Hi everybody,
welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace hanging out
in my sister's basement now...
I'm hanging out here because my sister is a
phenomenal equestrian photographer,
she does all kinds of portraits on location.
She's usually outside shooting but in
the winter she likes to play and
experiment and do things in her small
home studio.
Her home studio is pretty
much like a lot of people's studio,
it's very small,
hers is in her basement..
Yours might be in your garage,
or your spare bedroom...
something like that, and so what we're
gonna try to do here is...
I'm going to take the challenge of using
this very small space,
and shooting a portrait that
doesn't look like it's been shot in a
small space.
I'm gonna use very small and
extremely close light to make this
small space look different.
So let me show you exactly what we have going on.
Here I have two lights, I've got two
Profoto lights.
now you could use anything,
you could use speed lights..
Profoto lights, elinchrom lights,
it doesn't really matter... it's the
principles that matter.
We're gonna be using the inverse square
law and we're going to be using lens flare
to make things look really cool,
and some post-production tricks..
hang on we got a lot to show you...
So first let me show you
these lights.
I have just a standard Profoto head,
and this is a standard
reflector, we're going to use this light
to give us a more expansive look by
blasting in some light into our lens, to
give us lens flare, and to mask the small space.
Thee second thing we have is a
small Octa Box...
you can use a small softbox, you could
use an umbrella, it doesn't matter,
we just need a soft source of light,
we want to keep it small because we're
just gonna be shooting a portrait really
really close and tight,
the other thing that I've done here is,
I want to mask this back wall,
so I've decided and I've chosen to use a
black backdrop, and that
is going to make everything fall into
darkness, because we're gonna shoot
everything at a sync speed of 200th of a second.
We're going to shoot with a wide
open aperture though at about 2.8, f/3.4
something like that, and so we still will
pick up a little tiny bit of ambient
light, because we're shooting with video
lights here, and so to make sure we drop
out that ambient light, we're using a
black background.
That's a lot of stuff,
so let's get to it by setting up our
camera and starting with that lens flare.
We're going to keep things simple by
doing one thing at a time,
the first thing that I want to do is,
make sure I have some
beautiful lens flare in my photo.
That's going to mask the small space,
make it look a little bit more expansive,
and we can play in post-production to
make that a little bit more pronounced,
or less pronounced, picking colors,
it's really a fun thing to do later on,
but how do we do it?
Well I'm going to be using this,
just a standard head,
so this is a Profoto light, with a normal
reflector on it, you can use a speed light
or whatever like I mentioned before,
but I have this reflector here, because I
really want to make sure
I get a lot of light right
into the lens.
I want to throw it right in there,
and I don't want a lot of light
bouncing around in this very small space.
So I have this reflector,
that's really refining where the light is going.
I want it to go right down the barrel of my
lens, so to do that I'm going to take my
camera, here....
This is a Canon 5D Mark IV...
and I'm going to set it up pretty much
on axis.
So when I'm looking in the frame
of my camera, I want that light this
light right here, to just show up in the
very top right corner, just right off
frame, so I'm going to do that...
I mean I just sort of move things around,
looking through my lens I think I have it just
about right...
I'll take a test shot and
yes,
I have some beautiful lens flare so
that's all streaming in.
Now that I have it in pretty much the
place that I need it,
I can make fine adjustments when my
model comes to make sure that I have it
exactly where I want, but the step, the
first step is to make sure you have an
on axis light to shoot into your lens, to
give you beautiful lens flare.
Now that we have our lens flare dialed in..
at least at a basic level,
the next thing we need to do is get our fill
light so when our model gets here,
we're going to have
him sitting this way...
extremely close to this light,
and because this light is
shooting into our lens to create lens
flare, we need to make sure that we even
out the lighting on the model, so what
we're gonna do is we're just going to
grab this small beauty dish right here.
I'm gonna try not to knock over any of
my sister stuff, and we're gonna put it
extremely close, so I said, this was going
to be very small, and extremely close, but
these two lights are almost touching and
then when our model comes, he will be
sitting about right here, so really close
to the camera,
close to the light, really close to the
softbox, but when we put everything
together, you'll see that it doesn't look
extremely small, and extremely close all.
Right now we have a model..
this is Danny, he is from Valencia Spain.
He doesn't speak any English,
I barely speak any Spanish...
but we're going to make it work.
So the first thing we want to do is keep
things simple, we want to work with that
lens flare to make sure that Danny is in
the right position.
We're not getting anything that's
overexposed, and we're still getting that
really nice flare on the image.
So what we need to do here is,
I'm going to place Danny about right
here...
I look through the lens to see if
he is in the position.
I need to move my camera up just to here,
I'm gonna move you
back just a little bit... we're really
really close, we're about two feet from
the camera.
I'm using a 35 mm prime, which is
something that you
probably wouldn't use for a portrait,
but we're gonna make it work all right...
so the first photo here that I'm going to
take is just a little test, and we can
see by that image Danny is too close to
the camera..
we're getting spill from this
light on his face, and it's just a little
bit too close to the lens..
so what I'm going to do here,
is pull you back just a hair
just like that, and we're going to shoot
again... this is a nice profile shot, ah
yeah, so we have the lens flare.
Everything's looking good, we're not
getting any spill on to Danny, we are
getting some illumination from this
light but it's underexposed,
and Danny's face is flat,
there's no light forming,
no shaping to that,
we need to add some sidelight,
some soft side light that's where
this light comes in,
and what we're going
to do here is,
I'm going to grab my little light meter.
I'm going to turn this light on,
we're illuminating Danny's face from the side.
I have my lumisphere down, because I want
to sort of see exactly what's coming
from this light, we're shooting at about
3.2 shallow depth of field,
which is something that we're doing
specifically to make our lens flare look a
little bit softer and more bokehlicious so let's
meter this, and see where we are.
So I've got my little light meter here.
I've set everything up to match my
camera, and now let's meter this.
It meters at f/2.5,
I'm shooting at f/3.2,
so let me put my lumisphere up to see if
the mix between these two lights gets us there.
So I'm gonna meter one more time,
and we're right about there...
so what I need to do now is
take a couple of test shots to see how
things look.
So Danny's looking right at
the camera there.
Softlocks, looking very manly,
that looks pretty cool.
So now that we have things dialed in,
what we need to do is start playing with things.
Adding a hat, adding different gestures,
making him look a little bit angry,
making him a little more cowboys...
I don't know, we'll take some
rugged things, and play a little bit,
choose the best on,e and hop over into
post-production.
So let's shoot right now.
I'm an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom classic,
and you can see here's one of the images
I just shot...
and it's just nothing to
look at right out of the camera,
but that's cool because there's a lot of...
there are a lot of things that we can do
in post-production.
So let's hop over into the develop module.
The very first thing that I'm going to want
to do is to take my blacks,
and just take them way down.
That helps really mask that background.
You can see it's sort of gotten rid of this
area here, and makes it look like it's part
of the lens flare.
Even though it's actually part of the wall.
So we're just going to really take
those blacks a little bit down,
the other thing that we're gonna do here
and you can do anything you want really
with your images,
but we're going to play with
our color profiles.
So I'm gonna click on profile,
and I'm going to browse, and you
can see if as you hover over these that
it really dramatically changes the way
that the image looks.
So I'm just going to choose one of these.
I'm going to choose artistic 7,
because it looks sort
of like that cowboy look that we're going for.
I'm going to close that, the
other thing I'm going to do here is to
add some texture.
I want this to be really nice and grungy
and we've got a lot of texture,
and Danny's beard...
so I'll just go over here to the presence
and click on the texture slider,
and just pull that over until we start
getting some gritty texture.
So I'm overdoing it,
but that's ok, that's what we want with
these images.
So you can just play with this,
and do all kinds of stuff.
You can change, maybe do some
vignetting...
You can do some split toning...
take the shadow, it's one of the tricks
you can do here is to put some blues in
the shadows, just a little bit or a lot...
you can do almost anything you want,
with these images.
I'm gonna take it about where it is right
here, I'm not gonna play too much with that,
but I'm gonna take this next, and I'm
going to go into Photoshop.
Now that we're in Photoshop, what I really
want to do is use my Nik collection filters.
So I'm gonna go to Nik collection analog
effects Pro....
Now this is not required,
but I like what I can do in analog
effects Pro.
Inside analog effects Pro
there are these different custom cameras
that I've created.
one of them is called Danny bokeh,
and so what this filter does
is it does two things...
One adds a film type to add some grain to
the image, and the other thing is this
bokeh, and so this is an artificial bokeh.
If I go here, you can see where I'm
affecting the image.
Really what I want to do is,
I want to add this artificial bokeh to his
shoulder and to this sort of
lens flare...
Again this is something
that's just a purely artistic choice, but
I like i, and so I'm going to hit OK, and
apply that to my Photoshop image.
I can turn this layer on and off, and you can
see that it makes a pretty big difference.
If I go in 100%, you can see
that all this film grain has been added
to this, and that is from analog effects.
I really like that, so the last thing I'm
going to do here is one of my favorite
tricks to add a little bit of punch to
contrast the images, and that is to
duplicate the top layer, so that's analog
effects Pro,
and then I'm going to go to
filter other, and then I'm going to
choose my high-pass filter, and this is
going to allow me to choose a radius in
other words how much of this filter that
I want to really add punch to this, so
the trick is to look at your image, and
to make this radius as low as possible.
You just want to see the hairs, and the
fine detail showing up in this gray,
if you're getting more than that, you've
gone too far.
So for this image, it's about 1.3 pixels
then I'm going to hit o.k...
the next thing I'm going to do is,
go over here to my blending mode,
and I'm going to make this an overlay,
and again if I go into 100% you can see it was
specifically on Danny's skin,
and the beard...
If I turn this on and off that
just over sharpens everything,
but in a controlled way.
You might not be able to
see this on YouTube,
but trust me if you
do this on your own image,
you will see that really pop.
Now I'm going to save
this and we'll hop back over into
Lightroom.
Now we're back into the
develop module with the Photoshop image,
really the only thing I want to do to
this, is do a crop.
I'm going to crop this in Lightroom
because it's non-destructive.
I can always change the
crop later.
I don't like how modern his
shirt looks, and I also want this to be
a 16 by 9 aspect ratio,
so it matches the video.
So I'll do this, I'll off set him to the left
just a little bit.
Something about like that, once I play
with it a little bit.
We'll look and see the final results.
Well that's all there is to it...
a little bit of creative lighting in a small
space, with some creative post-production,
and you can make your small space look a
little bit more expansive.
Thank you so much Danny,
that was really fun.
Don't forget you can follow me on Instagram.
I'm always posting behind the scenes
videos and pictures of what I'm filming
and my travels around the world.
So don't miss that,
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Thanks so much for joining me,
and I will see you again next time.