An Old Hollywood Look with New LED Lighting
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2024
- Don’t forget to try hard light. And inexpensive LED lighting can’t be an amazing source for creative ideas. You don’t need expensive gear, just the willingness to play.
The StellaPro Reflex lights can be found here: lightandmotion...
Love the Stella’s. Great content John. Thanks for sharing.
It's a real pleasure watching someone who knows what they are doing and can do it easily and explain it simply. Plus you seem to have a relaxed and collegial relationship with your models. This is a good sign. Thanks so much.
Thank you. 🙏🏻
Beautiful. Your models are really lovely and I don't just mean physically beautiful, they all seem very inventive pose-wise, and quite playful. Excellent video (as usual!).
That was fun, thank you for making hard light less scary
Great to have a model who knows her craft and when she meets a photographer who knows theirs, Boom 💥. Super results, very impressive as per usual here. Thanks for explaining the setups John.
PS. I’m pleased you don’t promote smoking stuff.
It was a paper straw too!! 😊
I learned portrait lighting as apprentice and assistant to top wedding shooter Monte Zucker back in 1972-74. He developed a new look for wedding coverage which combined portraits taken with the light of a north facing window and a reflector which looked like Old Master paintings with dual flash photos re-enacting the ceremony and at the reception which had the same full range of tone and detail as the window lit portraits but with lighting more like a Hollywood movie.
We used two identical direct flash units, one on a bracket over the lens of the TLR Rolleiflex 2.8 for Fill and an identical direct flash on mounted on a modifed medical IV pole triggered with a simple photo cell trigger. Ratio and exposure were controlled, very cleverly, via distance to subject for Fill on camera and distance to subject’s nose for the off camera Key flash per the inverse-square law.
What Monte realized is that moving a light from 16, 11, 8, 5.6 and 5 feet - the same numbers as f/stops-changed exposure by exactly one f/stop. Our baseline shooting distance was 11 ft and with testing it was determined that f/8 @ 11ft exposed the shadows on color negative film / prints correctly in the black suits of the men. When the camera and Fill Flash over it was @ 11ft. placing the off axis Key flash @ 8ft (making it 2x brighter per the inverse-square law) exposed the white bride’s dress perfectly on the color prints with the same 3D modeling of face and clothing as in the window lit photos. When moving in to 8ft for a tighter crop the off camera light moved into 5.6 ft to keep the ratio the same and then the aperture was closed to f/11 to keep the exposure the same. Once the concept was understood it became very easy to produce well lit full range photos with 3D lighting on the fly. 50 years later I still use the same technique with my digital camera.
What I learned using that method was that the used of an OVERLAPPING Key over ‘neutral’ centered fill and the distance of the lights to the subject and the inverse-square law play a huge role in the perception of lighting looking “Soft” or “Hard”.
Here’s a test scenario to illustrate this, best done outdoors at night when there is no “bounce” fill from ceiling and walls.
1) Place a light 8ft from subject directly over the camera as Fill. Have subject wear white and black clothing and set lens to f/8. Raise the Fill intensity until detail is seen in the black clothing. Note where the Fill source is creating shadows on the face. Those areas have no fill so move the light higher or lower relative to the to the face to hide them (why we raised Fill flash on camera using a bracket). Overall the lighting will appear flat and highlights will be underexposed because sensor can’t handle the contrast ratio. Move to the side of the subject and observe / photograph how rapidly the Fill light at 8ft falls off per the inverse-square law front to back on the subject’s head and body.
2) Add the second Key light 45° to the side if the subject’s nose at 8ft and high enough so its shadow falls over 1/2 the nose but no so high the brow shades the eyes - will vary based on face of subject. Raise power on the Key light until the highlights on the white clothing and skin are exposed perfectly.
That two step process will “expose for the shadows” with Fill and “expose for the highlights” with Key light in a way that fits the range of the subject from black to white to the range of the camera sensor. With that set-up you can photograph 100 different subjects with different clothing and skin tones and they will all have the same full range of tone and 3D modeling. What is the ratio numerically? It will vary based on the DR of the camera sensor and isn’t really important.
From that baseline if you repeat the two steps but with the camera and Fill light at 8ft and the Key light at 5.6 what you will observe is that one less stop of exposure / light power is needed and that the fall-off from highlight to shadow on the head is more rapid and makes the shadows look “harder” than the first shot with the same light ratio entirely due to the inverse-square fall-off of the shadow fill.
If you start with the Fill light back 16ft from the face and Key Light 11 ft the ratio will again be the same but the lighting will look “softer” because the lights are further away and do not fall off as rapidly front to back. You’ll realize that one of the reason Hollywood movies were able to create buttery smooth highlight / shadow transitions with direct Fresnel lights was because they were placed much further away from the faces than typical with still portraits and why a very large studio space painted black is a better way to control lighting than spill fill bouncing off the ceiling and walls of your living room 😊
The other way to alter the perception of “hard” and “soft” in lighting in a Key over Fill scenario is to start Step 1 with less or more fill than required to render the black clothing accurately. Given the ease of increasing contrast with a LEVELS adjusted when edit it is always better to err on the side of having too much fill and over-exposing the shadows than risking underexposure and loss of detail and noise.
I saw this on your instagram page. Your model, lights, pose, just beyond beautiful
Thank you.
Wonderful! More!
as an amateur this is really helpful, now I wanna go to the studio and try it.
Remember to just keep making those little tweaks to the light position to best work with your models face - and embrace the shadows!
Thank you as always John, love your content.
Fun shoot - enjoyed 🥴
beautiful
Thank you sir.
I love these videos where you talk through your thoughts on lighting. Very informative. Your model looks like a lot of fun to shoot with!
She is a never ending ball of energy and enthusiasm
Like most people, I prefer soft light. But there's no reason you need to eat your favorite food every single meal, and there's no reason you need to use your favorite light every single shoot. A bit of variety is nice. Hard light is still light, you can get great results with it.
LEDs can sometimes blind and overheat models, but she looks like she's having fun!
They can and do take a bit of time to adjust to depending on the brightness but start low and turn them up as you go - it helps a little.
It's so interesting to watch her pose in the video, and then see the resulting photo you took. To my untrained eye, some of the poses look so unnatural while she's holding it, but they look great in the final product.
I always tell the subject to just get weird and have fun! We don’t have to use the bad ones but the good ones may shock you by experimenting.
I was about to say watch those shadows, but you don't care I guess. I personally wouldn't tell a story with those. (ut I guess there's always post processing for those shadows.)
Embrace the shadows, without them we are flat in