Hey this is Daniel Norton,
I'm here in my studio in New York City
with Paulina and today we're gonna do
kind of a fun thing
every once in a while I'll do this, you
know, I see an old shot that I like, not
not an old shot like that I made, I'm not
that old...
and we had a cool shot of Audrey Hepburn,
and I thought you know same facial
structure, kind of you, kind of had the
similar, both beautiful women with dark
hair I guess, you know.
there you go, whatever, I thought it was a
cool shot, I thought the look of it would
work well for her, and as I was looking
at it, I'm thinking well this was
probably shot on a film set, it's a very
old picture, I tried to to locate who
shot it originally, and I couldn't find
it, so I'm guessing it's probably some
film still you know, something like that
and I'm looking at it and it's pretty
clear to me that it's a bunch of kind of
you know, maybe like the hot lights like
fresnels or something that were on a
film set that were lighting it up and
they brought her over there and made a
nice portrait, which is how a lot of
times I did those kind of shots, and at
first I was like well I can break out my
hot lights, so I could do whatever but I
thought, why don't I do it with more
modern stuff to kind of show how to
create something similar using kind of
what we, how we shoot today, right,
those tools that we use now.
So what this is actually, a three light shot
you know, cuz why not right?
So the, it's, get a little unusual to,
one of the reason why I picked the shots
because it's got a very very heavy top
hair light, which is not something you
see very often, so I thought that'd be
cool to do, and for that I'm using my
Octa, because I know that I wanted the
light to be relatively soft, so I don't
get like blown out hair, because I
knew I was gonna make the exposure high,
but the softness of the light will help
kind of graduate that, you know, that
exposure so that won't be like blah, and
you know sometimes when you take a
really hard light behind someone, you
smack them in the hair with it, it just
becomes this like weird halo, this will
be a bit more of a glow, I did have to
put a grid on it though, it, so there's a
3ft Octa above, and a B1X with a
grid on it, put the grid on there because
the light was bouncing everywhere, and it
was lighting my background up, and I
wanted the background to be a bit darker,
and rather than taking down my gray
background, I'm putting up a black one,
right, what's the other option, I put a
grid on it, simple enough right, so that's
what kind of my overhead light.
The, we're gonna go through, I'll do each one of
these as we go, but I'm just gonna
explain them all first.
The next light, which is kind of the
keylight basically,
is this V1X here, with the Chimera extra
extra small in it.
This is kind of coming and feathering
past the the front of her, she's gonna
look towards the source, it's gonna give
it shape to her face, give light in her
eyes, make a nice even light, but it is
gonna throw some shadow like under her
chin on the side of her nose, on her
cheekbones, and for that we're gonna fill
in, with, and this is probably kind of
unusual, I chose to use a beauty dish
right, you always gonna bang the beauty dish
when you do it, right.
It's a silver beauty dish, I'm putting that
difference in specularity, that's kind of
my call back to the old, old way of
working, you know, they use these big pan
lights with silver reflectors, so to kind
of tie in that vibe with something that
would use now silver beauty dish no grid,
that's my fill light, so let's walk
through and do each one of these lights,
and I'll show you what we're getting the
camera set at f/8 at 1/200th of a second,
ISO 100, so none of this light in the space
is affecting my shot, and I'm gonna start
with my overhead light, turn that guy on
and let me just show you what I'm
getting here, okay, so this is gonna give
us just that kind of glow on the hair
right, again it's bright but it's not
blown out, and it's not something I
would normally do now, so it's kind of
fun to do something different, it also
gives the shoulders some light, you know
in this case it's kicking and hitting
her earring and stuff, we'll see,
giving her some separation here, even though
she's wearing a dark outfit, so that's
basically it, I mean otherwise you know,
you wouldn't do just the light unless
you were around like 20/20 or something
and it was like let me tell you what
happened in this company when nobody was
you know this is just a hair light, so.
Do they even have 20/20 anymore - is that
show anywhere?
Okay we're in 2020.... lols
anyways I just figured
that out halfway
through the thing I'm figuring out its 2020 huh.
All right I might try that one off, for a
second time, I do each one separately,
guys I could show, you all right so now
I'm gonna turn on my other lights, so
that was in my A group, let me turn that
guy off in my B group, which is this guy
right here, we're gonna get kind of like
I said, a wash of light across, or a fill
light a key light I should say there we
go, cool, right, nice, pretty light on their
face, right, creating shape right, even
though it's a softbox it's still a
relatively hard light because it's kind
of small, it's kind of far away, but it's
giving her that overall light on her
face, creating shadow pattern, creating
depth, and we see that all the side of
her face is in shadow, which we're gonna
fill in with our third light,
so let me turn this guy off,
and just show you the third light for a
second, this is now the beauty dish in
the front, the silver beauty dish, this is
basically our fill light, good, all right,
and that's why it's you know,
underexposed, because it's a fill, so this
is the look that's gonna give, it's gonna
fill in that side of the face, that's
dark over here right, so these two
combined are gonna give us right there,
yes right nice even light across the
face, but it still has some shadow
pattern, and again you can dial this in
as you see fit, if I wanted that to be a
little bit darker, but I'm not gonna mess
with it yet until I have my third light,
in which my A light, so let's fire that
up, yeah there we go,
let's get the hand in there like the
traditional pose, or of chin down a
smidge I think, - now what's important
for this, it is a little bit limiting
because we're kind of copying a shot.
Is... we want to make sure she's looking off
towards this light, if she's not what's
gonna end up happening is she's gonna
create different shadow pattern, but here
we're trying to replicate like I said, so
now the hair is nice and lit up, her eyes
look big and bright, we have shadow here
but it's filled in nicely, she's not
overexposed anywhere,
something is wrong though, what is not... oh
it's in color...
I only the world was in color back
then, I'm not sure, we'll have to ask
somebody much older than me, so I'm gonna
go, I'm gonna Capture One, I'm gonna throw
a black and white on here, now we have
nice contrast in there, you know what's
great about shooting tethered like this
and use it applying a style now, is I can
shoot to the style right, if I looked at
it and I was like oh you know what, I can
actually just my light to make sure it's
gonna look good, that's one reason why I
always say, you should try to shoot, if
you're gonna shoot black and white, you're
gonna shoot with a special effect on it
or whatever, shoot tethered, put that in
in the beginning, that way you're seeing
it as you go, alright, so let's shoot a
few... good.
I'm just gonna play around a little bit
and see what we get,
alright cuz we got the main shot, the
actual shot was easy, you may find that
we might find something we actually like,
more, very nice, that's pretty cool, yeah
and actually it's it's fairly versatile
right, to replicate the shot exactly we
need to well judge it, b,rought the soft box up,
not much, but you know we brought out
exactly that, but even even moving around
a bit, it still looks nice, now what I
would say is, that actually is kinda nice
there, I think the chin down plays the
best though, no matter what we do, I think
I know and we never haven't you know,
he'd never tell anybody to ever put
their chin down, so it's so unusual right.
I'm always ....
that's good,
good like that, focusing good, I want to
make sure I have enough space above her,
so I'm just kind of even, though I get my
box in the shot, I'm not worried about it,
if I was in TTL I'd have to be worried
because it would throw out my exposure,
having the light in the shot, but since
I'm in manual right now, I'll just crop
that in after, I don't want have to
struggle with my composition you know?
And what's interesting about this too by
the way is, that if you look at the
original shot, there's like some
interesting shadows on the wall, there's
stuff so I kind of was playing with that
here, and leaving that here, so it has a
bit of an environment in there, you know?
we're seeing a bit of shadow on the wall,
we're seeing some shape and that's how,
there is no shadow, so I thought that
would work for us, if that bothered you
then you would, I would, you'd end up
having to do probably raise the Octa,
would get rid of that shadow out of the
shot.
This shadow down here is caused
primarily by this beauty dish in the
front, so you'd have to change the angle
of the beauty dish, but then I thought it
was more important to get the light
correct on her, and also to make it look
you know, as much like the original shot
as possible,
but adding our own flavor yeah, our own
flavor, what flavor are you, will find out
in future episodes, so if you want to
know what flavor we are... I'm probably
like chocolate chip or something, some
flavor is I'm really good.
Yeah so if you want to know more about Paulina
I'll put her information in the
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sure to follow me DanielNortonPhotographer
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