In this video, I show you how to shoot a silhouette photo, with a simple one light setup.
AdoramaTV presents,
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV.
Brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that has everything
for us photographer's. In his video, I'm going to show you how you can create a
silhouette, using just one single light.
Now, lights come with a whole bunch of different light modifiers,
and we're going to try four different types of modifier to see
what works best with a silhouette. We're going to try bare bulb, so no modifier at all,
we're going to use a reflector, a grid, and the conical snoot.
Now, I can't do this on my own of course, and today I'm be working with Gemma, do
you want to say hello Gemma?
All we need to do, is set the light up,
get some balloons, and we'll take some shots. So to begin with,
I'm going to start with no modifier on the flash whatsoever.
I'm using the StreskLight 360 for this shoot,
and it has a feature called bear bulb, where the hole of the light
is exposed and light goes pretty much everywhere. Now this is going to give
a silhouette because it's behind our subject. Light is going on to the
background,
the background is going to be lit, but not so much light is falling onto Gemma,
so Gemma is going to be darker and silhouette. That's the idea,
lets take a shot and see how it looks.
So with that shot, it's okay
definitely a silhouette, the balloons are back illuminated that's why they're
there. They're semi-translucent,
but the shadow in the foreground is not what I'm after at all.
The light is coming forwards, and up onto the sides.
So to get some control to this shot, I'm going to add in a reflector,
and it would be a little bit like using the wide angle end of your zoom if you are using
a speed light flash. Now I'm just going to pop this on the front
of the StreakLight, and straight away you can imagine how this is going to work,
the light is going to come forwards,
but because this is solid, none of the light is going to go up
or to the sides, and we're not going to get the spill back on Gemma that we had before.
Lets take a picture and see how it looks.
Yeah, and that's done exactly what I predicted,
we got a nice drop off at the edges, that shadow at the front has been
eliminated and yet the balloons are still rear eliminated.
That looks pretty good, but would it be better with one of these?
This is a Honeycomb grid, its
a small series of honeycomb shaped holes, that push light in one direction.
In theory this should give us a much tighter circle light,
and a very different look to the background on our silhouette.
It slots into the reflector,
really simply. There we go, just take the picture.
So as you can see, that is a much tighter circle of light.
I'm not sure it's quite what I'm after. So this time I'm going to
add in the conical snoot. Now in theory this should be a very small circle of light,
I think it'll be way too small, but you've got nothing to lose by trying, so
lets just pop that inm and take the shot.
There we go, we get a very small circle of light,
and it's not really not that good for this particular type of silhouette.
Remember the flash distance, the background distance, is remaining the same in
every single shot, so its simply the modifies that are changing the look of the picture,
and you might think that the conical snoot would be useless, don't use it,
but there's one way we can use it where we can still get a good shot.
So what I'm going to do is, rather than having the light behind
Gemma, and thats the perfect place for it in this shot although we will need to do some
cloning to remove
some of the legs in Photoshop. I'm going to take the light and put it
over to the side. Not only that, but I'm going to raise it up a bit higher as well, so
lets put the light up really high like that, we'll angle it down a little bit.
We're just going to skim the light down the side
of the background, so rather than being a circle of light we should get
a shaft of light. That's the idea, lets try it out
here we go.
So it can be used to get a silhouette, but it's not quite the shot I'm
after in this case. I think of the four that we tried. I like the second one with the
standard reflector.
So I'm going to put that back onto the light, put the light back behind Gemma,
and then we're going to do a shoot. Okay Gemma, are you ready? Lets do it
Okay that's terrific. Well there we go, we got a load of silhouette shots there,
plenty to choose from. So what
I'm going to do now is to get my favorite picture into Photoshop and we'll do a
little bit a post-processing
there as well. We're going to do that right now.
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As always, I took all of my pictures in camera raw
format and as always that means I need to do a little bit of work in Photoshop
just to get the best out of the file, let's have a look.
Now this is the picture as it came off of the camera,
with a little bit a cropping done, and although it looks okay
its not quite how I remember the picture on the
LCD, on the camera. On the LCD it was a lovely deep black silhouettes but
here I can actually see detail in Gemma's arm, and
in Gemma's face, and in this case I want them to be nice and solid
and black. To do that I'm just going to go to the blacks
slider and take the slider down
into the minus area, and we'll keep going down, I reckon about there at -70 should be
pretty much
perfect for this shot. So that's given a nice
deep solid silhouette, but its affected the whole picture.
Wen now have much darker edges around here, and the balloons, well they're not as
bright as they were a minute ago, so
we need to bring that back. I don't mind the dark ages, but those balloons, well
I can fix them fairly simply by changing tools,
I'm going to change this one here the adjustment brush.
Now the adjustment brush allows me to make small changes to small parts of the picture.
So let's click it, I get a brand new panel with the adjustment brush
panel, and I can choose to increase the exposure
for example, by dragging the exposure slider about a stop and a half, that should be fine.
Then I just click on the balloons, it's like putting extra light into the balloons
because
that's literally what we doing. I can change it even after I painted, I can
move the slider around
to get it exactly how I want it. Maybe you know, a little brighter, and a little bit more
saturation in there to really make those reds come out, and maybe a little bit of clarity in there too,
just to give it an edge.
Okay I'm happy with that, so I'll click the
OK button, will leave raw behind, and I'll go into Photoshop.
Now the reason I need to come back into Photoshop is there is one more thing I
need to do and
Photoshop is the best place to do it. It was a problem that I knew I was going to have
even whilst I was taking the pictures. Its the legs
of the light stand. I needed the light behind Gemma, I wanted nice
even illumination behind her, and that meant having some form of
lighting stand in the shot. Removing it fortunately
isn't too tricky. So having a look down here, we can see there the light stand
quite clearly,
and my tool of choice for this kind of work, is this guy here, the spot
Healing Brush. So I love this about a Healing Brush
because all you need to do is just paint over the thing you want to remove,
like that, and when you let go and cross your fingers,
it disappears. It might need a couple clicks just to get it
absolutely right so don't be surprised if you need to click in a few times.
But you can use it to remove any little minor blemishes as well.
But big things like this, paint over them and the go.
Larger parts like this, now this is a bit more tricky because there's a little bit less
for this tool to work with, and you have to kind of hope a little bit
that it will work, and don't be surprised if you need to go over this two or three times.
Look at that, there we go, and eventually it'll fix it for you
and there you go, there is my final
picture completed. Well there you go, shooting with balloons is great fun, the
translucent nature of these work
so well with the silhouette of the final picture. Now if you want to see what
we can do with more than one light,
and a set of balloons, then you need to watch my next video,
and of course the easiest way to do that is just a click on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching!
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