Hi everybody welcome to 'Exploring Photography'. I'm Mark Wallace and I'm
joined by Tamara Rodriguez here in Mexico City and I am NOT saying your
name right. How do you use it correctly?
Tamara Rodriguez.
Yeah, I can't do that. My mouth doesn't do that 'Tamara Rodriguez'. OK, it just hurts.
Alright, so I'm just going to call you Tamara and not do it right. So what we want to do here
is, Tamara is a beautiful model, she's got this gorgeous long hair, she's got really golden
skin, she has this beautiful brown earth tone outfit on, and so we want to make a
really amazing portrait of her, but we're in an environment that isn't really
fantastic. We have this white wall back here and that's about it. We don't have
any color, we don't have any texture, so we just want to keep this simple and create
a portrait that works in this environment, so instead of overthinking this,
what we're going to do is, we're just going to use one light and one reflector to create
something special. So here's how we're going to do that, so Tamara, we're going to have you step right over
here and you're going to face this light. Now, this light is just a Profoto
softbox, it's a B2 head with a grid and what that grid allows us to do is
have really nice, soft light falling on Tamara's face, but it's not going to
spill anywhere, specifically it's not going to spill on this white wall and
that means that this white wall isn't going to be getting any light, which means
it's going to fall into complete or almost complete darkness. We want it to be
a dark, grey to compliment her skin tones. Now here's what we're going to do. The first
thing we want to do is meter this light. So I'm going to meter this and when we meter
this, that meters at f/11 and so that's really nice, punchy light and when
we come back here, I'm going to meter this wall and it meters at 1.6,
which means essentially it's getting no light, just a little, little, tiny taste of
light, and so what we're doing is we're making sure that we have this nice, soft
pool of light right here and nothing back here and it will compliment her
look so I'm going to come over here and just take a quick test shot so we're going to
have Tamara look straight at the light. I'm going to take a shot and it looks pretty amazing.
The problem with this, though, is we're not getting any of the shadow detail
here. I don't have another light, but what I do have is a silver reflector so
Victor, he's assisting me today. He's going to bring this silver reflector out and
just stick it right there. Now because that silver is going to be
highly reflective so that light's going to bounce right back into her hair and now
we're going to get those highlights in the shadows of her hair, we can see
some of that detail. Her hair is not going to fall into darkness. We don't want that. We
want to see the waves and all the texture of her hair. So we're going to take another
shot really fast.
Perfect and now you can see that we've got some really amazing results. Now one
thing, if you're shooting in an environment like this, to understand is
this works great as a profile photo but what it doesn't work as is a full-on front
shot like this so here's another normal portrait so I'm going to take this shot
here and oh no, so what's happening here is we have a nice light on this
side of Tamara's face but on this side, even though we have this reflector it's just
not enough punch and so she looks sort of like Nosferatu or some kind of
Dracula out of a black and white old film. We don't want that, so you have to
make sure that you understand where the light is coming from and the pose that
the model strikes that matches that exactly. Alright so I'm going to shoot a few
shots, we'll show you our results and then you can try this out where you are.
Well thank you so much, Tamara, for being a fantastic model and thank you for
joining me for this episode of 'Exploring Photography'. Remember if you're in a situation
like this, don't overthink it. Keep things simple and you can get some really
spectacular results. Don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV. All of our
videos are absolutely free and if you zip over to the Adorama Learning Center
you'll see our archive of hundreds of video about metering, photography
shooting models, shooting landscapes, shooting video, all of that kind of stuff.
It's absolutely free, so check that out. Thanks again for joining me and I'll see
you again next time.