Hello, everyone, I'm Urs Recher, hi I'm Karl Taylor and welcome to the next 'how
to' video. Karl you prepared a product shock for us... What's going on?
Karl: Yeah, a product shot which essentially is going to be black on black but because it's a
black product I need to separate it from that background using rim
lighting so we're just using a very small strip of black and then I'll
extend that black out afterwards kind of similar to that aubergine 'how to'
video you did a while ago but let's walk through the setup on
this one. Urs: So I see only two softboxes, the biggest one and the smallest we
have plus a lot around. Karl: Yes, well essentially it's quite simple in terms of
lighting because like you say is just two softboxes we have the large 120x180
as the backlight which has given me a very large spread of light, the bigger we
can make that light then the more it's gonna wrap around the product and you
can see I've got this sheet of diffusion material in which is actually gonna
soften the edge of that wrap around. Urs: So otherwise, we just get the sharp line
from the softbox and this just feathers the edge a little bit. Karl: it does yeah,
as you said, it feathers diffuses away so what I'll probably do
is I'll show a shot with this and without it so we can see
the difference. The second softbox is actually almost the smallest in the
range the 35x60 so we go from the biggest in the range to the
smallest but that's fine for this product because the product is
small, got it in very close to the product, trying to illuminate the
glossiness of the product. In addition to that, a mirror here, a large mirror which
is bouncing some light into this side of the product and then you cleverly made
me a very nice window mask flag to stop the flare because as we said, we've only
got a thin black strip here because if we're shooting
black-on-black obviously if this was all black as you know we wouldn't get any
light onto the rim light products so we can only use a thin strip of black to
let the light wrap around and then I'll extend that black out afterwards so
because of all this extraneous light shining into camera without your little
window mask, we'd be getting flare. Urs: If I understood it right, during the setup you
prefer a mirror here instead of something just white to actually reflect
again a gradation that this light is creating a gradation in the object is
right? Karl: Absolutely, I mean we would have the option there to put another softbox there but
it would be a very flat homogeneous light source we could put a flat white
material there but again a flat line. By using the mirror and picking up some of
the gradation off this softbox and off of this scrim then we can get a
little bit of that gradation light in the reflection on that side. Urs: Okay great.
Karl: Excellent, right I think I'm ready to take the shot and then what we'll do is
we'll take a shot with each softbox independently so the viewers can see and
then take the scrim away and see that option as well. Urs: what is doing what. Karl: Okay so let's get
the capture button open I'm shooting f-16 120mm macro lens and there we can
see the result now the interesting part here is obviously the the rim lighting
but here you can see the feather of the rim lighting because of the scrim.
Yeah and here you can see the feather, the gradient
from the mirror reflecting the scrim and you can see the feather gradient from
the other scrip from the rim lighting around and that's obviously afforded by that black
and as I said, will extend that black outwards later and I'll probably put a
fake artificial glow behind the product as well in post-production, there's
a couple of little details that I'll have to fix in post production where
we've got this highly reflective chrome foil it's a couple of little patches
that are gone black which I'll probably fill in in post but this is a very
difficult subject matter to try and capture in one shot. Essentially as well
I'll probably shoot separate exposure a darker exposure for
the cap to recover some detail in the cap in the in the final
shot. Let's take a look at just one light at a time so you're a bit taller than me
Urs, so if you can maybe turn off that top softbox first of all. Now in this
last shot we'll have the rim lighting but we'll also have the mirror here, so
the mirror is still there and actually the light that you see on the label is
just a reflection off the front softbox. Urs: Without flashing. Karl: Exactly, it's
acting as a reflector but that would be obviously quite dark and the letter K
would be black without the softbox in there. Urs: So change?
Karl: Yeah let's change go the other way around and we'll see how important the
backlighting is which is obviously crucial to this shot so we take that
shot and there we have an invisible product with just a band of light.
Urs: It disappears, black on black. Karl: Exactly so that's why it's so essential for
the backlight, the rim lighting, so we'll pop that back on again,
we'll take another shot and then we'll remove the scrim.
The great thing as well about this shot is we're doing it
just with the two Siros lights, we're not even using any fancy expensive
lighting or specialist product lamps we're just using two standard
Siros lights I believe one's an 800 and one's a 400. Urs: Exactly
Karl: Now because we've taken the scrim away we'll probably have to knock a little
bit of light off this. We'll take it down a stop and see
how see how that looks. Urs: So in the background we are now three stops below
max before we have been two stops below max so let's say on 200 joules.
Karl: that was on 100 ISO as well at f-16. Right so let's see what
we get on the rim lighting this time but we take a closer look at it. Urs: Pretty much
the same brightness so we compensated nicely. Karl: Exactly but
here when we look at the detail on that edge there and we compare it to that
edge there, there's the gradation, there's the
gradation and now there's no gradation and there's also no
gradation in the mirror because the scrims gone. Urs: Because this is a recycling
the scrim's like. Karl: Absolutely, so you can choose that maybe as a
photographer you might prefer the harder sort of homogenous lines but for me I
prefer the mix of the lighting with the with the gradients
because this main light on here was rather homogeneous and then the
edges are soft. Okay, hope you enjoyed that 'how-to' video with
rim lighting product shots. Thanks very much for watching, I'm Karl Taylor. Thank
you very much Karl thanks for watching bye-bye, bye-bye.