In this video
I take on the challenge of a Red Riding Hood themed shoot
in the studio.
Adorama TV presents
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you are watching Adorama TV brought to you by Adorama,
the camera store that has everything for us photographers
and today we have a themed shoot. Can you guess what the theme might be?
Yes it's going to be Red Riding Hood and for my model today, this is Fearne.
Do you want to say hello Fearne? Hello.
She's going to be Red Riding Hood and we've got a specific idea of the shot in mind, so
we are going to end up hopefully with a fairly tight
headshot, a very shallow depth of field look to this image,
we may even put in a little bit of snow later on but,
we'll get to that. So let's talk about lighting first of all,
now for this shoot, I'm going to be using my little streetlight 360
and we've got it here with a beauty dish and
the shower cap on. Now that's going to be the key light,
the main light, but we'll build this up bit by bit.
Let's start with this light, let's see how it comes out on it's own.
So first thing to do of course is to take a meter reading.
So let's do that, so i've got my flash meter, i'm just going to pop it underneath Fearne's
chin, pointing back at the light and that is giving me a very low power f1.8.
Fearne can I get you to take a little step forward for me. Now if you move the light
or your subject then your flash power will change.
So let's do the same thing again and it's now gone up to
f2.8, so that little step forward was
almost a stop extra in light. And that's what I'm going to shoot at
f2.8. So let's take a picture like that and see how it comes out.
So here we go, let's do a couple of shots. Lovely, and again, one more.
Fantastic. Ok so, at f2.8
with our light fairly elevated above we get this harsh
contrasted light, lots and lots of shadows underneath the chin and
underneath the eyes,
and of course the background has dropped off completely black
because very little light is actually hitting the background.
Now we'll deal with the background in a minute but let's start with just getting
Fearne's face correctly lit.
The light from above is fine but we need a light from below just to fill
in the shadows underneath the chin and although we could add in a second
light
we could also use a reflector. So that's what we are going to do. We are going to put a little
reflector in
just underneath Fearne's chin.
So let's bring that in, there we go.
Just like that and that will bounce light from the beauty dish
onto the reflector and onto Fearne's face. Batty idea.
Let's take a picture and see how it comes out. Ok so, here we go. Same thing again.
Brilliant and one more.
Lovely, ok so, wow what a difference.
Now the shadows underneath the chin are nicely filled in, but it's not as bright as the
light from above.
So we still have that nice beauty lit look,
but that background, the background is jet black.
Now if you want a jet black background, this is how you do it, I mean
whatever your background color even if it was a white, it would go very
very dark possibly even black and there's not much of a gap behind here, there's maybe
two and a half meters at the most. But I don't want a black background,
I want to have some of that texture and tone coming through in the shot.
So, we need another light.
So I've got here, this is the
eh the streetlight 180, so this is the smaller brother
of the 360 and it'll be perfect as a background light.
Now i'm going to put it right behind Fearne so you can't see it, but trust me
it's here right behind her, and it's pointing directly
at the background. Now we can change the power in a second, but let's take a test shot
and see how it comes out,
and we'll work out whether that's right or wrong from there. So Fearne,
let's go for another shot, here we go. Brilliant and one more.
Bang, ok perfect. So looking at the shots we've got some light in the
background.
It's a little bit off to one side and it's not as bright as I would like,
that's why you take test shots, so now you can refine it a little bit. So we'll move that light
ever so slightly
to the side, and I can increase the power of the light
here using the street light remote. So I can add in maybe an extra stop a light,
three clicks, that's one more stop of light.
Ok let's try that again. Here we go and again.
Perfect ok so, with that I've now got a little bit more light round the back of Fearne.
and I think that's a nice balance on the amount of light that's being
produced by the background light
and its balancing up with our key light as well. But,
there's one more thing we could do. The color,
the color is going to be whatever color the background
you're using is. Whilst this grey is really good. I do love my grey background,
what we want with this shoot is to make it look like we're actually
outside. So we want to change the color of the background.
Now we could go with sort of a cold blue color because we are going to use a bit of snow in a
little bit.
And blue snow, that could work well. But of course Red Riding Hood, you'd be
out in the woods wouldn't you? So we want to perhaps go with a more woody color
and to do that, I'm just going to grab myself
a gel. So the street lights have gels that are correctly made for them, but of course you can
get gels to go on any flash
you like. This one just clips to the front of
the streetlight like that and that's going to add a bit of green color
into the background. Now remember when you add a gel, you're going to change the amount
of light that comes through the flash because the gel
will act like a bit of a pair of sunglasses, so you might need to change the exposure.
Best way take a test shot, see how it comes out. Ok so let's go again. Here we go.
Brilliant, one more. Good stuff.
So with the green, it's there but it's not as powerful, not as bright as I would
like.
I'm going to increase the flash by one more stop
just on the background only. One more stop of light
on the background. Let's take a shot there and again.
Brilliant. So there we go. Now that light
is much brighter but it's not overpowering. It's a beautiful balance between
the key light
and the background. That's the lighting look I want to go for.
Let's do a shoot where we use this lighting look and see what amazing pictures we
can come up with.
Ok Fearne are you ready? Ya. Ok Let's go.
Ok if you just look down towards there.
Really good, fantastic, ok and we'll do one more.
And we're done. Ok so there we go.
Ah wow that was a really exciting shoot, that snow. I've never worked with snow before.
Have you? No it was the first time for me as well but it was fun.
It was, it was great fun. So what we're going to do now is get our favourite picture into photoshop and we're going to do some
editing, and we'll do that right now.
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Fake snow in a can absolutely brilliant stuff for photography.
Now if you are going to use this, do make sure you read and follow the
safety instructions on the back but the end result was
pretty impressive stuff. Now the lense I was using was all part of the plan.
I was using my Canon 50 mm f1.8 lense because
I wanted a really shallow depth of field to make the snow have a very shallow
depth of field and
add to the sense of three dimensions in the image.
It really is a brilliant lense, it's kind of a must have, every photographer should have
it, a 50 millimeter f1.8 lense
in their kitbag. So what about the end result?
Well this stuff is quite random, you don't really have much control over where it's
going to going. So
you won't be surprised to hear, there's a little bit cloning to do in this image.
Let's have a look at a couple ways we can do it. So this is the picture
and I've got a bit of work to do. There are some large lumps of snow that shouldn't
be there. There's another one kind of down here that's in the way
and there's some small fine bits on the face, which
some might like and some that dont. Let's start with the fine stuff.
To remove the fine little spots of snow, i'm going to use the
Spot Healing Brush. Now some of the spots I don't mind, I mean the ones that are
white, they look fine. But the ones that are grey,
less so. Why is there grey snow? Well with
the light we were using, it was quite a small area of
light, so any snow that was just outside is going to fall into shadow.
It's going to give you that slight grey feel. So that's just one of those things about
the beauty dish, it's not a
a great big light source. But then that's, that's fine. I'm not going to take all of them out.
I'll leave a few on, because it adds to the feeling
of snow. What about the larger stuff? Well there's a large bit down here that
definitely needs to go.
For the larger things, I'm going to switch to the patch tool. Because the patch tool
allows me to select
around larger areas, and the reason I love the patch tool
is when you move that selection by dragging it, you can see exactly where
you are going to sample from.
I can follow the line of the ribbon just to make sure that, that
ribbon line continues in a nice neat direction.
There you go. It's gone. Now I think I'm going patch the hair as well and that might work
except there's not really much to sample from on the hair.
And that is quite a large lump that needs to go. I'd like to keep the hair
looking
real, so what I did was I took more than one picture.
And I have to do that sort of thing, and I took lots of pictures before we used the snow
and this one is a very similar pose, very similar distance
i'm going to use the hair from this and put it over the other shot.
Now if you don't have a can of
fake snow, you might have lots of pictures like this one, where there's no snow in
the shot.
Don't worry I've got a neat little trick to add some digital fake snow
inside of Photoshop and we'll come to that right at the end.
So with this one, all I'm going to do is get the Rectangular Marquee and i'll make a rough
selection
over the area I want to copy across the clean area.
Plus plenty of extra space around it. I'll go up to edit and
copy, i'll go back to the main image, and i'll choose edit
and paste. We'll just drop the opacity a little bit just so we can see
through that pasted layer and then we can pull it roughly in the right place.
And I'm really looking at trying to follow the hair, now the,
it's not going to be absolutely perfect because the hood with the, yeah, and that's,
it's just not quite in the same place but that's about as good as it's
going to get.
So we'll need to work with what we've got. Ok let's pop the opacity back up again
and I'm going to put a layer mask on there by going to layer,
layer mask, hide all.
So that will hide the layer that I've just brought in,
now we're going to bring a small area back. To bring it back I just grab myself the, the
brush tool and I make sure that my foreground color is the opposite
to the layer mask. So at the moment the layer mask is black,
so if I make my foreground color white then it will work.
And we just paint here, and as I paint I'm going to bring the hair back.
So we are just going to use a small brush to start with so I can work out
how much space I've got. Ok I can't do that bit because we will get
the hood coming through. I'll swap to black and i'll paint that back in.
So we're going to have a little bit of snow on there but I don't think that matters too
much.
Now there is a definite difference in color so this is where we're going to use a much
bigger brush.
We'll make sure we're working with white again and we'll just put a little click in
here,
just to try and feather that in slightly. Ok,
that's fine but again we got a little bit of the hood so we get a smaller
brush
and paint it back in. Now this is kind of how you have to work. You just make your
brush bigger and smaller and paint in. But when you are done, you
shouldn't be able to see the join. That's absolutely perfect. Ok so there we go.
That is the basic edit done
But what about that fake, fake snow I was talking about a moment
ago.
Well if you head over to my website at www.gavtrain.com
and you do a search in the search box for snow,
you'll find my instant snow action. You can download into Photoshop or Photoshop
Elements
and it'll give you instant snow at the click of a button.
Now I've already run the action because it does take a minute or two to run so
I've got a couple of snowy layers that it has created here and we'll just drag these on and i'll
show you
that we can add in extra snow even fake snow.
And that works really well just to add that extra level of snow
into the image, and there you go. There is my Red Riding Hood in the snow picture completed.
Well if you have enjoyed this video and you want to see more videos from
myself
and the other amazing presenters here on Adorama TV you know what you've got to do.
You've got to click on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey and thanks for watching.
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