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Lighting for the Scene

Lesson 37 from: Fine Art Photography: The Complete Guide

Brooke Shaden

Lighting for the Scene

Lesson 37 from: Fine Art Photography: The Complete Guide

Brooke Shaden

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Lesson Info

37. Lighting for the Scene

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

19:06
2

Storytelling & Ideas

27:34
3

Universal Symbols in Stories

03:19
4

Create Interactive Characters

02:16
5

The Story is in The Details

04:13
6

Giving Your Audience Feelings

05:49
7

Guided Daydream Exercise

04:20
8

Elements of Imagery

02:19
9

The Death Scenario

01:47
10

Associations with Objects

03:01
11

Three Writing Exercises

06:39
12

Connection Through Art

30:35
13

Break Through Imposter Syndrome

07:40
14

Layering Inspiration

23:13
15

Creating an Original Narrative

07:42
16

Analyze an Image

04:12
17

Translate Emotion into Images

04:31
18

Finding Parts in Images

06:02
19

Finding Your Target Audience

04:05
20

Where Do You Want Your Images to Live?

12:01
21

Create a Series That Targets Your Audience

32:43
22

Formatting Your Work

06:08
23

Additional Materials to Attract Clients

07:24
24

Which Social Media Platforms Will be Useful?

04:17
25

How to Make Money from Your Target Audience

11:27
26

Circle of Focus

07:55
27

The Pillars of Branding

06:18
28

Planning Your Photoshoot

09:05
29

Choose Every Element for The Series

07:38
30

Write a Descriptive Paragraph

09:37
31

Sketch Your Ideas

17:27
32

Choose Your Gear

02:50
33

How to Utilize Costumes, Props & Locations

26:18
34

What Tells a Story in a Series?

13:06
35

Set Design Overview

01:43
36

Color Theory

19:50
37

Lighting for the Scene

12:05
38

Props, Wardrobe & Time Period for Set Design

06:00
39

Locations

04:31
40

Subject Within the Scene

07:26
41

Set Design Arrangement

05:46
42

Fine Art Compositing

03:46
43

Plan The Composite Before Shooting

10:29
44

Checklist for Composite Shooting

18:52
45

Analyze Composite Mistakes

12:11
46

Shoot: Black Backdrop for White Clothing

10:42
47

Shoot: Black Backdrop for Color Clothing

08:36
48

Shoot: Black Backdrop for Accessories

08:17
49

Shoot: Miniature Scene

09:59
50

Editing Workflow Overview

01:57
51

Add Fabric to Make a Big Dress

08:35
52

Edit Details of Images

08:09
53

Add Smoke & Texture

10:47
54

Blend Multiple Images Into One Composite

24:58
55

Put Subject Into a Miniature Scenario

17:55
56

Location Scouting & Test Photoshoot

22:10
57

Self Portrait Test Shoots

22:30
58

Shoot for Edit

04:21
59

Shoot Extra Stock Images

10:01
60

Practice the Shoot

25:07
61

Introduction to Shooting Photo Series

03:33
62

Shoot: Vine Image

10:40
63

Shoot: Sand Image

09:50
64

Shoot: End Table Image

04:59
65

Shoot: Bed Image

06:18
66

Shoot: Wall Paper Image

05:54
67

Shoot: Chair Image

08:02
68

Shoot: Mirror Image

06:57
69

Shoot: Moss Image

05:48
70

Shoot: Tree Image

07:33
71

Shoot: Fish Tank Image

04:09
72

Shoot: Feather Image

09:00
73

View Photo Series for Cohesion & Advanced Compositing

07:35
74

Edit Multiple Images to Show Cohesion

36:55
75

Edit Images with Advanced Compositing

29:33
76

Decide How to Start the Composite

09:35
77

Organize Final Images

21:37
78

Choosing Images for Your Portfolio

08:19
79

Order the Images in Your Portfolio

16:28
80

Why do Some Images Sell More Than Others?

16:03
81

Analyze Student Portfolio Image Order

11:42
82

Framing, Sizing, Editioning & Pricing

02:19
83

Determine Sizes for Prints

16:44
84

How to Choose Paper

13:56
85

How to Choose Editions

07:18
86

Pricing Strategies

18:59
87

How to Present Your Images

13:26
88

Example Pricing Exercise

09:39
89

Print Examples

08:23
90

Licensing, Commissions & Contracts

04:44
91

How to Keep Licensing Organized

06:07
92

How to Prepare Files for Licensing

07:28
93

Pricing Your Licensed Images

12:33
94

Contract Terms for Licensing

12:07
95

Where to Sell Images

04:55
96

Commission Pricing Structure

08:23
97

Contract for Commissions

12:17
98

Questions for a Commission Shoot

08:45
99

Working with Galleries

08:58
100

Benefits of Galleries

07:39
101

Contracts for Galleries

10:32
102

How to Find Galleries

05:22
103

Choose Images to Show

08:53
104

Hanging the Images

03:38
105

Importance of Proofing Prints

08:04
106

Interview with Soren Christensen Gallery

21:59
107

Press Package Overview

04:35
108

Artist Statement for Your Series

18:20
109

Write Your 'About Me' Page

09:04
110

Importance of Your Headshot

03:55
111

Create a Leave Behind & Elevator Pitch

20:19
112

Writing For Fine Art

04:44
113

Define Your Writing Style

14:49
114

Find Your Genre

06:41
115

What Sets You Apart?

02:25
116

Write to Different Audiences

05:10
117

Write for Blogging

39:57
118

Speak About Your Work

14:21
119

Branding for Video

07:37
120

Clearly Define Video Talking Points

14:27
121

Types of Video Content

31:45
122

Interview Practice

13:22
123

Diversifying Social Media Content

22:32
124

Create an Intentional Social Media Persona

24:48
125

Monetize Your Social Media Presence

18:46
126

Social Media Posting Plan

04:01
127

Choose Networks to Use & Invest

02:57
128

Presentation of Final Images

19:13
129

Printing Your Series

09:16
130

How to Work With a Print Lab

13:39
131

Proofing Your Prints

10:11
132

Bad Vs. Good Prints

03:32
133

Find Confidence to Print

10:50
134

Why Critique?

06:55
135

Critiquing Your Own Portfolio

10:39
136

Critique of Brooke's Series

16:18
137

Critique of Student Series

40:07
138

Yours is a Story Worth Telling

02:09

Lesson Info

Lighting for the Scene

So here we have a few images and we're dealing with lighting, now. And lighting is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating things that we can deal with as a visual artist, specifically with photography. And I never thought that I hear myself say those words, that it's one of the most interesting things to me, because I hate lighting, I really do. I don't enjoy working with lights, I don't enjoy, even, flipping a switch to get a light to turn on. I think it's annoying and quite frankly, it's not part of my process. That's not to say that I don't appreciate it immensely, 'cause I do, I love the lighting theory. I just don't love doing it. So, the way that I do my lighting is in Photoshop and I am not afraid to admit that. I do it and that's okay with me. And it might not be your method and that's okay. You know, we're getting to the same end goal, which is having control of light. Really having control of it and not just settling for whatever is outside at the moment or whatever's in...

side at the moment. So, with lighting, first and foremost, it's creating a mood. We're trying to create images that have a certain feeling to them, have a certain emotion in them. It creates atmosphere, which atmosphere I find, is a really hard to define word. It's a word that can mean mood, but it also has this, sort of, airy, tangible feel to it, which I feel that light provides, specifically if we look at this image with the ladder coming out of the hole. There's this beam of light coming into it, that you almost feel like you could sort of, like, touch the dust going through it, in a sense, and that to me is creating atmosphere. And then it brings attention to whatever you want to bring attention to. In my case it would be the subject, in yours it might be something else entirely, but it's perfect for that. And then we've got color temperature. So, how are you going to deal with color temperature of light? In camera, in post-production? Doesn't really matter how you do it, as long as you do it, as long as you are aware that color temperature is a thing. It's a real thing, okay. And then post processing. So, what is your process in post? (laughs) And how are you going to manipulate the light? So I'll just explain really quickly how I deal with light in my images. For example, this one, with the two bedsheets over my head, that one was a little bit, less manipulated and Photoshopped than the rest. I had hung a dark backdrop behind me, I stood with a window near me, so that the light hit directly and I made sure to position myself in a way where I wouldn't have to change a lot of things later on. It's simply, that's where the light hit, added contrast, of course I did a lot of other things in Photoshop, but in terms of light not very much. Whereas you have an image like this, where I'm coming up out of this hole and it was a little bit flat of an image. I remember, I shot this background in Australia, and it was just an overcast day. There was nothing special about that kind of lighting, but I really wanted to create this feeling that light was coming in from the background and hitting our subject because that made it more dynamic, because that shed light, literally, on the subject, on the character, here. And I remember when I was doing that there were a lot of things to think about. For example, how is that light going to hit my background, which wasn't really hit like that? How is it going to hit my subject, where I did make sure to light myself to match this lighting? But, am I making sure that the color temperature is the same between those two things? And then finally, how is it hitting the atmosphere? How is it hitting the clouds? Does this look realistic? I would actually say that it looks slightly unrealistic and that's just my own critique of my work. But, I was okay with it at the time, I'm still, kind of, okay with it, if I'm being totally honest and in the end it created a much more dynamic picture, than if I had not bothered to light my subject from behind with a rim light and if I had not bothered to add contrast to the floor of this image. Other images here, perhaps I didn't have to do as much in Photoshop with the lighting, but for example, with this picture, I have a lit candle here, in this one, and I didn't really have a lit candle in that scenario. Mostly 'cause I was in a swamp and it was very uncomfortable and I didn't have the patience to light a candle in that scenario. I just wanted to get the heck out of the swamp, so I didn't, and I did that later and then I added a glow to my face. And it's instances like that where yes, I could have done it there. It would have been fine, I was a little bit afraid of burning things down, which in hindsight in stupid 'cause I was in water, but still, I had this fear in my head, I was in Arizona, you know, you get these things, and I knew I could do it later. I knew that I could add that believable glow. Why? Because I was shooting in diffused light. There was no direct, harsh light source. So it was believable that I could light something up and it would look right, because there was no clear light source already in the image. So, for that image, lighting became super important to draw attention to my subject, to actually light my subject, and to not be distracted by all these other things going on in the picture. And again, whether I succeeded in that or not, is up for debate, but that was the goal, when I started creating the light in that image. This is an image where I did try to light it on the set, on the scene. This was in the forest and I brought all of these candles and I wanted to make sure that I had some natural glow that I could play off of in this picture, so I made sure that, for example, there was a candle by the book lighting the page a little bit, so then I could see how that naturally looked, and this was lighting her collarbone. So I did have a number of candles there, which I then enhanced here. Not very much, you can see that that light that was on the book is still on the book, that light that was on her collarbone is still on her collarbone, but then you can also see that I added lots of books that weren't there originally because I'm not made of money and I didn't want to buy a hundred books for this, so I bought a few books and did what I could with it, and then had to create that light. And I was able to create that light because I studied the light in this picture, because I'm studying where is the light coming from, how harsh is it, what is the temperature of it, and then emulating that in other parts of the image. These are super old photos of mine and by super old, I mean, as far back as my history goes. This image with this ball of light that one of me is handing to the other me, is the first image that I ever created, ever, with my camera, and that image was definitely a learning curve. I didn't know exactly what I was doing, but I was just coming out of film school and I had learned so much about lighting, and I did learn a lot, but I should say, I didn't really know how to do it. I had had this three and a half year education about how to light things, and then if you had handed me a light I would have said I don't know how to work this light. I was just useless. So I was doing things like using 200 watt bulbs, light bulbs, with Ikea paper lanterns around them, and diffusing the light somehow and just trying to create soft, ambient light in my images and that's how I created this other one, too, with the bedsheets, just by putting those balls of light behind me and seeing how that looked. And I show you these images because I have very much gotten away from doing things like this. If you look at the previous set of images, particularly these, there's lots of light in the images. They don't really come from a particular source, exactly, they're very, sort of, evenly lit, and I believe that I have started doing that out of fear, out of fear of lighting and I don't know if any of you guys have fear of lighting, but it's big with me. Like, I hate lights, I don't like using lights, and it freaks me out, and I didn't start out like that. So it's important to sort of, show you how I got out of film school, I learned about lighting and I wasn't scared to do it. And the reason why is that I didn't have a reputation, I hadn't done anything, so you could do anything. You know the feeling? Where you're like, wow, wow, nobody expects anything from me, I can just do whatever I want, and I started doing things like this and it didn't stick. It's important to know that I didn't love it enough to keep doing it. I didn't love the process, I didn't love the results, but I tried it. And lighting is really good for trying different things within your art, for experimenting and seeing how that sits with people, seeing how that sits with you and how that can tell a story. This is just a quick example of color temperature and how we can use the color of light to manipulate how we see an image. I just shot this image the other day in a forest and it was very yellow out there. The green was reflecting all over the place and then I simply switched the color temperature, made it really blue, and saw how that effected the mood of the image. And it does effect the mood, in a really big way. I think that color temperature is probably one of the biggest things that we can look at in terms of how do you immediately feel toward an image. I wanted to show this one to talk about the atmosphere of light, to talk about what kind of feeling does the lighting evoke here? If this image wasn't lit from the side and didn't have that contrast would it have the same impact? If this was just straight on, maybe like, lit with a big light, Ikea light, straight on? It would have a different feeling. You'll notice, for example, if you look at horror movie images there's often a lot of bright direct light in those images and you see lots of shadows and it's very mysterious and scary. And then you'll see, let's say a movie poster for maybe a period piece about people who live in the countryside of England and it's almost guaranteed to have overcast, gray light, right? Like, because that's what it looks there and it looks very whimsical and soft, and you're not expecting a horror movie, then, are you? It's just a fact. If you see a close up of someone's face and they've got like blood trickling down their face and a harsh light on them, you know what kind of movie you're getting, pretty much. And then if you see a girl in a whimsical dress running through a field and it's all very evenly lit, you know what kind of movie you're getting, roughly, generally speaking. So I'm giving you horror movie, no I'm kidding, I'm not really, but I'm giving horror something, my version of horror, and I believe that the lighting creates atmosphere here. The lighting cues you in to this is a certain type of image. It's going to be a little bit darker, the background is dark because the light isn't hitting the background, it's only hitting the subject and there's contrast within this picture. And then here I'm creating a cone of light, let's just say, which I think is an actual lighting term, so I probably shouldn't say that, but I am creating a literal cone of light. Where I have a light source that wasn't actually there and I'm drawing in where the light needs to go over the whole entire image and then same with this one. So here we have a cone of light, is that a real thing? Can anyone confirm? I think it's a real thing, okay. So, I've got my light that wasn't there to begin with, that's just adding to the shape of the image, the atmosphere of the image, and how your eye looks at it.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Guided Daydream & Writing Exercises Workbook (Lessons 1-11)
Creating an Original Narrative Workbook (Lessons 12-18)
Finding Your Target Audience Workbook (Lessons 19-27)
Planning Your Series Workbook (Lessons 28-34)
Set Design Workbook (Lessons 35-41)
Compositing Workflow Checklist (Lessons 42-49)
Editing Workflow Checklist (Lessons 50-55)
Location Scouting Workbook (Lessons 56-60)
Stock Image Downloads for Practice (Lessons 61-72)
Organizing Your Portfolio Workbook (Lessons 77-81)
Pricing & Editioning Your Work Workbook (Lessons 82-89)
Writing Contracts & Licensing Images Workbook (Lessons 90-98)
Gallery Best Practices (Lessons 99-106)
Pitch Package Workbook (Lessons 107-111)
Writing Your Brand Workbook (Lessons 112-117)
Marketing Workbook (Lessons 118-122)
Social Media Workbook (Lessons 123-127)
Printing Methods Checklist (Lessons 128-133)
Self Critique Workbook (Lessons 134-137)
Bonus Materials Guide
Syllabus
Image Edit Videos

Ratings and Reviews

April S.
 

I tuned in for most of Brooke's lessons in this course and watched some of them more than once as they were rebroadcast. First I want to say that Brooke is a very good instructor. Her easy-going, friendly, down-to-earth, somewhat quirky manner cannot be mistaken for unprofessional. She is very prepared, she speaks well (not a bunch of hemming and hawing), she is thoughtful, she is thorough, she is very relatable and at ease, and she is definitely professional in her presentation. I really thought when I first tuned in that it would mostly be background noise while I was at work, sound to keep me company. Not because I didn't like Brooke but I really didn't think I was into fine art photography nor did I think I cared about the business side of things much. Not now anyhow. I was really wrong. Brooke sparked a deep interest in me to delve into fine art photography, to consider creating images for myself, from my imagination. In fact, I realized that this was something I'd been thinking about for a couple of years though I hadn't put a name to it (the idea of creating pre-conceived images based on my own creative goals). I gleaned many little treasures from her about image sizes, working with printers, different types of paper, selling, interacting with galleries, and so much more. I may not need all of what she taught right now because I'm definitely headed in another direction at the moment, but she planted ideas and information in my head that I know will be useful at some point. Things I may not have thought of on my own, but that seed is in my head now so when the time comes, I'll know. I'd really like to buy her course but at the moment, with the holidays right around the corner, it's not in my personal budget. I'm grateful to have caught the live and rebroadcast lessons though, and her course is on my list to own. I think it's a great reference to be consulted over and over again, not watched once and forgotten. Kudos Brooke for really putting together an excellent course.

Ron Landis
 

I'm retired now, but spent decades in the people and training business. Brooke is extraordinary! Even though this course is extremely well organized and she's left nothing unattended, she moves through it with friendly conversational manners and without a sense of it being stilted. It's as though we are all her friends, not students, as she shares her heart and passion with us. What a joy it is to listen to her. And what a clear, unambiguous command of her subject. Wow! She explains it with such ease using explanations and techniques that won't overwhelm artists just starting their portfolio or the Photoshop-squeamish among us; but despite its simplicity her resulting art is breathtaking and beyond original. I wish more of my professors at school were as engaging. This was by far my best buy at Creative Live yet.

Angel Ricci
 

When the title says comprehensive, it means comprehensive! I loved every part of this course. It's inspirational, motivating, and insightful towards creating art work. Even if you are not necessarily considering a fine art specialty, the concepts discussed in this course are applicable to many areas! I find this super useful as a videographer and photographer and look to apply all of these exercises and concepts for my personal and business work moving forward. It is lengthy, but you will not regret a single minute. Brooke Shaden is an amazing artist and educator. I recommend keeping up with her work, presentations, and any future courses that may come in the future.

Student Work

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