uHi everybody and welcome to another exciting episode of Exploring Photography right
here on AdoramaTV. I am joined by Azul Sofía right here in Mexico City
Now, we're going to do some really interesting things. Now, normally when you shoot a
portrait, you're going to put your key light in front of your model, that's normal.
Now we're going to mix things up instead of putting our light in front of our model,
we're going to do the exact opposite. I have this very, very small light right here.
This is a Profoto B2 head and what I'm going to do is I'm going to
intentionally shoot this from behind and straight into the lens of my camera and
what this is going to do is it's going to give us intentional lens flare. I'm
shooting with a 50mm lens at 1.4 wide open. Now, to get fill
light on Sofía here, what we have is behind the camera, the entire wall is
white so we're getting a lot of bounce and because of that, I'm shooting wide open
at 1.4. That makes sure that I can expose correctly. For her, I'm
shooting at about 1/160th of a second. Now this light
back here, how bright should it be? If it's not bright enough, we're not going
to get the lens flare that we want and so what I've done is I've taken my little
light meter here and I've metered this light. It comes in, let's
see, right at..it comes in at about 6.3 so that's about four stops brighter than my
aperture setting so it's actually going to be overexposed and you might think that's
wacky but the results are spectacular. We're actually going to get some angelic shots, so we're
going to shoot a few shots really quickly, I'll show you the results. And then I
want to show you how you can clean things up in Photoshop because these shots
definitely need some post-production work, so without further ado, let's shoot some pictures.
But before we start shooting, I forgot to explain one thing
that's very important. What you want to do is make sure that the modeling light is
turned on, on your flash so you can see exactly where the light is falling in your
lens. You want that to come directly into your lens
and so back here, this camera's lens, I want to make sure that this is going straight
into the lens and it's not blocked by any shadow like that. It needs to show up
in the lens and then when you position that, you can play with how much of that
light is in the lens and how much you see and how much you don't see. Sometimes you
can get it just to the edge, it'll be just fine. You're going to have to play with that
for creative effects, so now that you know that you'll sort of see me moving
around and you can understand what I'm doing. So now, let's start shooting results.
But, while you're shooting. If you're not getting the results that you want. You might want to try
to move this a little bit closer, a little bit farther away from your subject and also make
sure you play with the angle so you get just enough light in the lens to get
that beautiful lens flare, but once that's done, you're not finished yet. You
need to go into Lightroom and do some post-production to bring out the best
results, because you want to adjust the color, you want to crop out the light, get rid of
that light stand and clean things up a little bit so let's hop over to
Lightroom and I'll show you how I did it. This lighting really lends itself to
post production because as you can see out of the camera it's pretty flat and
lifeless. So let me show you what I did to this image really quickly. The first thing I
did was I cropped this image. You can see here that I cropped out the light stand on
the left hand side and the right hand side of the image, and we just got rid of that.
It's a really quick, fast crop. Now to change the color I wanted this to feel a little bit
cool and so I changed the color temperature to about 4100 degrees
Kelvin and so we really have this nice and blue kind of feeling to it and then
I also changed the tint to just under 0, so just a -2. I really need some
contrast to this image, though, and so the first thing I'm going to do here is go
into the blacks, because you can see on the histogram, we really don't have any
blacks here because that light shining into the lens lowers our contrast so I'm
going to take this down until that looks about... something like that... something about in the 50
range, -50, but the problem is now I'm getting all of the shadow detail. It'ss
starting to block up, so I'm going to counteract that by opening up my shadows
til about the opposite, so I'm about 60 here, so now we have a little bit more
contrast and you can see on the histogram that yes, you have a more contrasting
image. Now we have that nice color but I want to even push the color a little bit
more than just this. So, I'm going to go down here to my hue saturation and luminance
sliders and the first thing I want to do here is, this red of her lips really
bothers me, so I'm going to take the saturation of the red down to about -40,
-38, something like that. Then
that doesn't look so nasty to me. The other thing I want to do is I really like how this blue is
starting to pop so I'm going to increase the blue just a bit, so just above 10, so I'm
about 14. Now we're getting somewhere.
The other thing I want to do is I'm going to go into my hue sliders here and I'm going to go the blue slider and
I'm going to pull that down and what that's going to do is that's going to really give us a
different color, that neutral grey back there, now is showing up as this sort of the cyan
color. It's really sort of nice. It's a sea aqua, so we get this cool kind of cold
feeling to this, and the only other thing I'm really going to do to this I'm just
going to add a vignette to it, but not too much.
Something about the 20-25 range and so there you have it. A very, very simple
just a couple of adjustments. I really went from something that was drab to
something that has life. Now, these images as I said, really the sliding lends
itself to post-production, heavy-duty post-production. So let me show you
something that I did. I'm going to hop over into Photoshop really fast.
So we'll pop over there. Here's another image that I made the exact same adjustments
to in Lightroom and then I just imported it into Photoshop. You can see that it has all
kinds of problems and even with the adjustments of the color, it's a little
bit lifeless so I spent about a half an hour in Photoshop and I clean this up, so
I got rid of those light stands over there. I added a high pass filter to give it
a little bit more sharpness. I added some artificial lens flare, I added some sort of
stars to give it some depth, and then I just did some really cheesy stuff here
to sort of make it look a little bit more like a fantasy world and you can
see that these images have a lot of possibility for post-production because
of the way that the lighting is set up. These images are perfect if you plan on
doing heavy duty post-production. Now, there you have it. That's how you create
some angelic lens flare looks and you have to play with that a little bit to make sure you
get it right. If you remember Daniel Norton
and I tried to do this in New York and neither one of us succeeded so
the key is use a small light source. Make sure it's about four stops brighter
than the aperture that you're shooting at, play with that angle, play with the
lenses that you use. And finally you're going to get some great results and also make sure
you do your post production. If you want more information about post production
and editing and all that kind of stuff, don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV.
That way you don't miss a single episode. It's absolutely free, and also check the
Adorama Learning Center, that's where all of our videos are stored. We've got
hundreds of them, all about photography and videos and all kinds of stuff and I
want to thank you again Azul Sofía for being a fantastic model here in Mexico
City. We had a blast here. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you again next time.