In the area light: ep.250

Hey this is Daniel Norton,I'm here in my studio in New York Citywith Polina and we're gonna shoot kind ofa fun fashion look today... yeah!Little disco fashion action...right? but what I really want to talk about whilewe're creating this shot is, using kindof zones in your set to light, so insteadof just throwing a big light up, which isoftentimes what we do when we're juststarting, especially one big huge source,it looks good, it lights everything up,it's really good, we're gonna talk about kind ofseparating things, because as you get into more commercial type work, you'regoing to want to be able to control yourset better, you know you may wantexacting light on different parts ofyour set, so we're gonna use, I find themore I shoot the smaller the lightsources are that I use, which might seemthe opposite of what people would think,but that gives you a lot more control.

so we're gonna talk a little bit about that.We're gonna light up the set, and we cancreate some fun pictures, so I made adiagram because you know I have adegree in art, pretty good right, sobasically this is our setup here, this little staris you, you are a star right,so we have a little star, that's wherePaulina is, she's essentially on thisrunway of grey paper that we set up,which I'm gonna use for depth.We'll talk about that as we startshooting it, and what I'm doing is, I'mlighting the background actually with aHMI, I have dedolight HMI, and inthat HMI, it's fitted with a projector,in that HMI I have a glass gobo,basically it's gonna, I've used thesebefore... basically it's gonna throw apattern, but it's also gonna be color andin texture, it's really interesting andyou can put them in another focus, andplay around with them, in this case Ichose this kind of red, yellowy onebecause I thought it worked well withthe outfit, with the sparkles...and that just hit in the background so that's aconstant light source.So we gonna haveto deal with that in a second,we'll be here, to, to camera left,I've got a Profoto B2 pack with two heads and,I've actually got to strip boxes,now the reason why I'm using two, 1 by 3strips is. 

Because generally when you usea larger strip, you know, you you may wantto control the power up and down.Like I might want brighter on her face, ordarker on the outfit, as I'm shootingthroughout the day.Let's see if I'm doing fashion or somethingyou know she might have a white pantson, let's say and a dark top or somethinglike that, so I like to do this,versus getting one long one.It just works better for me, it's a goodway to work if you only have one head,and you want to use one single block youcan certainly do that, although oftentimes the longer ones, the six-foot onesare usually two feet wide, which meansthat you might put a grid on it for control,speaking of a grid, to kind of give hermore versatility and ability to move,I've got a beauty dish up here with a gridon it, that's just to punch some light on onthe front of her, and to her face, so shedoesn't have to work towards this lightthe whole day long.

Right this is to give her a nicesilhouette, this here, right here is tolight her face, so if she works this wayshe's fine, but if she turns morestraight she's lit here, and even if sheturns more to the side, she'll be fine.The other thing I've added for a littlebit of contrast is a black card on thisside, that's there for two reasons, one isthat the Sun keeps coming in and out,cause I am in a daylight studio, so I want tomake sure we don't have the Sun hit,which we'll talk about more in a minute.The other reason for that is, becausewhen you're wearing something that'sreflective, like it has this has shine init, if you put black there it willreflect the black, and actually addcontrast, so it's kind of a nice way to work.so I'm gonna set up all theselights, I'll show you where they all areand let's go for it.Right so TTL is wonderful, you see meuse it all the time, but for this kind ofthing I like to use a light meter.I'm using the sekonic here,the 858, and I'll do the background last.So I'll start with her, I know we want toshoot at f/4 and my the sync speed of mycamera is like one 1/60th of asecond, so I'm gonna set my meter at 100 ISO,and 1/160th of a second, and what I'm gonnado is, I'm going to point the light, I'mjust using my other Profoto remotehere, I'm gonna do one at a time, so Iwill do the, I'll do the beauty dishfirst, I want to put the beauty dishwrite it up for to start with anyways, soI'm gonna meter it essentiallypointing it at the light, okay, we're alittle down, so I'm gonna bring it up atiny bit, okay, we're getting 4,4.1 actually, I'm actually going to go downone more from that, cuz I probably wantthis to be a tiny bit duller, I don'twant to look like she's overly lit,so that's that one, then I'm gonna comearound to this side.

I'm switch to my seat with my C-group,which is a, which is this light over here,now there's a couple of different waysthat you could do this,some people will turn this one off andthen do this one,that's important if they're touchingeach other, but I'm going to meterdown below,so I'm not gonna worry about that.What I'm actually going to do is,I'm gonna leave all the lights on,and I'm gonna close... this meter has thisthing where I can close this as part of it.That will keep that light off of it,I'm just gonna go like this, in this case,I have them the same.Right, I have my, my two heads set thesame in the in the boxes.So it's easy enough to do, I'm gonnabring this one up a smidge as well.That's too much, perfect, f/4.01 again,so this will be a smidge brighter than thatexposure wise.Now the final thing I'mgoing to do is the background,what's kind of neat about this meter is ithas a mode that I can go into my. My constant light mode, and I can actuallyput in, not just the you know, the, theshutter speed like you'd normally do inan old-fashioned meter, I could put it inthe f/stop and the ISO,when I put this against the background,I'd make a reading,it tells me a quarter of a second,it's telling me a quarter of a second willgive me that exposure,so we should be good, let's try,I mean keep in mind that your meter isgiving you what it thinks is the rightexposure to get the saturation, etc, etc,that you want, we're probably going to goa little bit darker than that the other thingwe're gonna do to make it a little bitdarker is, I'm going to actually turn offthese overheads now, so I had these onso you guys can see me whenever you're usinglike a constant light source, you want totry to kill as much light in the spaceas possible. 

So we're gonna just killthose for now, so here we are,I'll get my Nikon here, and I'm gonna setthis guy up, good, see where we're at,so I'm here on a tripod,and I'm gonna get in a little bitclose, part of the reason for that is, Iwant to kind of elongate my space,remember the further back you are themore compressed of the space,so I mean long gating my space bygetting in closer to her,I'm also slightly tipped downagain, I'm trying to exaggerate the spaceslightly for that reason, so I'm gonnacome up on the tripod, it's good, you'regood there, and you get a focus on you.I am set it at f/4, I am at, we'll start at aquarter of a second, and we're gonnaadjust our stratosphere as we go.So I'm gonna start at a quarter, because that'swhat the media tells me to do, I'mtethered in the Capture One,we'll take a shot, and well I guess,we should listen to light meters, right,cuz that's, that's pretty darn good, right?That's a pretty good exposure, right,there, she looks well lit, right,even though I'm in a quarterof a second, she's nice and sharp,because none of the ambient light isreally hitting her right?

And we've got kind ofa nice look going on, I like that, if wewant to make the background a little bitdarker, which I kind of thought I wasgoing to, so I'Il stick to my original plan,and I'm gonna go up to,you I'll add one stop, so I'm an 1/8thof a second, again I'm not doing thatbecause I'm more worried about her moving,I'm doing it for contrast in thebackground, how bright or dark I wantthe background to be, so that's justadjusting my background, because rememberwhen you adjust your shutter speed inthis situation, it's only affecting theconstant lights, so good, like that.Okay we're tremendously low light here,so I'm kind of shooting slower, and thentry to nail my focus each time with theNikon, although these new camerashave great autofocus.Okay so come in here, and I'mfocused just on her eyes, I mean I'm at4, so she's gonna be sharp all over,but we can see now that she has thisnice kind of glow on the outfit right,and then on this side she's got a littlebit more darkness, because I had thatblack card over there, and her face againis lit very nicely, she has a, you knowlight coming from this side. 

Which givesher this a nice strip, it kind of justadds some balance and contrast.So let's shoot a few more like this,now that's gonna work for anything,look you don't you know if you're in let's say abar, or you're doing a scene of the bar,or something, I don't know why I'm in a bar firstthing in the morning, we're in a bar right,and we want to light, let's say thebackground a different way, you certainlycan do that, the idea here is that noneof our lights are touching each other.None of that light from the flash ishitting the background, and none of thelight from the constant light, is hittingher, so basically we've got two differentzones, and we're able to create ourimages wherever we want.. you know,and I left a dead spot in the middle,I did that on purpose,obviously you could like that as well,if you really want to get crazy,do one more straight on the camera,powerful, that's it, good,grab hold, take this in, now Ithink one thing I'll do just forexperimentation, even though I think thisis perfect.It's too bad when you get ittoo quickly right, we do it too fast, it'slike a day, I'm gonna actually go to amuch slower shutter, so I'm just curious,I'm gonna go to 1 second now at onesecond, some of this ambient light thatin the room in general, even thoughit looks dark in here, is probably gonnaaffect her, but let's see in this focus.If she's gonna focus one second, good,nice, oh wow, now we have like an electriccolor, so remember you know if you want,you know it's all about exposure.

Well you, okay, you were trying to holdstill which is fine, but do you knowthat's it, right, we can control that,basically with our shutter speed, and yousee that the light on her, really didn'tchange much, it changed a little bit, cuzagain some of the ambience bleeding it,let's try somewhere in the middle,I'm gonna go back to a 1/4, which is what theis recommended by the flash meter,let me do one more like that,good, one more, whenever aphotographer says one more, it always meanstwo more, we know that by now, and it's anice beautiful shot, balanced out, nicelight on her, nice light on thebackground, cool kind of a scene going on.I'm gonna come in a little closer for acouple, just come here,as you can see I am not going to actuallyphysically move, remember if I move it'sgoing to change the compression,I don't want you use the compression,so I'm just gonna zoom my lens.One reason why you uses a zoom lens.Definitely should also mention that, ah, it'sgo like that hold, focus, good, that I threw acouple more V flats in the back foreffect, you know, just to see the lightbounce around. 

Because of how we are angled,you know what I wouldn't mind doing hereactually, so stay there for asecond, so what I'm doing is, I'm noticingnow that backgrounds getting a littlemore out of focus, it's not enough out offocus cuz I'm at at f/4 right, enough,you know what's enough right, so I canactually go to my projector, and I canactually change the focus.I'm gonna knock it really out, to get it totallydifferent look.You know I don't know, I want to shootit at f/4 to get enoughfocus on her,but I want that super blurry background,look something's gonna come in here,and bang that out like that,now we've got, ultra out of focusbackground, see if you can work it veryslightly this way.I'm using white beauty dish, by the wayguys to lower the contrast a little bit.I know I usually use silver, so I know I'm going toget that question a lot,this one is white.It does have a grid on it, though so it'slowering the the highlight contrast,because it's less specular,but it's been, but becausethere's a grid on it, I'm getting morecontrast, yeah, that's okay, that was, Iwill do one more, that was pretty, thattook forever to, that's like Danieltalking about lighting instead of taking a picture.Okay, so you see it's beautiful,nice light on her, the background is blurry,like people like...Let's do one horizontally, because youknow we love horizontal shots,they know I saved it horizontal,Okay, changing my focus point,here we go, good, check that,Oh yeah I like horizontal, oh that'sactually really nice, huh, say I do likehorizontals, see what happens all right,we're doing a horizontal shot right.We're in it to win it,that's perfect, I'm gonna pull back atiny bit, to get a little more in theframe I like that.

Here we go focusing again,just focusing on our eyes, guys,I'm at, you know, quarterof a second, at f/4, lots of fours goingon, 4 is the lucky number today,and hold, good, more beautiful, that was nice.I'm curious if we bring down that toplight a bit, who's gonna come in andbring the beauty dish down just a coupleof things, just curious, I think theexposure looks good, but sometimes it'sgood to mess around a bit, let's see,yeah that's nice, we'll get to know whereyour hands are.Right there's good, good, yeah,one more that's one, good,wow that's nice, that's really cool,and I like how the light,I actually have a kind of a zoomedthe focused on the background guys,so you can see that I'm getting kind ofalmost like a vignette back there too.So we're getting all kinds of cool stuff, wegot a blurry background, we got vignette,we're just like all kinds of fun stufftoday, but that's the thing. 

Because thebackground is lit and exposed completelyseparately than my foreground light,I was able to make changes as we went,and it didn't affect the light on her,the light on her is gonna be consistentthroughout the entire shoot, which iswhat we want, we're making a portrait offashion or whatever we're doing, andthat's gonna give us the total control.Right this is all about control, whenyou're lighting you're on projects,that's what you're doing it for you know.You know you're lighting it to make itpretty, yes, but you can find pretty light.The reason why you're lighting is,because you want control, and that's whatwe're doing here, controlling it in zones.So I will put following this information inthe description, so you guys can followher, be sure to follow me @DanielnortonPhotographerand of course subscribe to Adorama TV,ring the bell and all that.I'll see you next time OnSet.

Sources of article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=924QHDy8Gc0