Hi everybody..
welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace, and in this
episode I'm going to give you an
exercise that you can do at home to help
you improve your lighting skills.
Now this is a follow up to a video I did a
few months ago in a little apartment I
was renting in Croatia, where I
illuminated a bowl of fruit, and so so
many people watched that video,
I think we had about a hundred and fifty
thousand people that have watched it so far...
so if you haven't seen it... go watch that video.
First so a lot of people said please do
another one of these, and that's exactly
what we're going to do today.
So the exercise is to improve your lighting
skills and your understanding of how to
shape light, not necessarily how to get a
fantastic photo in the exercise itself.
So you're doing this so that you can
hone your skills, so that when you have
to create an amazing photo, you can do it,
and so let me just show you the setup
that I have here, because I'm in a very
very small space.
I invaded my friend's house.
My friend Keith and I borrowed a
bunch of his stuff - we borrowed his camera and
his flashes, and well everything really
in this video is borrowed from Keith,
and I'm in a small space intentionally
because I want to make sure that you can
duplicate this where you are.
Now the stuff that I'm using, you don't
have to use.
You can use any kind of speed lights
or studio strobes or whatever you have
on hand.
It's going to work just fine, the point
to remember is to learn about how to
shape light.
All right now, let me just give you a quick
tour of this space and
then we'll get to the exercise, because
things are so small I am tethering my camera.
So I've got a tether table here set up, and I
am tethered to a 5d Mark III.
So this camera is not going to change
location or anything, it's just set on a
tripod, and then I've got a controller
for my speed lights that I'll be using.
I'll show you in just a second, but this
has got a 70-200 mm lens, and
it is right on axis with my bottle of wine.
that's just on a makeshift table,
and some wood that I found laying around
in Keith's workshop, and then to each
side of our bottle of wine we have some
C stands with arms on them.
those will come in to use a little bit later,
so these can be just any kinds of stand
you'll see as we get into that, why I'm
using those, and then on each side of the wine
bottle I have speed lights.
So I've got one on the left, and then I have one over
here on the right.
Now these are mounted vertically and the
reason for that will
become apparent a little bit later as we
go through this.
These are also set to slave mode, so I've
got a wireless controller on the 5D Mk III
and that's going to make sure everything is good.
Solet's get to it now that we know about
the space, hopefully you can recreate
this in your own living room.
Now remember you can use any kind of
speed-lights or studio strobes or
whatever you have.
The goal here is remember to learn
about shaping light, not necessarily to
get a fantastic photo of a wine bottle
although that's a bonus.
We really want to dive in, and learn about
specular highlights and diffusion, and the things
that we're going to get into, so to start...
what I'm going to do is just to take a
photo with things set up the way they are.
Now remember my camera is set to... my
flashes are set to TTL mode...
so they're in auto exposure mode,
and then the other thing I've done is...
these flashes are to the side of the wine
bottle and they're just sort of pointing in
front of the wine bottle,
and I've also raised these
arms up here,
so they're not going to
block any of the light.
Hopefully I don't poke my eye out...
and so the other thing I
need to mention, is earlier I showed you
that the speedlite are mounted
vertically, the reason for that is we
have a vertical bottle, and what I want
to do is I want to have a vertical highlight.
I want to light as much of
that bottle, so if they were horizontal
normal we'd only get a little strip of
light across the bottle, I don't want
that, I want to illuminate the entire
bottle, so I've changed those two
vertical orientation, if you're not
familiar with the vertical orientation,
horizontal orientation of speedlights.
I've made a video about it, and I've
included the description... in the
description of this video, I've included
a link to that video.
There's all kinds of things about zooming
and orienting, and that kind of stuff with
speed lights that you should know about
if you're new to them, go watch that video.
All right so let's take a photo, so I have
tethered everything to my laptop.
I wanna make sure I can wake up my little
speed lights back there.
Let's take our very first photo this is a f/8,
ISO 100, shutter of 160... blam.
This is just right out of the camera, it's horrible
it's really bad, so let's look and see
exactly what's wrong with this photo.
So the first thing you can see is we have a
really dark streak in the front of our
wine bottle right here, the highlights
are blown out and then these specular
highlights are just nasty.
Specular highlights are the reflections of the
lights illuminating our scene so
anything that is bright that reflects in
a shiny surface that's called a specular
highlight.
Now these specular highlights
are shaped in the same way that the
lights are shaped, so we can see in our
wine bottle here that on the shoulder of
the bottle we have these two vertical
lights, those are the speed lights.
They're really hard, and it's also because
that light is so small and.. and hard..
we're getting all of this dust that's
showing up, and I think I got a
fingerprint over here that's showing up.
We also see some stuff up here on the
neck of the bottle. It's just not very good,
also the because we're shooting at f/8
the fall-off isn't very good, so on this
table thing here that I've made, I really
like to have that fall out of focus a
little bit more, so.. let's get to our
second thing.
The first thing I want to
do with changing all this up is...
I want to use this stuff right here, this is my
diffusion material called translum..
there's all kinds of different types of
diffusion material, but I really love
this stuff...
So you can see that it is
translucent, and it allows light to go
through it, and then when light goes
through it.. it scatters...
now the thing with this stuff is,
you can sort of fold it
and shape it and do anything you want to.
It.. it's similar to the stuff that's on
the front of a softbox, that's a little
bit heavier duty than that, and so what
I'm going to do is... I'm going to fold
this over like that, and so it's going to
go through that two different times.
So I'm just gonna drape this right on top
of my little stands here, if I don't kill
myself, so let me get this done.
Okay so now I have that diffusion
material and those lights are going to
shoot through that.
The light is going to scatter...
that's what the fusion does, so
let's just once again, let's go with our
tethered laptop.
I'll make sure that my
remote flashes are on, let's take another
photo and then look at this second photo
and you will see that that changes
things dramatically.
So let's compare these two..
side-by-side the before and
the after image, and check it out see how
the specular highlights,
the reflections of the flashes has changed
considerably.
On the second photo you can see there's
these big wide swaths of light instead
of these little dots, the other thing it
does is it smooths out all that dust, and
the fingerprints and all that stuff that
was on there.
Now we don't really see
that it has fixed that it's sort of like
shooting with a softbox with somebody
that has a bad complexion, or problems
with their skin.
Having soft light really
helps out, but we still have some issues
here.
Check this out, we have this little
reflection right here.
We've got another one right there
what the heck is that?
Well those are reflections of these
light stands right here, so the lights
coming in, bouncing off of those, into our
wine bottle, and it's showing up so we
need to get rid of that.
The other thing, if we look at the back of
our table right here,
you can see that I didn't do
a very good job of positioning my flash,
and so that light is spilling onto the table.
It should be diffused all the way
across so let's do the next thing.
I'm going to turn these stands around and
then we'll take another shot, and then
we'll keep tuning things in
all right...
so I've turned that around really.
We're trying to eliminate those
highlights on the bottle from the
reflection of the stand.
So once again let's take a photo.
I'm going to wake up my remote flashes,
make sure they're ready to go,
and now we'll take another picture.
Blammo... let's see the difference, we can
zoom into our wine bottle now.
Notice those two reflections, have
disappeared because we put those
behind... however I
created yet another problem with my wine
bottle, and that is if you look right
here, you see that white line coming down
this side, and there's another white line
coming down this side...
Those are still reflections of those light
stands, now they're just on the back
of the wine bottle instead of the front,
and so to fix that, I've got a secret tip that
is gaffers tape.
So I'm just gonna put some
black tape on those stands, and see if we
can eliminate that tiny reflection.
Tape has been applied, let's take another
photo and see how we did.
So once again that's all tethered in, so we
can really control what we're seeing,
and now take a look right here on that at
the top of this wine bottle where we have
that really bright line,
we've gotten rid of
that reflection we're dialing in and
tuning what we are doing with our
specular highlights.
Now there's one other thing I want to do
and that is I want to see if I can soften
this.
This specular highlight right here by
maybe making the the light a little bit
wider, or spread it out a little bit more.
So on the front of the speed light there's a
little attachment, you can pull out on
most of them that is for wide-angle
lenses it spreads things out and then
the other thing that you can do is
there's a little white card that you can
pop up, that allows you to bounce light.
So I'm gonna take both of those,
and put them on the
speed lights, and see what happens to our photo.
So let's start right there...
Okay, those have been popped out again,
let's take a photo, see what changes.. ha!
Check that out.. by changing the spread
of light that didn't really help the bottle too much,
but it changed the background pretty radically.
Notice if we go back one, look at the
difference in exposure there.
So let's check this out, and see exactly what's
happening, because I think what's
happening is, the light is bouncing off
the front's of those little cards, and
into the background.
So all I'm gonna do now is,
I'm going to put down those
little white cards, and see what that does.
So putting down the one on the right.
Putting down the one on the left or
right left, I get those backwards, and
now let's go again and take a photo.
Let's see what that does to our background.
it changes things, how crazy is that?
So again let's look at those before and after.
Look at what that's done to our
background, all I did was I put that
little white card down.
That's it, so we're getting there, the next thing I
want to do is... this is an eTTL mode.
I want to have some control over my
exposure so I can do some things with my
post-production to get this exactly
where I want it to be.
The other thing that I've noticed here..
is on the table - we're spilling light on the
table I need to fix that so let's fix the spill
of light.
Then let's switch this to manual
mode and dial everything in, exactly like
we want it.
So let me fix that spill on
the background.
The way I'm going to do that is....
I'm just going to go to each of
these studio strobes... or these speed
lights here, and see which one is
spilling.
So I'm going to fire this guy...
I can clearly see that is spilling on
that, so I'm going to move this just
forward a little bit.
So we're not getting that light on there...
there you go.
Now let's see if we've got that...
exactly we want it, to see if we can fix the
spill, again take a shot,
and we've fixed that spill...
so notice how that's changed the table
dramatically.
So if we look at this, whoops...
if you look at this one,
compared to this one..
look at the table, see how we've changed
that and also by feathering the light..
so I move those lights a little bit farther
forward.
We have changed how that light
is falling on the table.
It's getting more and more pleasing as we go...
so the last thing I want to do is flip
everything into manual mode, and then
crank open my aperture.
So I'm at about f/2.8, and see if we can
get some shallow depth of field to get us
almost all the way there,
so all I'm going to do is on my remote
control here... take that off
my camera, I'm going to go into my
settings here, so I'll change that from
each TTL mode to manual mode ok..
then I've got my handy-dandy light meter
and what I'm going to be doing with this
guy... is I'm going to be metering it toward
these side panels.
So I'm going to trigger with this...
so I'll take a meter reading.
There we go... and that meter is
exactly at f/ 2.8... and so I got really
lucky, that's exactly where I want to be,
so I'm going to change my camera to be exactly
at f/2.8 as well, and then we'll take one
more photo, so in my tethered, in my
Lightroom here, I can change that so I'm
going to go to f/2.8, and then I will
take another shot.
Aha... now look at this,
now we are almost there,
let's take a look at the
very first photo we took,
compared to the very last photo.
We took and you can see the journey
that we've made... it is crazy,
so we went from a really hard
ugly bottle, to a really nice soft
beautiful looking bottle.
Now the last thing we need to do is,
just a touch of post-production.
I'll do that really fast,
and speed it up.
I'm just gonna add some
vignettes and change some exposures
really fast, and I'll show you the final
result!
Well we clearly improved our
bottle shot by shaping the light.
Now there's a lot more that we could do,
there's a lot more fine-tuning on our
specular highlights that we could do.
There's some things on the front of the bottle.
I'd like to fix... the shoulders
aren't exactly equal, and so if I had a
lot more time, I would do that, but that's
the point of this video,
you have the time, and the challenge is for
you to do this exercise in your home studio
or back yard, or wherever you can do this,
and try some of these things.
So remember...
First... set everything up, and just full
auto mode take a photo.
Start adding diffusion... change where your lights are
located, change how they're diffused,
and the angle of view of the flash itself.
If it's a wide or focused, see what happens
raise and lower those lights.
Make sure you tick really closely to see if
there's reflections that you can mask
using some tape or some cloth..
something like that, and then once all of
that's done, flip over into manual mode if you
haven't already, and really start dialing
in things, like exposure and depth of
field, and then finally hop into
Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever your
preference is for editing photos, and
then do some post-production and see
where you get compare your first and
last attempt, and see the difference, and
then what will happen is, you'll get some
knowledge, you'll get some experience and
then when you have to go out and shoot
something for a client or a friend,
something that matters, you'll know what
you're doing because you've done the exercise.
Thank you so much for joining me
for this episode of Exploring Photography.
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you've seen it the whole time.
Thanks again for joining me
and I will see you next time.