro 2 is free so you
can download it and install it and it's
really easy to use. You really don't have
to know anything about it to make it
work, so it's going to load the image
straight from Lightroom, into Analog
Effects Pro, and then right out of the
gate here, I've got these cameras, and I
can just start clicking on them, without
even knowing what I'm doing, and getting
some really interesting looks, so what
I've done is I've played in Analog
Effects Pro here, and I've created a
preset called the Gav Max, because I want
to apply this to all the images that I
retouch, and so this is my texture and
my tonality and all my punch, and you can see
right out of the gate.
This looks pretty good, so I'm going to
save this. It's going to save all my
changes and bring that back into
Lightroom as a new tif image that I can
then do some more work on, because this
image does need a little bit more work!
Ok, here's our image now, what we need to
do if you've learned anything from Gavin
is that we need a focal point in our
image and right now Gavin's hands are
competing for our attention because they
are brighter than his face and so all we
need to do here is go to a local
adjustment brush. I'm going to
double-click effect, so that reset
everything that I'm going to take my
highlights down to about negative 35 / 36
something like that.
I've got a nice soft brush and I'm just going to
paint onto Gavin's hands here, and that
just takes the highlights down, so now
his hands, they look natural, but they are
not competing for the focal point of
this image, but his face needs some
retouching as well, so what I'll do here,
Is I'm going to get a new brush,
double-click effect to take that back to
nothing. I'm going to take the exposure of
this brush up by about a stop maybe a
little bit
more, and then I'm just going to get a
nice big soft brush and paint on Gavin face.
Now there we go his face is brighter
than his hands, but his forehead is too
bright, so I'm going to get another brush
here, take the exposure down by about
half a stop, and then I'm just going to
paint right up here on top of head, and there you go.
Now we can turn these adjustment
brushes on and off, and you can see that
we've really made a nice dramatic change,
now of course this is a Gavin Hoey style
retouch, and so he did take my clarity
and take that up by about 20...
something like that, and now we've got an
image that is punchy and fun and got
some texture, and some life, and let's
take a look at our final images.
Well that's all there is to it.
Gavin thanks for teaching me some tricks to
take something that is simple, and make
it look a little bit punchy and fun, and
thanks for being a good sport about
wearing the bomber jacket and the
goggles and all that stuff, that was really fun.
Don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV
because that way you won't miss a single
episode by Gavin and all the other
people that are contributing, also check
out the Adorama Learning Center there
are tons of articles to help you
understand things like the inverse
square law and what a honey comb grid is and
all those types of things, and thanks
again and I will see you again next time!