Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on
Adorama TV I'm Mark Wallace, well today I'm going to be showing you how you can
shoot with no light modifiers at all. We are just going to use hard light and using
something called a subtraction panel and a flag we're going to control that hard
light to get some really contrasting amazing portraits .
We have a fantastic model Roxanne come on out.
She is going to be posing for me today. She's going to be look sort of like a ninja
and then also we have Nicholas. He's going to be holding the flag and he is
helped us in a past episode. I think you've already seen that.
Thanks for helping me out today Nicholas, so let's get to it. I'm going to first show you the
lighting setup and then we'll take some fantastic portraits of Roxanne.
This lighting setup uses two lights and they don't have any modifiers which means
we're going to have really hard light but that's okay you don't have to be
afraid of hard light for portraits because you can control and shape that
hard light using flags and subtraction panels. Well what are those?
Let me explain it to you. This is our key light.
It's just a small profoto head it's going to illuminate
our model from this side and what we want
is high contrast. So instead of having this light bounced off the
white walls and the white floor, we're using this. This is a black panel which
some people call a subtraction panel because it absorbs light and prevents
that from being reflected, which means we're going to have high contrast, so this
side is going to be very illuminated this sides going to fall almost completely
into darkness. The problem with that is you'll notice that our background here
is the savage seamless paper, it's totally black which means our model who
has a very dark outfit is going to blend completely in with that, and so we don't
want that. So I've got this light right up here on a boom that's going to
provide some separation in fact I have that it's going to be over-exposed she's
going to be wearing a hood and what that's going to do is create this sort of a
silver lining around her head now, so we are going to have Roxanne come out here just so I can
show you how this works. Then we'll get to what flags are. So as Roxanne is in this
sort of the cocoon of light
we've got this light which is going to be illuminating her head. We've got light
coming from this side,
she's going to be able to either, move toward the light or away from the light
to get different looks.
The problem is this light here is going to be illuminating not only her
head but it's going to be coming straight into our lens and what that does is
going to give me lens flare and lower the contrast I don't want that. We need
something called a flag. A flag is something that separates and prevents
the light from falling on your camera's lens. You can use just about anything and
newspaper whatever even cardboard or you can buy an actual flag or you can use a
five and one reflector if you want Nicholas is going to come out. We're going
to use a five and one we're actually using the black side of this five and
one reflector to absorb that light and what he's going to do is, he's going to make
sure he positions this in a position where that separation light can still
fall on the hood of Roxanne's head but prevent it from falling on the lens of
my camera and that's going to prevent me from getting lens flare and getting all
this weird wash out which I don't want. There is one other thing I need to make
sure that I don't do. When I'm shooting
I don't want to shoot too high because if I do, so Nicholas you can put that
down for just a second, on this background right here
I don't want this white floor in the picture so if I shoot at eye level
I'm going to get this white floor and so to prevent that when I shoot over here
I'm going to actually crouch down and shoot this way but I keep doing that but
I like the picture so much I keep standing up and standing up and so I'm
going to solve that problem by just sitting in a chair. So I'll make sure
that I keep my camera angle low I'll sit in the chair.
We're going to get this amazing portrait, we're going to take some shots
and show you exactly how this looks
Well as you can see using subtraction panels and flags you can control that
hard light and get some really amazing photos, thank you so much Roxanne for
being here today don't forget to check out the Adorama Learning Center,
there are all kinds of articles and videos about shaping light and working in a
studio like we did today and don't forget to subscribe to Adorama TV
It's absolutely free and that way you don't miss anything so do it right now
thanks again for joining me and I will see you again next time.