hey guys my name is Francisco Hernandez and today I'm doing another episode of
my building the shot series in this series I basically show you guys a
step-by-step buildup of how I came to a final image that I'm gonna be
highlighting in every video. If you haven't already seen my first video in
this series I highly recommend you do so you can do so by clicking the link
that's gonna be in the top corner of the screen somewhere or checking out the
description area below the whole reason why I wanted to make this series is
because I feel like a lot of photographers out there especially new
photographers they see these photographers that they fall ill post
nothing but great work but they don't see those those mistakes so I feel like
by showing those mistakes you guys can kind of get at least inspired to
continue to shoot more because you feel like it's humanizing these photographers
so that's why I wanted to make this series obviously I can't show you the
mistakes of other photographers I can only show you my mistakes so that's why
I'm gonna make this series so you guys can see all that and you can see the
thought process that was involved and learned a little bit from that as well
if you guys are interested in seeing my tutorials early then I definitely
recommend you follow my instagram at fjh photo or follow my facebook lighting
group called learn to light an off-camera flash lighting community
because eventually I do make my youtube versions of those tutorials a little bit
later and just cuz of all the time that it makes so yeah definitely follow me on
Instagram or follow my Facebook group so you can see them early alright so let's
go ahead and get into the tutorial already I'm we talking about this image
on the screen right here of my friend and model marina that I took last year
and I think around November at the historic Pro in San Antonio this image
was getting a lot of attention on my Instagram and on my facebook so I really
wanted to make a video version of this tutorial for you guys because I feel
like the video versions of these tutorials provide a little bit more
insight than the text versions that I share on my Instagram or in my lighting
group if you're curious about the gear that I use for that shot then everything
that I use for the shot is a meet in the description area below so you guys can
check that out if you're interested alright so this is the first shot that I
took in this whole process and the first thing that I always try to let you guys
know to do before you add any sort of flash is to expose for the background so
in this shot here I thought these were the settings that I wanted and
eventually I do change them but let's say for example this is the exposure
that I wanted for the background so now that I have that exposure I can start to
add flash but of course if you guys are interested in
knowing why I chose these settings I pretty much always have my aperture wide
open because I like a shallow depth of field I try to keep my ISO at the lowest
or close to the lowest the lowest I can go on my camera is ISO 50 but I always
try to keep it at a hundred if possible because ISO 50s an artificial ISO and
some people say that the dynamic range is suffers a little bit but honestly
when I've been using ISO 50 for years and you can't really see the difference
at all so sometimes I do go to ISO 50 but if possible I'll just keep it at 100
when it comes to the shutter speed that's the main thing that I tried to
focus on adjusting that and the power of the strobe are the only two things that
I pretty much always adjust at my photo shoots in the day time in the night time
yes I will change my ISO but I'm working in the day time here so that's gonna be
at the lowest which is ISO 100 so at this point I have my aperture at F 1.4
my shutter speed at 125 hundredths and my ISO at a hundred and to give you a
little bit more insight about why I chose these settings I had originally
thought I wanted more of more ambient in the background so I can get more of a
natural look which is pretty much gonna be a lot of ambient going on in the
background and just a little bit of flash filling in the shadow that's gonna
be in front of the model so after I got the settings where I want them now I can
start to add flash which is what I do right here but of course what you guys
can see going on in the shot is that the exposure on the model is not exposed
correctly or not underexposed but it's overexposed when you experience an
overexposure like this you have a couple of things that you could do to solve
that overexposure but if you have the background set up exactly like the way
that you want it to be at the settings that you've chosen then the the best
thing that you can do is go ahead and just reduce the power of the strobe so
that you can get that even exposure on the subject and not an overexposure
which is exactly what I do in the next shot that I'm about to show you in this
shot that's overexposed I'm at half power and then I go from half power to
one-fourth power which is this exposure on the screen right now but as you guys
can see it's still a little bit too bright a lot of you guys did let me know
on Instagram that you actually did like this shot as it is and did it feel like
it was too bright but for me I personally felt like this exposure was
still attached to bright I could reduce the overall exposure to get to the level
where I do like this shot but again this isn't the
that I aim for in my head when I took the shot here I didn't necessarily just
feel that the brightness of the stroke was too bright on marina but I felt like
the shot overall was too bright in this gent I was at F 1.41 25 hundredths of a
second iso 100 with my strobe at 1/4 and this next shot that you're about to see
on the screen I go to 1/8 thousands of a second I said 100 at F 1.4 with my flash
still at 1/4 the reason why I made these adjustments is because in that last shot
that I'm gonna go ahead and throw it on the screen for you guys right now I felt
like the exposure in the background I originally I had thought it was fine but
after I took this shot on with marina with the exposure to bright with the
strobe I felt like it kind of gave me the indication that the scene was too
bright overall and I saw that in the highlights and it also saw in the
top-left corner of the screen how the exposure of the background was a
little bit too distracting you can see that Square just kind of just very
blocky in the top-left corner of the screen and almost of the best word but
that's what the the best way I can describe it it was just kind of just
taking away the tension for marina and I wanted that attention to be just on
marina because it's a portrait and that's what I always aim for so when I
took that shot I saw that the exposure was too bright on the strobe and then I
kind of saw though the highlights as well how they were too bright so that's
why I decided to just increase the shutter and make it one a thousandth of
a second which was actually a good balance between exposing for the
highlights was still getting detail in the background overall I not only
adjusted the exposure to be one eight thousand of a second but it also changed
my composition because like I mentioned just a second ago that top-left corner
of the screen of the shot was just too bright and distracting from marina so I
went ahead and just adjusted the shot to be not like this this is actually a crop
from for the Instagram tutorial too so can fit I actually took the shot in
landscape orientation and in that landscape orientation the thing that was
sticking out like a sore thumb was that umbrella in the background being very
blue and it was kind of again taking away attention from marina but that's
something that I just in a second the thing that was sticking out to me of
course in this shot here is the exposure of marina being underexposed
so again if you feel if you ever experience that under exposure or an
overexposure you have to adjust the strobes
so in this shot I'm at one-fourth power and then I adjust it from one-fourth
power to one half power which ended up in this exposure right here now when I
got to this point I felt like the flash exposure was exactly where I wanted it
to be I felt like the settings of the background were exactly wanted to be but
I felt like I need to work on my composition and also marinas pose but
also like I mentioned before something that I did kind of feel at this shot at
this point in time was that those back those umbrellas in the background we're
just a little bit too distracting in terms of color so I went ahead and just
adjusted my angle to be a lot lower which ended up in this next shot right
here in this shot right here you can't see those in brothers anymore because I
went to a lower angle and by shifting my angle I no longer saw those on umbrellas
this is something I definitely recommend you guys do in case you have to work in
a very distracting background area so if you ever wanted to kind of just remove
some stuff from the background or not necessarily remove but just kind of hide
the fact that they're there adjust your angle and then you can go ahead and get
those results that you're wanting okay and I'm gonna get a different angle just
because there's like the blue things behind you in this case I wanted those
umbrellas to be gone so I did so by you just just suggesting my ankle a few
other things that you can see going on this shot is my angle of course has
changed but you can see that in the top right corner of the screen there's the
octa box the 30 inch globe pair of pumps showing up in the shot of course you
didn't want that to be showing up in the shot and there are ways to to kind of
remove it in post but of course you don't ever want to kind of rely on
post-production for your photos so I I went ahead and took a step further back
for this shot because I wanted to add a little bit more scene but in doing so I
added that octa box on top right and of course there's that flare going on on
top left as well which I actually do really like as it is right now but as
much as I like that Ferren top left corner of the screen it was just too
distracting and I always want the attention to be on this subject and
nothing else going on in the photo but let's say for example I didn't mind that
Fair and I actually really liked it there there's still that issue of the
octa box being in the top right corner of the screen I know that many of you
guys out there are gonna say well why didn't you just move the octa box a
little bit further back and you won't have that issue of it being in the shot
anymore well there's gonna be two things going on there which is why I didn't do
that when you move the light further back you reduce the output of the light
hitting the because of the inverse-square law which
in a nutshell just means when you move the light further away it's gonna get
weaker so if it's already perfectly fine as it is in the shot here the exposures
fines on the subject then you won't want to move it for the back and if you
already kept that on full power at that level of distance where it's at right
now in the shot then when you move it further back then it's going to result
in an under exposure on the subject in terms of flash another reason why I
wouldn't want to do that is because when you move the light further away it's
gonna be less soft and I love soft light which is why I always have the the light
as close as possible with the modifier and I always tell this the the models I
work with if the light feels like it's right on top of you it's perfect just
because I like that soft light but as I mentioned earlier the light was actually
at half power here so I could actually have moved it a little bit further back
but again the light is not gonna be as soft and I'm not gonna get that nice
punch of light from having it real close so I kept it at half power and kept
everything exactly the same and only took a little bit step closer so that I
can get that get the flare out of the shot and the octa box and a shot which
ended up in this shot here one thing that you should take notice of from that
last shot to this shot is in this shot there's a lot more contrast and there's
a lot more vivid colors going on because in that last shot with all the flare
going on I'm gonna go ahead and throw it on the screen right now because all that
flare is entering the lens it's making the the vivid colors a little bit less
intense and less vivid and it's also taking away some of that contrast that I
really like in this shot right here so if you ever have a flare going on in the
shot and you're wondering why that's happening why there's less contrast and
that's favorite color it's because of that flare okay so at this point
everything is pretty much exactly where I want it to be the flash exposure is
perfectly fine exactly where how it is in the shot it's not too bright and it's
not too dark like I was previously experiencing the the umbrellas are not
no longer than shot because I just said mind an angle to be a little bit lower
and those umbrellas were taking away attention from the arena which is why I
didn't like them that flare is no longer overbearing in the shot the octave box
is no longer in the shot and at this point all those points I just made were
exactly how I wanted them to be but I just wasn't a fan of the the expression
where they her expressions were fine expressions are really nice but the pose
was something that I wanted to be a little bit justed now that I have
everything exactly where I wanted to be I want to work on that pose to be a
little bit more better when I took this shot I was really really happy because
like I mentioned before all those other things that were not exactly how I
wanted to be previously like these the octave box and the composition and the
exposure of the flash and on the background those things were not
previously how I wanted them to be but now exactly where I wanted them to be
but she had a better expression in this shot I feel and her pose was really nice
and I actually got really like lucky with how the dress was blowing because
he gave a little bit of emotion to the shot all right one two three
so everything was exactly how I wanted it to be in this shot so I ended up
editing this photo and I'll show you guys the Edit in a second and explain a
little bit of what I did as well to answer some of the questions you guys
might have asked me in the previous tutorial that I did make sure you answer
in that video but I do want to answer here though the process of from start to
finish usually takes me about a minute maybe
less than a minute to get exactly how I want it to be in terms of the shot that
I have in my head and the exposure of the light and on the background but in
this in this whole shoot here I was actually recording behind the
scenes of video because I did intend to make into another type of video and
actually made a whole behind-the-scenes video for this shoot so you think anyone
checked it out you can do so by clicking in the top right corner that one of the
corners on the top here - that links to the this video here but
yeah the process is not that long at all I know from me explaining it it feels
like it's a lot longer than in then it needs to be but honestly it's not that
it's not that long of a process sometimes I even get too shy exactly how
I want it to be in the very first shot which is actually something that I wish
I didn't do so that I can provide a little bit more insight into how I ended
up getting that shot and I might do something like that in the future there
are some photos I really really like but I just don't have a lot of build up
shots that explain a little bit more of my process in the trial and error so I'm
considering making the videos on those shots as well because I do think
providing my insight and - exactly how I got the shot exactly how I wanted it in
the very first shot might be a little bit helpful so I
we'll consider making those videos but let's go ahead and start talking about
this photo still the Edit is actually very very subtle I wanted it to be very
very minimal the only thing I did really was I really boosted those colors a
little bit a little bit I do so in lightroom by adjusting the the blacks I
make the blacks selectively a little bit darker in some areas that I want to be
more vivid when it comes to having a shot that has a lot of flare when it
comes to editing a shot that has a lot of flare we reduce the blacks a bit it
really brings back that contrast in the vividness of the colors I did that just
a little bit in the shot because I like the vivid colors and I like the contrast
so in this shot I not only did that in Lightroom but I also brought this photo
into Photoshop and I reduced the amount of blemishes that are on her face I
don't believe I did frequency separation which is something I rarely do and I of
course I did dodge and burn which is my favorite thing to do so I'm gonna go
ahead and show you guys the side-by-side of the shots from before editing and
after editing so you guys can see how subtle it is and then you know I'll just
go ahead and overlay the the shot how it was straight on that camera
- how it is edited so you guys can see the edit in real time right there and
that's pretty much it I hope you guys enjoyed this video again I'm gonna make
a lot more of these building the shot tutorials because you guys have been
responding very well to them and actually this post this tutorial here on
my Instagram did very very well it was my first to go over 9000 so I was really
happy about that thank you guys for all the positive feedback on these tutorials
and thank you to F Stoppers and anybody else who featured this tutorial on their
website because that really helps a lot because I do make these guys they make
these tutorials to help you guys so I'm really happy that it got such positive
feedback and it just makes me want to make more of these tutorials for you
guys if it's already Thanksgiving or if it's coming up then happy early
Thanksgiving or Happy Thanksgiving or happy past Thanksgiving but yeah I just
want to say Happy Holidays and all that stuff but thank you guys for watching
this video really means a lot to me if you're already subscribed subscribe if
it helped give it a like and comment with any thoughts that you guys might
have because that feedback will just help make these videos a lot more
helpful all right take care guys I'll see you in the next video