Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV. I'm Mark Wallace in Cairns,
Australia. I'm in a really awesome little
apartment and I'm here because well
there's a cyclone just outside and it is
raining, raining, raining, so I'm stuck
inside but I know that's true of a lot
of people right now because it's almost
summer but not quite yet.
That's okay because there's all kinds of
things that we can do inside and so
today what I'm going to do is I'm going
to create a self-portrait, something that
I can use for a profile image or maybe
self-promotion from a ride around the
world and I'm going to pull a Gavin Hoey
where I have some props to make some
kind of energy in this image.
So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to use two
tools to do this.
I'm going to use the
inverse square law and chiaroscuro.
Now the inverse square law
is something I've covered quite a bit
in past episodes of Exploring Photography
so if you're not sure what the inverse square law
is I've included the links to those videos
in the description of this video so watch
those because it's really magical once
you learn about this stuff. The other
thing chiaroscuro, oh well that's an
Italian term that was sort of introduced
during the Italian Renaissance
and it means light/dark.
It's when you have a really light area
and an image that is almost completely black.
chiaroscuro: light, dark.
You can see this in old
pictures by Vemeer and you can see
them like for the Mona Lisa,
got a really bright area surrounded
by a really dark area.
So we're going to do
that using the inverse square law
and we're going to use an artificial light
source, so you can do this with a speedlight.
I'm going to be using a Profoto B2
so it doesn't really matter what you
use but you will need a softbox
and a grid. So we're going to set up this
apartment and then we're going to show you
all of the things that I've used to set
this up and we're going to get going, so
let's do that right now.
Now that the room is set up,
let me show you how I have the light
set up and then we'll get
to the camera here in a second.
We want to control this light because we want
that light, dark, chiaroscuro look
and so what we've done here
is this light is at a weird angle.
It's almost at a 90 degree angle to our
camera. We've done that on purpose
because we want to make sure that we
control everything now just as a note
this is a Profoto B2,
that's what is powering this head right
here in this small softbox.
It doesn't really matter you can use
a speed light
or whatever but I'm using a Profoto B2
and I've got this nice two-foot octa box
here and a grid on the front of this.
iI's going to really control the light.
Notice though how close this light
is to this chair. I'm going to be sitting right
here in this chair about right here
with this helmet on, so it's really, really
close. That's about, I don't know less
than a foot. We're doing that because
of the inverse square law
which says that when a light is really close
the lights going to be exposed properly
here but then it's going to fall off
really rapidly so everything else
is going to be dark.
So we have chiaroscuro, light, dark,
we're also putting this at a 90 degree angle
to the camera because we don't want to light up
the back. So back here we have this wall
back here that's white,
so we don't want to light that up
so that's why the light
is facing this way.
The inverse square law
is going to take care of most of this.
This isn't going to fall completely
into darkness but it'll be dark enough
that we can clean it up
in post-production.
So that's all fine.
Now what we need to do
is make sure that our camera
isn't capturing any ambient light.
We want to make sure that the only thing
that the light sees is the light from
the flash, so to do that
I set my camera to F/11,
1/180th of a second
and ISO 100,
so we need to make sure that the flash
matches that so I'm going to do is turn on my meter
here and then once that's on,
I just meter to the light.
Normally I'd meter to the camera
but I just want a meter for the
highlights. So I'm metering to the light
in this instance so I'll hold up my light meter,
I will take that reading that meters
right at F/11
because I set it in advance,
so normally you might have to do some
adjustments but this is meters at F/11,
let's talk really quickly about the
camera itself. So the camera I'm shooting
with my Leica M10 and what I've done
here is I've set this to aperture value
of F/11 I've set this to ISO 100
but I'm manually focusing,
so let me show you how to manually focus this.
So what I've done here,
I'm going to put this on top of my camera
so it will trigger the flash,
is I've used Live View
and Live View allows me to look
and I've got this thing called Peaking
your camera probably has it as well
but when I focus my camera,
the thing that's in focus
is going to show up all red,
so I want to make sure that the entire chair
is showing up red and it does
and that means that the entire chair
is going to be in focus
and because I'm going to be
sitting in the chair
that means I'm going to be in focus.
The other thing I want to do is change my drive mode
so that it is on a self timer of 12 seconds,
so I have that set up.
Now when I push the shutter release on my camera.
I have 12 seconds to run over,
sit in the chair, strike a pose.
The flash will fire,
I'll do my self-portrait
and then we can look in post-production
and clean everything up.
So everything is set,
let me put on my riding gear
and let's get started.
I am suited up and now I'm going to
start by pushing my shutter.
I have 12 seconds,
and strike a pose.
I'm going to look into the light,
cross my arms, look macho
and I wait for it,
boom and there we go.
So let's look into the camera
and make sure everything is right.
We'll do a few more
and then we'll have the post-production.
I'm already in the develope module
of Lightroom and this is the image
that is the winner from the images that I shot.
Now to save time I've already made some
very basic tonality adjustments.
I’ve de-saturated, increased the clarity,
change the blacks and the shadows,
just a hair but that's about all
I've done. Now this is a good start
but we have some image issues.
We have me centered.
We don't want that.
The left hand side of the image
still has some light spill
so we also need to fix that
and I want to add a little bit more
punch to the image.
Let's start by fixing the light spill
on the left hand side of the image.
We can do that by grabbing
an adjustment brush
and I'll set the exposure here to negative 4
and I've got a nice big brush,
I can just brush out
the left-hand side of this image
and clean that up very, very quickly.
Now we've got this perfect chiaroscuro
look; an absolutely black background
with me highlighted dead center.
I don't want to be dead center.
I want this to be more
of a 16 X 9 cinematic look
that you know, I love and add some more
negative space on the right
and get rid of some of this on the left.
Now to do
that we're going to be changing pixels
and so to do that,
I need to hop over into Photoshop
so I will right-click say edit in Photoshop CC 2018
and now my image is going to open in the Photoshop
application.Now that we're in Photoshop
I just need to do a couple of things.
The first thing I need to do
is take the background that's my image here,
I'm going to double click on it
to change that into a normal layer.
I'm going to change the name of the layer to Mark
that's me and then I'm going to add
another layer and I'm going to name that
one background,
alright and then I'm going to drag
background underneath Mark,
so now we have our layers set up.
The next thing I want to do
is grab my crop tool.
So I'll grab that and I want to set
this to a 16 X 9 aspect ratio,
so we just do this right up here at the top
16 X 9 and then what I will do
I will drag me over to the left
and then I will increase the size
of this so it matches the image,
oops, matches the image,
like that,
okay so now
we have me on the left-hand side,
lots of negative space on the right.
Maybe I'll just drag that something like that
and I will accept that.
Chunk, now what we have
is this negative space on the right
but it's got nothing in it,
that's why we created this background layer
so all I need to do
is make sure that my colors
are set to the default
so I can do that by hitting the D key
and then I need to make sure that black
is the background color,
I'll do that by hitting the X key
and then I can say command delete
to fill the background with black.
Command, delete to do that.
Now I've got me on the left hand side,
I have filled this in
with black it is wonderful,
so all that's left for me to do now
is to save this so
I'll hit Command S to save
and that is going to save this back
into Lightroom where we have one more thing to do.
Alright now back in Lightroom you can see
this is the Photoshop edited image.
So we'll double click that,
so now we're
back into full-screen view.
Then I'll right click and I want to edit this one
more time but this time I want to edit
this in Analog Effects Pro 2 because
it has a nice finishing look.
So I'm going to choose my default
menu options here.
My default file settings
and things like that
and click Edit Analog Effects
Pro 2 is going to pop up.
I'll make sure this is full screen
and once this loads
in there's just one small thing
I need to do.
Now I have created all kinds of
presets so I have one called Arai Selfie,
I'll click on that.
It's a very, very simple preset
that I created specifically for this image
and all it's done is,
I've used the basic adjustments
to do some detail extraction,
change the contrast just a bit, a little bit
and desaturate this.That's it, that's all
I've done, but I like the finishing look
of this image. You can see it really sort
of gives me that motorcycle grungy look.
So I'll click Save and that image will
show back up in Lightroom.
Now we will go to the develop module
in Lightroom and we're doing this so it's non-destructive
and there's one more thing I want to do.
I don't like my hands in this image.
We don't have a nice enough crop,
on my eyes, in my face,
we need to get in much closer,
so I'm going to get the crop tool by
hitting R, R is still at the original
which is 16 X 9
but just to prove it
I'll choose 16 X 9
and then I'm just going to bring this
into about right there,
so it's a much tighter crop much,
much tighter. I like that better.
There we go just like that
that's good, I'll hit the enter key
to accept. I've got this little highlight
right there that I don't like,
so once again the adjustment tool
it's already at negative 4,
make this much smaller
just to get rid of these highlights
up here on the top
and now just like that
our image is done.
Thanks for joining me for this episode
of Exploring Photography.
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photography tips into everyday use.
Thanks again
and I will see you again
next time.