Hey this is Daniel Norton, I'm here in my
studio in New York City with Zuzana
hiding back there, and we wanted to take
a nice portrait here, and we were
supposed to do it at night, or that's not
true we were wanting to make it look
like the night! So we're going to do that
but let me just show you first the
starting point, so here we are, there's a
nice light coming through the windows
behind her. I have my camera set on a
sixtieth of a second. I'd have f/4.5 and
this is kind of the light in
the room currently. So my white balance
is of course, it doesn't like that. You
can see my white balance is currently
set on daylight, because it is daylight,
and what we can see is blown out windows
behind her. You know, she's whatever, as
far as the light on her is kind of not
great. We obviously are going to make that
better. But one thing that really makes
it feel like night, and you see this a
lot in movies and stuff, is they add this
kind of blue feel to it. Right? The, the,
it's blue, so what we're going to do is
we're going to make our light blue outside,
by simply changing the white balance in
the camera. So if I switch my white
balance from daylight to let's say
tungsten, I mean you could also do a
Kelvin setting, but let's just do this.
Simple. Now. She's blue, which is fine,
except now she's blue, and we don't
really want that, and it's also too
bright out there. So let's also, right if
you're looking out the window at night,
maybe you don't want to be so blown out.
Let's get an exposure, that the windows
look better so let's dial into
1/000th of a second.
Well might be a little dark, 800th of a
second. Yeah, we'll start there. Right? if
the win if the lights coming through the
window, if it's like the moonlight it's
going to be exposed, right? So it's going to be
bright on some level. If you have a
bright moon out and it's going to have a
blue feel to it, keeping in mind that
your exposure will also dictate how
saturated the color is. So if I do go
really dark, let's go to 2000, so we can
see. Not only does it get darker the blue
gets more enriched, so you know you've got to
find the point where you feel happy with it.
I think I'll go with a thousand, that
always feels good. And now we want to
layer up, right? So that's fine, so we have
a nighttime window shot, and she's
totally a silhouette. So in order to
light her up I'm going to use my Profoto B1X here,
and I could just use it,
right if I turn it on, it's in my A group.
I have my controller on top here. I'm in
TTL. Let's see focus ...and well, and
she's still blue right, she's blue
because flash is basically the same.
White balance is daylight, well we need
to do is make our flash now equal to a
tungsten light. The way we do that is
with a gel called CTO or color
temperature orange. So this gel right
here ,is an orange gel we put orange in
front of blue. They're complementary
colors, they will counter each other out.
So I'm going to put this on my light. Just
clips right in there. I have the, the
holder already in there, for it to make
life easy for me. I'm in TTL so it's
going to compensate automatically. Now I
should also mention that I'm using high
speed sync, because that's how I'm able
to shoot at a thousandth of a second, and
now she is neutralized, right? So she
looks pretty good. I should think she
looks a little overexposed, cause nighttime,
you want to feel a little bit dark.
So maybe I'll tell the TTL to give it a
little bit less light. It's in the A
group, but I'm going to go into my camera to do
it, because remember when you only have one
light. With the Profoto system you have
to do it in camera. So I'm going to turn it
down to 2/3 per stop. There we go
that's a little better.
I might fiddle around with it as we go,
because I'm not going to sit there and do
that, like you could if you just had one
light, this kind of has a nighttime feel
to it. But this is definitely not a
complete shot, right? We have bright
moonlit windows behind us, I want to give
the, the, the scene, that feel, that the
moonlight's also part of our scene. So I
have another light here in the back, this
one is also a B1X. It is in a 1 ft x 3 ft
softbox, and it's basically giving
our kicker, or separation, or hair, or
whatever you want to call it light. This
one is in a different group, this is in
group or Zone B, which I can turn on, on
the top of my controller here. So now B
is on, and let's fire that up. Now we have
the two lights firing at once, and now
we've got this blue light coming in from
the back. Why is it blue? Because it is a
flash, right, and my white
balance is on tungsten, but I also added to
it a 1/4 CTB. Which is color temperature blue.
I already had that on there, just to give
it a little bit more intensity, and we do
have it on. It's on her hair, it's hitting
the cheek a little bit. We can play
around with where it falls, and that
looks pretty good. Like let's, let's, let's
pull your hair back a little bit. So we
can actually see it on your cheek. I want
this one to be a little bit hot, because
I feel like that makes sense, since the
windows are a bit overexposed. So let's
see, good it's nighttime. Nighttime is the
right time. Right, we get the little blue,
and we can play around with that as much
as we want, right. We've got the softbox
back here. There's a lot of things you
could use for this. It's just you can see
actually, that it's like, right at the
edge of exposure. So I still have detail
there, you could just use a regular grid
or even a bare head for this, because the
light is theoretically hard.. Right? Coming
from the moon. However it's going through
sheers, so by using a softbox it makes it
feel ...more correct, and again that doesn't
look bad, but I think the final thing I
want to do is. I have this gel holder
here. This has a two full CTO in it, so
it's extra orange. I'm going to actually put
this on my Profoto B2, which I have over
here, and this guy is in my group. See I'm
aiming it kind of at the windows, and the
wall to give a little bit of a hint of
warmth to it, because that's going to feel
like there's some lights on in the room. Or
something giving a little bit of like
ambience to it. So let's see what that
looks like, and once I have all these
lights up, we'll do a quick tweak to get
them exactly to the exposure that we
like, and then we'll take the photo. So
it'll be a little more straight with
your head. There we go. Perfect. Alright so
now we have those back there. Now with
all my lights together, I see a few
things. That light in the back is
definitely too bright. The warm light, I
just added my key light. Doesn't seem
bright enough. So now I'm going to go into my
controller. Right, first of all I'm going
to take off the the adjustment that I
put earlier, because that's affecting the
whole shot, and I'm going to take up the
photo like that, get myself neutral. There
we go, okay. So my key light is too bright,
still. That's A, so I turn that down a
little bit.
We'll say 3/10 of a stop,
maybe even a touch more. Good. Another thing...
I'm just doing this to feel, it's not
really, all these exposures are correct.
It depends on which one is correct for
me, that's basically where I'm at. There I
think my windows feel a little bit too
bright, so I am going to adjust my
shutter up as the suns coming up.
I'm going to a 1500, that put her to
sleep. She fell asleep when I did that. We
could see that. That looks pretty good!
One more, non sleeping shot, and then
finally I think the light all the way in
my C group, is a little bit too bright
too. So I'm going to go to my C dial that
down a tiny bit. I'm going to bring A
actually back up. Because that looks like
it's off. Remember, when using TTL, it'll sometimes
jump around. If you have multiple lights
going on. So you're going to want to tweak
each one independently, and then go back
until you have the formula that's working
for you. Like I think that's pretty good,
let me quickly check to make sure none
of my highlights are blown out, nope. It's
really close, she's slightly underexposed
on the skin, which I want, and that looks
good. The light is softish, but not being
too soft. It's dark now, now we just
need the right mood. Now be 'nighttimeish'!
Right? Important to instruct the
models! Okay. That's it, that's that good it definitely
feels like night. See? and now, now we've got a
nighttime shot. Right?
Feels good, a little bit darker on the
daylight. Good. So I'm just going to review
everything here. Right, we've got camera
set at 1/1600th of a second,
at f/4.5. So that's going to give us the dark
windows. If you didn't have high speed
sync capabilities, you could do a ND
filter on the lens, would also work but
you'd have to be, maybe shooting an f/22
or something. I've got CTO so-called
temperature orange on this light. A
little bit of color temperature, blue on
the hair / kicker, and a lot of orange on
my kind of window light, back there,
giving us this kind of overall scene. So
we'll shoot a couple like this, I think it
looks pretty good. This might be the kind
of shot you could do.... that means I
went too fast. The lights kind of yell at you if
you go too fast.
One thing that's important here, is these
are 500 watt second lights, and I am
really like running them at their
maximum here, with with all this gel on
there, and against the daylight. You know
it definitely eats up a lot of power. So
you know got to make sure I pay
attention, you, chin down a little bit,
more like this actually, look off cause I'm
curious what that will look like. So I'm
going to move around a little bit. Again I'm
playing around.. yes that's nice...with the
light, to see where it looks the most
interesting, oh that actually looks good...
actually do one more like that, because
whatever you do one, it looks good! Go, as
if to do a second one. Now that looks
really great except, I'm, I want that blue
light on your chin. So stay exactly there
or cheek round.. I'm just going to move ...my
my hair light... I'm just testing it to see
where it's at.
Alright let's try that, should be the
last one. This is the one, there we go. So
we get that a little bit of light,
hitting her in the cheek, giving her some
three-dimensionality. She's looking over
there at the hors d'oeuvres table. She's
like Oh? What's for lunch? You know...
That kind of thing!
Good, good, good, here we go... nice one more!
That's it, that's it, that's it, one more,
good, good, good, good, good, good, good,
stay with me. Nice down, right there, right
there, right there, right there. That's it.
Okay, so, oh, oh, oh, you look a little bit
mean in that one, and we know the Zusana
is not mean, she's very nice!
so we'll take one more
She's very nice. Perfect.
Okay, so again just checking to make sure
all my exposures are good. I think they
look good, when you're doing this kind of
stuff, watch the windows. Right, because
remember it is daytime. Right so unless
it's a cloudy day, and everything's going to
stay exactly the same. You're going to do
what your light could be going up and
down. Alright, if it's a full cloudy day,
we're like there's no clouds in the sky,
or if it's fully sunny, then it'll stay
the same all day, but most days it's
going to be changing in and out. So if you
want your windows to be consistent,
what's that exposure? You're going to
controlling that with your shutter speed. So
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