[SINGING]
Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens we’re going to shoot forty photographs
of dentists on white. We’ve only got ten hours to do this so we’d better get started
and see what we can do.
[MUSIC]
We’ve got our first workshop coming on April 30th. We’re going to be at a fabulous airplane
museum here in Los Angeles. I’m going to show you how to work on location in all different
type of lighting situation and then I’m going to let you take great images for your
portfolio. Julene’s gonna end up our day with some fabulous editing tips that will
help take those images and really set them apart. It’s on April 30th, you’ll love
it. Go to theslantedlens.com and sign up today. It’s a very limited group, so you better
get over there.
[MUSIC]
Alright we better get started. Just cleaned up our tooth here before we get started. We’re
shooting forty photographs of dentists in ten hours, on ten different sets. We’ve
got an hour per set. We’re gonna move from set to set to set. We have three setups going
here. So we’ve got our set A, set B, and set C. We set all of these up the day before
so they’re all ready to go for our first shot. As we do our first shot we move onto
the second shot, we’ve got a crew that’ll come behind, change everything up. And by
the time we get back to set A again, it’ll all be set for the new shot and we’ll shoot
again. So we’ve got to go really fast. This is for a calendar for a large dental group.
It’s gonna be a great promotion for their office. It’s all a lot of crazy stuff. Big
tooth, and big toothbrushes, and fun stuff to photograph.
So let’s talk about these four lights we’re putting up on the white background. If you
just slap them up there and don’t think about them very much they’re gonna do a
lot of crazy things to you. What I do is I put two heads on each side of the white background.
I put one up and one down on the same stand. One on the stand and one on a Bogen clamp.
The reason I do that is there’s not enough real estate to put two stands next to each
other. You can’t get them very close to each other, it’s just easier. One up and
one down. Then I put that same thing on the other side. So a tree of two, and a tree of
two. The two on the top are gonna be pretty much straight toward the background, and turned
slightly toward the middle. Not very much. You don’t want them to spill onto the person
in the foreground. Tw two on the bottom you’re gonna turn slightly towards the middle and
slightly down. Slightly toward the middle and slightly down ‘cause they’re going
to create a nice, kind of glow onto the floor. Make that transition do you don-- don’t
have a hard line from the floor into the background. Now you’ve got a nice white background.
I’ll meter that. Kind of turn them till I get that as smooth as I can. I want them
to be, say we’re gonna be on this at F16, on the background. That gives me a nice white.
And I’m gonna want to be F11 on my subject matter. So I get one stop brighter in the
background than my subject matter. That gives me a nice clean white. You know I know now
days everyone’s gonna say well we’ll just outline it and you know --. But you can shoot
on a white background that gives you a clean outline and have it look very nice and it
doesn’t have to bleed forward or spill onto the subject matter. This is how I do it. We’re
gonna do --. This is forty photographs. Do you know how much retouching that it? We’re
gonna clean it up, do it in the camera and it’s gonna look very nice.
So F16 on the background. And yes, I did use a meter. Our meter across gave me F16; F11
on my subject matter up front. So I have my four umbrellas with a background. And then
I’ve got a nice rim light coming from the camera right side. And then a nice key light
upfront. I’m using a medium octodome as my keylight. The reason I love the octodomes
is because they’re slightly, uh, shallower than the softboxes. Which means you get a
little harder highlight. And I like that look a lot. It looks very pretty. So there’s
my key light, my rim light, I’ve got four lights on the background. We had this on three
different setups.
Now we’re gonna play around a little bit. Like we’ve got a boxing ring. On that one
our lighting’s a little different. We’re gonna have one heavy rim light from behind
and then just a small Octodome above. It’s gonna open up the -- the shadows just a little
bit. Kind of open up the faces, get a little highlight on the faces. Then we’ve got a
huge 72-inch white umbrella upfront. It’s just gonna open the whole scene up, give us
a nice fill light. So, the light is gonna change a little bit on each of these. But
just understanding that principle of getting a nice, solid white background will help you
control the light and give you a nice white background. We’ve got three setups here.
And so we’re using three different types of strobes to get enough heads on set to be
able to light all three of these at once. So some of them, like the power packs from Dynalite,
have a built-in PocketWizard. With a trigger on the camera they fire, they pair, it’s
fabulous.
So the first sets on channel one, we also use the second set on channel one. And what
we did was we put two heads in the middle, umbrellas, and so we’ll use them for the
first set and then we just have to turn them slightly for the next set and use them there.
So we don’t have to put up four heads in the middle we can just use two. It helped
us save on, uh, heads that we had on set. So that was fabulous to be able to save that.
So we could do PocketWizard channel one on this set, PocketWizard channel one on the
second set but then PocketWizard channel two on the last set. Because on the last set we’re
gonna have to put ch-- uh, PocketWizards on all the different strobes because a lot of
them don’t have built in. We have a-- a Speedotron pack in there. We’ve got some,
uh, of the PhotoFlex heads. We’ve got a whole menagerie of stuff we’re using to
make that happen. And some Baja heads as well. So we’ve got everything working today to get all three of these sets lit
and, uh, going to aw--. Going to town. So let's take a look at some of the things we rigged for the shot today.
[MUSIC]
So there you go. I hope you enjoyed looking at the photographs we did on our white background.
I hope you learned something about how to set up and photograph on a white background,
how to make that happen. It’s a lot of fun to do. So keep those cameras rollin’ and
keep on clickin’.
The month of March is winding down. Your mother-in-law’s already signed up for this. Your mother’s
mother-in-law already signed up for it. How come you haven’t signed up for the Syrp
setup? It’s a two access setup. Go to TheSlantedLens.com. My mother-in-law signed up for it.
[MUSIC]
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Slanted Lens. You know, brush up on your lighting
techniques. Put a little fluoride in your photographs there. And you should floss. You know, tell
Grandma to break out those dentures and give them a nice focusing occ-- I mean flossing
occa-- ‘casionally. Whatever the word is. Anyway, subscribe to The Slanted Lens.