In this video, I have a look at how changing just three things will
completely change the mood of a portrait.
AdoramaTV presents 'Take and Make Great Photography' with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama,
the camera store that has everything for us photographers. In this
video I'm going to have a look at portraits and how it's possible to completely change
the mood of a portrait by only changing a few things. Now, I'm going to look at three
different things. I'm going to look at the obvious stuff, for example, if you change
model's expression or pose, that can change the mood in your shot then there's
more subtle things. Lighting. That can alter the mood as well.
Finally, I'm going to have a look at post-processing, a bit of Photoshop, because of
course you can do almost anything in Photoshop, possibly. We'll see how that
works out, but first let's get on with the shoot.
Once again I've been joined by Roger and he's still, well, he's still a boxer that's had a bit of a bad day but the
moods that we're going to simulate are two. Well, we're going to go with Roger as a victorious
boxer, who's won his fight and is looking really happy and aggressive, and we're going to go with
a sad, defeated boxer as well and Roger that's the one we're going to start with, but don't worry
we'll get to your victory very soon indeed. So for the sad shot, I'm going to use simple
lighting. One light and just light it nice and soft and gentle. So, this is the light
I am going to use. This is the Adorama Streaklight 360 and I've got it in a small
softbox. So let's just bring this down a little bit closer into Roger. Now I've got it on a
boom arm, simply so it doesn't appear in the shots, and we're going to get in nice and close.
Nice and close should give nice, soft lighting. The closer and bigger the light source,
the softer and more moody the shot becomes. Now, I want to shoot at f8 as
my aperture, so I need to set this light to produce f8 amount of light . Now we
could do it by trial and error but as I've got a flash meter,
I like to use that, and I've got my little remote control for the Streaklight here.
So I'm going to set my flash meter up so it's the same camera settings and then
I'll pop the little dome underneath Roger's chin, pointing back at the light
press the test button and I get a flash meter reading of f5.6. Now, that might be
fine. I could just dial in f5.6 on my camera but because I want f8, I'm going to
increase the power of that light by one stop and that's three clicks here on the remote.
And there you go, f8. So, I've got the light set exactly how I want it. Let's set the camera up and take some shots.
So there we go, Roger. That was your failure.
But now we get to do your victory. So for the victory I'm going to do things a little bit differently.
The first thing you'll notice is the keylight. The keylight is
exactly the same as the last shot. I still want that soft lighting on Roger's
face. It's the same power setting as well, f8, so what's the difference? Well, the
difference is the background lights. I've got two small speedlights either side and
just behind Roger and they're going to be set to put a little bit of rim lighting on the shoulders
and on the back. That adds contrast to the shot and that contrast is going to give this
picture a bit more aggression and that's what I'm looking for. Now, I need to work
out how bright to make these lights. Now,
remember I'm working at f8 for my camera and f8 for the key light. So the background lights,
I want them to be about a stop less, f5.6. So I've got my flash meter, I've got my remote trigger. I'm going to point
the little dome, back at the light I want to meter. OK, that is f8, so that's too much light
onto Roger. I just need to reduce the power here. I can either do it on the remote or of course I
can come round to the flash itself, we can just bring that down a little bit lower in power
and now I'm getting f5.6. I repeat the process on the other side, here we go and
by chance that's actually on f5.6. Brilliant, don't you love it when that happens? So that's the
light set. Let's do some pictures.
Well, that was fantastic fun and of course it's not just about the lighting is also the
model's attitude, the posing, it all helps to bring the two different moods
together. The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle is post-processing. So Photoshop
can help too. Let's jump into Photoshop and see how we edit some of the pictures
and we're going to do that right now
Photoshop is the key that's going to unlock the mood in these pictures but before I get to Photoshop
let's just have a look at the pictures as they came out of the camera, starting with
the first shoot, the defeated look. I asked Roger to give me a pose that looked
defeated and the simplest way to do that it just ask to get a big sigh and when
somebody sighs, their shoulders drop, their body relaxes and it all becomes,
well he looks just looks deflated doesn't he? He looks fantastically beaten. That worked well. The lighting
helped as well. The single light up very close means that I get a nice, natural
vignette around the outside and soft light on Roger which is exactly what I
wanted for this shot.
Compare that to the victorious shot in this one, where the energy that comes
through in this picture is enormous and we built that up in the shoot. We had a great
conversation. We were really getting enthusiastic, you can see it in Rogers
arms, how their veins are standing up and the facial expression. Perfect. The lighting on this one,
well, those two little edge lights may be small, but they give this lovely
separation from the edge of roger and the background. Now the key here was to
make sure they weren't too bright. It's very easy to get edge lights that overpower the
shot and burn out detail, particularly bearing in mind what I'm going to do next
in Photoshop, because it's easy to lose that detail in Photoshop as you increase
contrast. Let's have a look. I'm going to start with the first shot and defeated
look. I'm going to change the white balance rather than having it the Air Shot white
balance, I'm going to pull it down towards the colder end. He's getting the cold shoulder, he's
defeated its a
sad, cold shot. I'm then going to come to contrast and increase the contrast. Now,
I'm increasing the contrast really just to make these nice blacks a little bit
deeper so it adds to the mood of the shot and I've gone a little bit more than perhaps
I wanted to because I know I'm going to change the contrast again with clarity.
Clarity only works on the mid tones and usually I push it up, make it much more
clarity increased, but in this case I want to decrease it, I want to smooth out
some of the detail, really to give this a softness and that's going to add to the
mood, the gentle downbeat mood of this shot. The main thing, however, is going to
be vibrance. Vibrance, well the colors at the moment look like I shot them but if
I decrease the vibrance I can really make the colors feel muted and that is
what adds the mood that I want for this shot. Now once I've done all those adjustments you need
to glance back over, particularly at the histogram and say there's a bit of a gap
up there so we'll just increase the highlights and increase the whites just
so we have a decent range of tones and just adjust things accordingly.
That's the sort of downbeat mood. What about the victorious shot?
Well, let's jump over to that one. So for this one, I'm going to give it similar but subtly different
changes. I'm not going to change the temperature. I'll leave that as is for
now. I am going to add in the contrast, however, because I still want those nice
deep, dark blacks in the shot. The clarity this time, rather than decreasing clarity
I'm going to increase the clarity and I'm going to increase it a lot and that's
really going to add to the energy in this picture by giving it a very sharp
defined edge. Similarly I'm going to come down to the vibrance and I'll punch up the
vibrance a little bit just to make sure the colors are nice and punchy. It may be
just a little bit too red on Roger's face, so because I just want to adjust these
areas, I'm just going to get the local adjustment brush, come down to the
saturation and just set that and that alone. We'll drop it down, maybe 30%,
and with a nice small brush I'll just paint a little bit less saturation just
across Roger's face and we can
fine tune that to get it about right. There's the two different moods completed, starting
with a downbeat and defeated low-key, low saturation shot followed by a much more
energetic, much more punchy, saturated and clarity-driven shot as well.
Well, there you go. If you've enjoyed this video and you want to see more from myself
and the other amazing presenters here on AdoramaTV. You know what you've got to do?
You've got to click on the subscribe button. I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.
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