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Canon Speedlite Demo

Lesson 10 from: Lighting for Boudoir and Glamour

Lou Freeman

Canon Speedlite Demo

Lesson 10 from: Lighting for Boudoir and Glamour

Lou Freeman

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Lesson Info

10. Canon Speedlite Demo

Lesson Info

Canon Speedlite Demo

The speed like timo is short and sweet but it's tech heavy so basically we're going to go through each one of the settings and talk about why you want to change the setting um you're going to want to go over it with your own speed lights when you get home and set it the pdf is short sweet to the point there's no pictures other than the speed light settings on the back of the device and the trigger and then we'll talk about that just a little bit and if you guys have any questions you want to ask about that from there I thought it might be a good idea that you have a chance to actually look at that so in the beginning you know you used to putting that you expect to see the flash sitting right on top of cameron that that flash looks kind of has a paparazzi feel our nighttime look about it when you're in a party and such the first thing that you can do to make the flash look you need to simply take the flash off the camera it's kind of simple but once you do that part of the reason that l...

ooks so in you unusual and more interesting is because it's not where we used to saying it all our lives growing up when you put the modifiers on the front of it it distributes a light, spreads it out um the I'm going to go through these little rogues with you because they're just too cute and two fun you say cute but they are cute you have to admit when I first got them I thought their little toys but they're made so well so they literally just velcro right around the flash like that um this is thea think they small soft box and this comes in one of the kids but this one has been one of the most used ones I have so when I go to a party and gonna photograph you know my sister's kids or something I actually put this right on the speed light still and you cannot tell it's a speed line on top you can because it's distributing the light when you put this on the on the actual flash the consideration you want to make to make sure you have it on their strictly just make sure you're not space in here for the flash to move around and actually bounce there's a silver patch here on the top of that does it's just we distribute the light so when you put on the flash just make sure it's nice and fluffy and they're open thes three layers here keep down the possibility of having hot spot on your subject when you're shooting so basically what you're looking at there is three levels to it this once the extra large you can make it square like that or it comes with this panel and you saw one of shooting the bike shot. This is what I used to make my little strip banks. This is also what I used to remember the pegboard shot today from my slide show. This is the single white I used to eliminate her. Andi just puts out a long, skinny little strip of light. I used it inside the tiki hut. Teo, like the beauty that I was talking about I was sitting on the floor that was like right beside me you see her illuminated, but you can't really tell where the light is coming from, let alone though that it was on speed like right beside me just small light so you can pass them around you guys gonna enjoy that for a few moments? The other cool thing is they have all these little wonderful gel packs I'm going to show you one pack that I own um they have cinema jails, which are color jails and you've seen us use thes over the past couple of days with all these different awesome colors that you can attach to the front of the jail. He was a beautiful purple one, they attacked with a rubber band and you sit right here on the front of the jail on the front of the head and you do have to calculate for that and your exposure when you're shooting earlier I think I mentioned to you guys about the littlefoot stand that's the one that comes straight from cannon so you could sit that right on the ground and I believe the light right behind this was literally sitting on that little foot stand eliminating the background it wasn't on another light stand. These things are all in a little category catalogue all in order usually until, like it in there and start working with him every single time I have to sit down to re organize them. They also have pre cut round ones to go inside this kid right in the front here um, of your speed light here so what? You pass that around, see how that all works for what the's are there super starting very inexpensive and they can let you have some really cool effects. I thought it would show you pass around this quantum turbo pak let you see that I was going to pass it on the way that the agreement actually attach us to the front as it slides right in that little fitting and these little rubber bands pop around that six of those it's about what I keep rolling through what I have and I've had to buy extra jell kit so I could have enough jails to go around so there's multiple even jails on everything uh kanan also has this awesome jill kit they sin with warming gels there's a wheat in the cto inside and there's an automatic little holder that you pop on the front it just attach is right here in the actual sensors feels that the jail holder is on their compensates for it so all right are you guys ready so don't try to take notes the pdf might be a way to go on this because you're going to want to look at it over and over while you're holding the flash and the trigger so let's go through this little setup so I'm just showing you some dynamics now were these lights and how they actually look on the top because I know it's intimidating my girlfriends and I when we were in college we used to say reads like stereo instructions I think I'll just turn it on and see how it works you can do that if you want but the sad thing is you're not going to get the most of the benefits of it is quickly is if you sit down and just really try to rifle through it and learn how the little palate reads the pages read overall the difference between the way this thing looks is it basically the same as the five eighty which is the predecessor heads a little bigger so the flash zoom can work a little bit better effectively it looks the same on the trigger is it does on the back of the camera on the back of the flash itself which is awesome instead of looking at one thing and trying to refigure it out um you know when you're talking about adding the different jails and then trying to set the camera different than just jail you know I'd rather have these things matching image it makes it easier go straight to the point so it's radio based meaning that the flash I'm going to do this in a humorous way I think it could be here before your five eighty had to be here or at least this part did you were always positioning that so you could this would send a signal there and it was complicated everybody was making all these cool things teo so that you could do that side cars and now this is try this has come about it makes it easier and it's a little more consistent smarter I would say so it works up to thirty meters which is about a hundred feet I have used it much further away and I know other photographers who've used to dip tom was two hundred feet that cannon I guess we'll only guarantee it up to this distance so if you want to try it unless they wanted to light all these windows and you're way down the hall here you could pretty much count on getting like to come in those windows if you need it which is amazing you can connect up to fifteen flashes and groups and set ratios to those groups a, b and c come way that naturally, if you have a new a camera five d mark three or wendy x, you can have additional advanced groups, which is danny and that's. What we had set up today when we brought in these additional flashes, I put the bicycle shot she had both shot. Both lights on the face were on a so I could raise and lower the power on a simultaneously early dropped the power down on b and c from the top of thiss the zoom meaning that the actual light inside of this head moves forward and back let you spread the light out really wide if you want to put it in a modifier. So you get more light spread officiating wide angle shot is supposed to a telephoto shot. You want the lights spread out for that as well. So simple things that really do make a big difference and what the camera does and there's a focused assist available. And I mentioned the color correction things for you. So the set up one of the most important things that you do to connect the units together as you put them on an individual idee number. I said everything on a thousand these air actually photographs I took of these when I was setting them up to come here in the first thing that cole and I did we got here has put them all on the same idea number uh when she said this it will persist even if you take the batteries out this the idea number will stay the same which is awesome and that would allow me to do a shoot over here and you guys to shoot across the room over there with your own speed lights and we wouldn't fire each other's flashes so that's pretty cool. Um so you have channels one to fifteen the radio can handle up to fifteen flashes as we just described an infrared you can handle this many as you want. So you set your I d through that little button right there and the channel right to the left of it. Can you see that little light there right to the past? Right? So when you're looking at the back of the flash the very next thing you're gonna wanna um connect to is actually making the wirelessly sink or connect to each other are linking them together is that makes sense so that they all kind of fire all at the same time so you want to set one is a master one is a slave in other words one, units going to tell the others what to dio this is a transceiver minute goes both ways it can be a master or a slave this is only a master it doesn't have a flash it in any way tio phil but it can tell this what to dio there is a time that later and tell you that this could receive information from this flash too fire your camera for you you're going to love that as well. So when you're setting the radio or the infrared you see the images here to the left a little radio signal of little radiating lines that means you're you're on the radio when you're all linked together do you see the back the screen, how it when his green and one is gold the links tell you at the top that you're linked together on the masters and green and the number is in this light, so that kind of helps you don't you know that you'll get used to that on dh see that it's set and linked together and if you use thes and set this all up and you put him down and two months later you pick it up you're gonna have to refresh your memory to remember where everything is but it's kind of like riding a bicycle around my to mope ed, changing gears and learning where everything is to start and stop so all of these can be set to infrared or to infrared or radio you can't set it to infrared and go back and use your previous flashes like you're five eighties and things like that and fire flash but the five eighties cannot be brought forward to the radius like some of you may know that others may not so the mode I'm looking for and my operation is thie group the group motors a magic here although you have all these other modes of operation I'm looking to set it for groopman which is right underneath that link so now I know that underneath that if I wanted to set up each one of my life in a different groups a b c or d like we did on the bikes shot a and b were on the face see was on the side excuse me d was behind her and he was over here so I know that I label them I can look here here and adjusts all the settings by simply dropping rolling right down to that link and raising or lowering the power five zones a b c and d and e s o to get to that you're going to press the menu button here on the side going to scroll down and you're going to set up each one of your zones and each one of your zones let's say we're going to use a we're going to set up a is the beauty light on the face we're going to set that one up, tio tio I'm just choosing a name because I don't know which one you might want to set on dh you may have asked me about working at all that manual I've set them all on manual before made the adjustments from there if that's what you'd like to do that's totally fine so once you set that, then you have the choice of slipping over to the next level to change the power settings up or down three stops, which is very cool so eh b c b so I'll start with the face the kicker light this was the hair light? Well, I like more lights than just those three most of the definitions I've read say that there's three setups and then the first three I usually go all the way down to the five zones and set something up, so so you could take each zone and set it up as you would like to use it and then that the power as you want. So underneath the ellie lcd panel, you'll see these four dots one, two, three, four when you get to those four dots that's where you're going to actually make the settings happened that you want, so you're going to flip through your menu setting, which is over here there's a menu basic basically it should be called pages but it's written as many one, two and three so each time you flip to the menu we get a different reading all the way across in these four dots are goingto have different things they do so master to slave settings are going to be set here so and radio mode master might look a little different than the slaves mode I would so the same settings are going to be there but they'll be on a different page high speed shutter sink the little button is right above the master it's a little h with a lightning bolt if you decide you want to use the high speed shutter saying which means you know going above let's say you were shooting somewhere there was a lot of sun really wanted to bring down the ambient light so you decided you need to get the shutter speed up higher and you really needed to go up over two hundred or two fiftieth of a second that's when you want to use that setting so that's kind of a cool thing to have the only downside to me too that you lose some of the power. So then do you remember when I showed you the triple threat? You may find yourself wanting to put more flashes into that same group to help put more power onto that to keep your high shutter speed sync up now the cool thing about it is once you said it, you can leave it on you can still go down to your normal shutter speed and operate and flash smart enough to understand what you're doing and sense how you're changing the isso in the settings on go from there, so a high speed shutter stink can be left in place, the flash drops off significantly when you raise up the shutter speeds. If you start going up to like a thousand, you really suffer the consequence, you know you're going to want to be really close to your subject with the flash or add multiple flashes to help pick up the power that you're losing. So moving along here to slave mode, you're going to press the menu for master or in the menu slave mode press to memory there's a saving load option when you hit the save and load, what you're doing is, after you set up all these settings, it will keep it in there for you. So let's say you set up all five of these speed lights a b c d the way you want to use him, let's say you packed him up in your bag, you took this bike and you went down by the water and set this up outside. You could basically set it up the same way, put a lit back up and put it on your camera, put the lights in place and ask it to save in luck bring up this load and it will revive the information that you just said in there. So how cool is that? Once you have once you set the master unit to save and load then you can save and load the same things on your slave units as well. So are you following me on all this so it's a little complicated in the beginning once you see it and you rifle through the pages instantly easy to see so group mode is where we set the master unit and once you notice it you will see the little gr pop up right underneath a link mode. Then you are once you're set there and you hit the set button here in the center then you were able to hit this button here and pop right over to the power settings in each group you once you get to that set hit said he could pop back overto a scroll down to be do the same thing on b so let's say you wanted your face lights up a stop you can just push your power up one so you wanted less light on side like we did over here on the snow I took the split lights drop that down a stop in power so you see the phil, but you don't notice the lights so much so once you go through all of that stuff, you hit a memory to slave for the all of the light she want to follow what you're telling it to do from your master so after you've said everything, you have a master and you have it directed exactly how you want with all of the slaves you saved everything in the master, you've saved everything in the slave you can actually take the entire thing upper down and concert by going to menu one and then suddenly a little plus and minus is gonna pop up right above your dole tl settings and then you can adjust the whole thing up or down so that's kind of cool, so you don't have to go through each individual one and reset it if you want if you are worried about that, this is the coolest thing that I've learned about since I've been doing this and I learned about this when shooting a wedding a few weeks ago. You can actually use this as a remote to trigger your camera with no flash on it with the camera sitting across the room let's say you were shooting a wedding portrait, you had a camera set up somewhere and you didn't want to make physical presence where the camera is you could set it up put on a tripod in the background and then use this to actually set the camera off. What you have to do, though, is put this on the camera and sited over there. This would send the signal here to fire the camera. It's crazy, isn't it? That's one of the most useful things that I have come across because then I could shoot with two cameras when I'm doing something and there's not money for some thirty the second person to be there. So what you have to do is have to go to the master unit that you're going to shoot with to trigger the camera. First you have tio said this this camera, this becomes your transceiver on dh, then set it on the r l button. So what we have to do there is over on your menu setting, too. You'll go there, and then suddenly the little ar e l sign will come up on the bottom and my little arrows sitting right on top of it, right? But it's, a place where the bottom part of the arrow is this, where the year r e l signal is and you press that button hit, save and you're ready to go, and I would test it before I put it there expecting that toe work so there's eighteen custom functions there's no reason why you have to set them all, but I'm going to go through them and tell you which ones that I felt were effective for me, so we're gonna set a we're gonna leave the rest I'm set to default, so the zero, the very first three we're going to set zero one and four zero is going to be the distance we're going to set that toe one and one of the things that has happened to me a couple of times is the auto on and off or sleep my was on, so I turned that off and I turn my camera off from going to sleep when I'm shooting a wedding or something where I need to really be sure I catch a moment, I'd rather have that on and no one can catch it, then worry about it going to sleep just to save the battery because I have a ton of batteries with me usually, um, flash exposure bracketing I've met several of my friends were talking about speed lights and had it set on and didn't realize it was on and they're taking pictures and they have one light, one dark can't understand why this helps you when you're doing have you ever taken an hd art in your camera? You can choose how you want the setting for the auto bracketing to be from dark to mediums like and that's, the way I prefer to see it, if I'm goingto have auto bracketing on, I want to see the dark one first, and then the mediums in the light and then the three together. So the test firing set to auto, so if you never intend to use it, if you intend to use an external battery, you want to make sure that you pay attention to this setting. We had external batteries on every thing, and there's cannon has an additional battery pack that I think it takes double a batteries you have to look into that a little closer. I wanted something so I could take a lot of shots if I wanted teo and a rose, so I went with a bigger battery pack on dh I have not experimented with this cheetah battery pack, but a lot of people are telling it that's really nice it's, very affordable. So if you never intend on using aa battery pack, you leave it set on zero if you think you're going to use aa battery pack and you want to leave it set toe one. So a full dump of the power is something you want to know it can be capable of. You want to test that let's say you're at a wedding and you're really worried you're going to run out of battery pack. The time before you catch all the images, I like to confirm exactly where I'm at before I get into that crucial ten to fifteen minutes, and I want to make sure I can get the most out of it that I can, and I'm not going to be standing there wondering if the battery is going to be lasting for me, so recycle if you never intend to use the battery, are for a power source, and the flashing it units you wantto leave to set does default. If you're going to use that external battery you want, set it to one super easy there's two choices click click on everyone. This is just two choices flash exposure, compensation, dial, plus or minus over and under you can set it so it has a quick choice by using this dialogue, which is pretty nice. You know, I have to go through the menu's settings to find it. And did you notice the beep on my flash today? Every time I took a big picture, the beep hadn't come all the way around to tell me that all of flashes had recycled on time and that's kind of cool, I could set it so it will prevent you from hearing that, but I'd rather know what and understand exactly what's happening than not, um this is kind of cool I've got twenty one set to default, but you can have a light spread setting for your modifier so you can go ahead for your flash you can go ahead and tell it exactly how you want the spread from the back of a camera and the illumination panel I can't see things the way I used to, so I want it left on its brightest I can see it so I can make all these decisions myself and uh as I said, it works up to thirty meters in hundred feet, you can use it now because of the radio transmission and the ability to move it around. It can go inside of all these soft boxes and still work from the transmitter. If you have one of your one of your cameras set with the batteries in it and don't have a battery pack and everything else is set to a battery you khun set this one back to sew it chooses the batteries within that the the actual device, but you're going to go through batteries pretty quickly with this if you're going to shoot rapidly like we were doing today, even though we did like ten, fifteen, maybe twenty shots, you'll still go through the battery's pretty quick if you don't have a battery pack, try the lithium batteries that I mentioned earlier, I was amazed at how flash the faster flash recharges but it's a one time use and they're a little bit more expensive like double the price for what batteries regular batteries are and here again is just the modifiers that we used if you want to look at the ice lights that's not having anything to do with speed lights here, but the rest of these modifiers are all really awesome choices and very inexpensive this beauty box the rapid box is really cool because it falls down like you're a portable umbrella literally will fit in your pocket if you're going to go to shoot a wedding or something, you want some unusual lighting this's the triple threat what I mentioned to you about connecting three speed lines together to get them out of bloom with more power if we're going to use some high speed sync outside the full sun you want jack up the light out put just a little bit in this adjustable shu mt bracket is pretty cool and I left the prices on there just to kind of get an idea what you're getting into with this it does make a difference there's the magic flipper you ask about s o you can use other kinds of modifiers that you may already have on your speed lights so you know, try that first for the price point you really can't beat it it's better than buying all new modifiers and here again it's basically what I have in my possession for the actual road modifiers that I showed you today and I keep those in my kid I'd take him out all the time if I'm just going to shoot a quick portrait of a friend or I'm going to a family party I use them if I'm going to do shoot like this I'll pull them out using in a small space so you went to somebody's house and you were going to shoot in the bathroom or in their powder room or something like that you could put your whole set together and they're not be bumping into the walls where some of the bigger lighting that I've shown you today would really really be hard pressed to even fitted and some people's bedrooms thatyou might be going to shoot with so the options are working with speed lines is going to be a cool thing to just so you have that ability to set something up cool in smaller space and you all had asked me about the degrees of the grids the stackable where they work sixteen is the smallest one you have to your degree's thereby sandwich them all together and the price point is around hundred fifty two hundred ninety nine dollars and here's the kit and this would be about half to three quarters of what I used today on the bicycle set at a big huge discount and that's it fantastic. I love that. I've actually got that transmitter and those question myself and I learned from that. So thank you. You want to really appreciate that. And they had the jails by themselves. So if you have a different brand of flashes and you want to have fun with the jail's, these air pre cut on dh, it tells you about what the actual numbers are. Colors you could buy jails too and big sheets if you want to cut them down. But this is so convenient, and I've got four or five of these and I just put him down in the side of my camera bag and you could go just, you know, cool places and pull out some color and really changed the whole way. Something looks. I call it dynamic cinema lighting when I get into that and that's pretty much how I think when I liked for cinematic quality to bring some impact to the shots. So you're not just doing something ordinary. Anybody have any questions or anything you want to ask me? I can tell you one last thing. I can fit all of my speed lights on battery packs in one roller back so I can show up to a shape with one roller bag of speed, lights and one roller bag with my gear. Carried all myself doesn't count the stands, you're going to want to get a small set of stands, then you can take with you and probably to floor stand so you can put a light really litter the ground. So we have going, I'm wondering, I know that we mentioned the s t three can do radio or it khun do infrared, so we cannot even go back like you're five eighties been able to do both by any chance I could my around the corner could be my radios and my emperor's there in line of sight, you know, can't do both at the same time, I don't know, I've never done that, but that's a really good question I'm going to say probably not I'm going to say it's one or the other, I'm going to say it's, probably one of the other all right, how about a question from a cm eighty three who asked what type of bag you used to carry your your light stands, my life stands, I carry and I would like to hear just your gear in general? Like, what kind of bag do I have? I have tamba bags timba, which are are really amazing products some of the bags I take out most of the panning, and I used the raps because I could get more in the bag when I'm travelling on airplanes, and I put that heading back in because I really want everything to be stationary and secure. Um in my flash kit, I carry the cord that attach is to the side of the camera, there's a specific court for cannon and icon, and then this is okay for the quantum, and so you have to order those specifically, I also make sure I have a strip enough strips with me power strips to recharge all the flashes at once I shoot enough that I'm constantly rotating those around in a daze works I wanted not be struggling with where to charge the lines I have another little rule of some is the bag that's charging the gear and all the batteries gets parked in one spot. I usually put the pack the bag next to the strip light, then I'm not forgetting my battery's down the hall for my camera and whatever as across the room, I will walk right past the camera bad people in the kitchen if it's not sitting right beside my bag, uh, timbo makes great stand bag as well on, you can order them with wheels on the end and wheels really make it great for me because I can basically slide it out where I'm going to go and then I'll have to pick it up and put it in the car. The stands are all aluminum. They're pretty lightweight. The awesome thing about the bow in sliding is that the stands actually fit inside the kit with the lights, and they are munna lights and the power pack and heads all in one s o you, khun, pretty much go to the shoot right there. With that, you're reflectors, your umbrella and everything right in there. You should be ready to go.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Canon 600EX RT Flash Set Up.pdf
Lighting for Boudoir and Glamour Slides.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Lou is one of the most inspiring photographers Ive seen on Creative live. When I watch her, its like watching a great guitar player... in that, she hears the music before she ever plays it. Lighting and posing flows out of her with incredible ease. She inspires me so much! No fluff here, just pure maximum quality info and inspiration. Id love to meet her some day just to thank her for what she has given.

Francie Fillatti
 

Lou is one of my favorites. Although I shoot primarily woman, I don't do Boudoir. I love her calm, methodical style, and attention to detail. I respect that she always makes her women look elegant and empowered instead of objectifying them. Her images are sensitive and beautiful and I can't wait to watch her again today! I learned so much from her..

Bridget Murphy
 

I am amazed at how much information Lou gives away here. Her knowledge of the craft is extremely apparent and the end product is always stunning. I could watch this over and over for its ideas and inspiration.

Student Work

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