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Bouncing the Light

Lesson 18 from: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

Bouncing the Light

Lesson 18 from: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

18. Bouncing the Light

Lesson Info

Bouncing the Light

The very first thing is we want to learn how to bounce the light and so yesterday when we were talking about clicking twisted all that stuff, we had this stuff here and I did a little example and we had sarah over there and serious, you know, I'm gonna have her come out so you can meet her if you weren't here yesterday if you haven't seen the files yet, this is sara, she is our model in just a second we're going tio take a little trip into the hallway at creative live and we're going to be balancing the light around and so what we'll be doing is I've got this flash and then kelsey and john are going to be helping me out with some other flashes that we just for the sake of time we've already put some modifiers on them and we're going to be bouncing the light up into the side and behind us we're going to be adding some different modifiers to our flashes were gonna be showing those where maybe pulling this out train us so we're going to go and we're gonna begin by bouncing the light and t...

hat is all of the stuff that it's all gonna be done on camera after that we're going to show you how to take your flash off camera and for the most part we're going to stay there we're going we're going to shoot with our flash off camera, so but we first want to start with bouncing the light so without further ado here's my fancy slide liz mounts so we're going to do that it's going to take us a couple of seconds to go out there so you know where we're headed? So go okay follow kelsey she will guide you I'm gonna go out there and I need to get this and so you guys students were going to come with and just what your wife is sick is this right? Uh, ali six so unfortunately she is not with this today I forget to mention that come on, let's go this way and we're going to tether this as we go and we're just dipping over here. This is a behind the scenes look of creative live it's pretty fun so if you haven't noticed, we're on air here, so come over here, it's sort of like conan o'brien sketch if you know sketchy feeling ok, we're back here in the hallway. Thank you very much. Ok, so the first thing I'm gonna do is tether this and so what we'll do is come on over students let's just have you is it back here this is going to be very crowded in awesome way lovett, um we're going to do this and we're gonna have some people shooting besides myself were tethered jerks doctor there okay, so, um thank you very much through that so what we're going to do is let me first go through what I have my camera set to so right now I have my cameras set in aperture priority mode we'll start there um and aperture priority motive is the choice here because it's it's what we talked about yesterday it's sort of ambient light priority motive allows us to capture some of this ambient light we'll try some different modes as well. I always like to do a pre flight checklist, especially if I've been shooting outside at night the previous night. I want to double check my camera before every shoot to make sure I haven't forgotten anything so some one of the things I'm going to do here is first of all, I'm going to check to make sure I have a card in my camera I've got a card in my camera the second thing I would do is make sure I have ah blink card or check to see if there's any pictures on there that I don't want to, you know, get rid of I've already done that normally I'll form at my card if I've done a shoot previously outside one of the big gouaches that I uh I see over and over and over again is uh, you have to check your eyes so because it's very common to shoot it really high, I esos outside at night in a dark location or maybe at an event or something, and so if you're doing that and then the next day, you need to have a low I so you can really throw things off, so always make sure you check your eyes so to make sure it's set where you want it, we're going to start it I s o one hundred, so that set the next thing I want to check, I want to make sure I've reset all of my exposure compensation dials so everything's a zero sum is going to look on the top here if I had exposure compensation on, I would see some plus or minus thing, so if I push this exposure compensation over, I would see that that actually isn't lined up straight on, so the little gauge needs to be right in the middle. If you're on a nikon, you'd have a plus or minus there, so make sure that's all set to zero. I'm going to make sure I turn on my flash check that it's an e t l mode, and so I'll do that, oh, by the way, here's some here's a little tip. If you were a nikon owner on the front there's little on button when you push it all the way over, it turns on your lights on your camera. If you do that on a night, connie will also turn the lights on on your flash on a cannon. This first little button here is a light, so in the dark, if you push that, it will show up, and you can read that in the dark and soon that's what that is. So I just made sure everything was set correctly. It is everything is all on auto, so that's a good practice to get in, only I'll do that, and, you know, thirty seconds or so, but if you don't do that, you can wind up having some issues, okay, so we're going to do is I'm just going to take a picture of you right here, and what we want to do is and I don't have we already shown the entire room, so you can sort of see this wall over here, john doctor, but john's here, it's funny behind the camera, you should see the fun there's, all kinds of stuff going on back there. So this is sort of the room that we're working and it's a very, very small room and s o the first thing I would do when they come into a room like this is figure out the best location to shoot, so don't just walk into a room and go, ok? This is where we're going to shoot because right now this move is probably not the best location why? Well there's no walls on either side of her, so my bouncing the light potential isn't the best here is probably a little bit better over here where john is because I have not only this wall, but I have a wall that's right behind the camera and so that light could be bouncing around here, so this is probably a better location and this over here, but we're going to start here because it's a very, very squishy over there a ce faras how much space we have and so we've got nickel, which she could see nico right now, it's awesome he's back there with cables it's really cool story to start right here and we're going to take a picture and what we'll see is the light's not very flattering is just going toe blast right your face and we're gonna get hard light but let's, just try this, okay? What did you hear that? What do you guys hear that slow shutter speed, right slow shutter speed, but you can see this photo and it's, you know it's a picture it's a picture on dh what we have going on here look at the lines right underneath her chin we have the shadow that's right underneath your chin you can see that there's no shadow behind her. We don't really have any contrast in this picture is just flat light and we have a really slow shutter. So what I'm going to do here, let's let's test our knowledge that we learned yesterday in this small environment we have ambient light. But do we care about the enemy in light? We don't care. This is a who cares situation. We don't care about the ambient light here. Really? All we care about is light from our flash that's what we want to use. So we know based on what we learned yesterday that I can take my camera and I can put it in shutter priority mode if I want to get a who care shot at sixtieth of a second, my camera's going to scream at me and say not enough ambien light but we don't care right let's, take that same picture now and our shutter priority modin ok, much faster shutter the picture is identical, ok it's an identical picture except for now we know that slow shutter we don't worry about camera shake or I could just put my camera in manual mode, said it to sixteenth of a second, and then it can actually control the depth of field. And so we have that fashion can make incense. Yes. Making sense. Okay, let's, get back to bouncing the light number one. The very first thing that will try is putting this straight up. Can we put our flash straight up? What's going to happen? Is it's going to bounce off the ceiling, which is about eight feet here and then it's going to come straight down now, when we do that, what we'll get is we're gonna get shadows underneath. I'm not gonna poke your rival. We're gonna get shadow underneath her eyelids. She doesn't have serial killer eyes like idea, but you'll have some shadows here will have shadows underneath it's not really the most natural looking, but if we have walls close by, will get light bouncing around but let's, try it and see what we get. So we're going to shoot again saying kind of thing. And now look at this bouncing that light, we got a less pleasing shot because we have light coming from a above we have those serial killer eyes not really the best thing to do so. Let's try something else let's try just tilting this for just a little bit that's it the sixty degrees so we get some forward some bouncing off the ceiling and they're going to try one more shot with just the bare flash bouncing forward still not terrific so what we want to try here is I'm gonna grab that stuff in nominee bounce must try this carriage here so what we have is we already have a flash rigged up with some light modifiers we're going to see what happens a week we use one of these diffusion panels now right now I'm using this is a five fifty x so this is an older cannon flash so we're just showing that you can use all kinds of different flashes it doesn't have to be the latest greatest and we're doing that because that's the one I have with the bounce so now we're going to do this with this diffusion so what this should do is throw more light all over the room and let's see what that does to the shadows you see if that helps us out just a little bit it does quite a bit now so I don't know if you guys can do this back in the control room but if we can compare them the previous shot to this shot you can still see that we have light coming from above but we have much softer light it's not so a natural looking or you have a really really bright shadows there so this a diffusion panel like that can help out but still that's not really to my taste really don't like this like bouncing off the ceiling so my point is my life my ass style is don't bounce off the ceiling because it doesn't look really terrific so we're going to do here is we're going to switch around so I want you to stand here and now I'm going to be back by the wall so now we're changing things now instead of bouncing off the ceiling and just having that light come straight on our model what we're gonna do is we're gonna bounce off the ceiling in the wall now we should get light that it's more directional this way and directional this way so we should be able to get much softer light so to do that I'm going to twist this around you now I'm balancing it basically up into this corner making this big soft light and let's see what we get here it's going to be terrific uh look at that see how were softening the light it's getting softer and softer so that you guys see this because you can't see the computer screen so we have soft light that's what we did before it's really getting that light to be soft right? So that's really going to help out instead of standing this way bouncing off the ceiling and having this I think a better solution is to get against the wall use this as your source of light to really soften it now let's try something else just for fun let's get that other light back without any modifiers on it so I'm gonna take my five fifty off get back to a light that has just nothing on there were only switching flashes just tio make sure they don't take forever to do this stuff I'm going to the same thing I did before but this time with no modifier at all and what that will do is it will illuminate this wall and we'll get a nice soft light. The other thing I'm going to do it is I'm gonna take my zoom I'm gonna get my resume and I will make that manually zoom to twenty four millimeters in their words a really wide like maybe a listers go to about thirty five because that will allow us to get a lot of light a big, broad light here instead of a really focused light because we want a lot of ah large light source for soft light and so now we'll try this again taking a shot, huh? Look at that and so we also have soft light with this shot without having that modifier on the top so there are options that you can use to do that now the other thing I want to do is we're gonna have you come right about right here right there, john I mean, have you move so you're not behind their radio, so let's have you move this way? Okay? And so we're going to do now is we're going to balance the light off of this wall. Now we're going to get some side light coming in from the side to get some contrast. So here we go looking right into the lens. Uh, ok, now, if we look at this shot here let's, just look for this first. Second, what you can see is that we have some really nice light, but on the opposite side we need two more light on sarah because one of the side of her face is too dark, but what I can do is I can move her and the camera sort of in relationship and because this, uh, zips around like this this khun swivel I can't have you face a little bit more this way to meet. Good. We're gonna get mohr light in relationship to her face and then I could just get back here a little bit, so move a little bit more toward me there you go, yeah, so this children this way just a bit ok like that then I will shoot right up this wall ok and now you can see that I actually filled in mohr of that side of her face just by moving the location of the position of my model in the wall and so I'm gonna have you hold this let me explain it so this light this is becoming our light right here this wall is our like I can't move this wall around sarah just not gonna work but what I can do is I can move sarah in relationship to the wall to have more light falling on her face or sarah let's have you move this way so just obsolete like this and now what that would do is I would have less light falling on her face so just having her move toward or away from the law is going to change the light so I'm gonna do ah siri's of let's say three pictures I'm gonna have you looking this way in this way and then this way and then we'll show how that light changes so we can sort of understand this bounce thing okay so again this is this is the source of our life this wall right here so upstairs looking right at me I love that pose and you can see that we have light sort of coming from behind look straight I mean this way good, good, good and then yes more toward you got it perfect it's like that okay, now you can look at those three shots in sequence, and you can see how that light is just changing based on the position of where I'm standing in relationship to the model in the wall. So this is our life looks pretty cool when you guys when you try this, josh wanted trying, we're not josh try and josh, what I'm gonna do when I put it to the test, I know you like what? I was going to set this all back to normal to normal stuff when I hand this to you and then what we're going to do is, um, I'm gonna have you bounce the light off this wall, okay? So you're gonna bounce off the opposite wall instead of what? I just didn't want to do just the same thing, but the opposite, okay? We're going to see what josh gets and, um, and then your questions will become questions that I'm sure lots of people will have. So sarah let's have you come on over here and then josh let's have you started just a little bit, and then I'll walk you through it pretty well. Look in particular now just to see if you can bounce a light and see if we get some some contrast there. Um and this guy here just make sure you push it all the way to twist yeah, and it'll be sort of fun, josh, just like I did not know you're going to do this, but the point is I think the stuff that josh is doing here is going tio resonate with people at home going oh yeah, his questions are my questions ok, so talk out loud what you're doing so thirty five getting a bit more all right, I want to take a peek nice, nice I love that. So this this photo I think is pretty nice. One of the things that you can use in this situation is that hallway back there and so she had that light falls off on that hallway, you can actually use that to frame sarah let's try this let's have yeah, try to get her and you see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, try to use that sort of as an element to frame her, and what you're doing is you're taking a horrible location and you're making it pretty spectacular, which is I think the point of all of this is pretty fun, huh? Now let's, take a peek at that, yeah, yeah so now we're getting something I really don't like this this little part over here, maybe you can use some rule of thirds and rid of that but you can see how we're starting to dial this in um and what I want to do is begin take the camera over here so we're going to see down that hallway so if you guys could see what we see this is not a very pretty hallway it's got just some stuff and it's it's not great, but what josh is doing is by using that flash your illuminating syria getting this side light and that light is falling off a zit goes back here and so that not so attractive stuff behind sarah is just going away because we're relying on the flash to write us as our source of light gets a one more picture and they're going to keep moving on you're addicted aren't you passes like I'm addicted I want to do it some terrific shots ok, so I mean there's always some stuff that you could do here with, you know, fixing up the doorway or grabbing something adding a light behind there's all kinds of things you could do, but you can see the potential having a flash on your camera and just bouncing instead of having it go straight and so just to prove the point I'm going to shoot a shot with no bounce just so we can see how that is going to set my zoom back to this so write their seasons behind us it's awesome okay, uh, so you could see how my life is not anywhere near as pretty as your life. So it's just straight online instead of this nice soft bounce light. My composition is a good just give you this. I'm done. Okay. All right. So you see how that works? So, do we have questions? Can we do questions out here? Do we have questions? Okay, so I'm gonna do some questions with this before we get to, uh, some of our light modifiers that are are made for that. So I'm gonna stand over here where you are. We'll hang out, and we'll do some questions. Okay? Susan, tell me. What's okay? Mary would like to know what's the maximum maximum height on a ceiling to get bounced. Is it the same inverted square world? It is. Inverse square law still works. No susan's mike is not on, but I'll tell you what the question was, it's what's the maximum height of a ceiling that you can use it is it? This is the inverse square law still apply? It does still apply mathematicians. They're going to be screaming about that. Because it's not a point source of light and all that stuff, I know that, but the the ceiling height in my experience really anything that's above about ten feet is just a little bit too far so eight to ten feet I think is a pretty safe place now one of the things to understand about ceilings and bouncing light off ceilings and walls is that the color and what those are made of really really have an impact and so I know that there are some wedding halls in some reception halls that are like dark oak really really dark wood on dh what will happen is a lot of times that will just absorb all the light and so it's just throwing like tio to know where it's just like shooting into an open sky or you could have the reverse of that sometimes you have like the black wall but it's like really really high gloss lacquer kind of stuff and that's just like shooting into a mirror and so those not only do you get a lot of light coming off the wall but you have to be careful how you're bouncing the light because it is like a mirror and you can see like highlights and stuff coming off just like if you were shooting in a bathroom or something with with light flashing around so the how reflective a wall is and what the color and how dark of writing is really effects this is sort of ideal because it's white highly reflective and it's pretty easy to use okay let's see here we did have a question not so much about bouncing but val food she had asked when you use the flex and many does the zoom change on the flash automatically um it does not ok does not ok next question let's see here um sandy had asked where does the red highlight come from the red highlight in the eyes not sure I'm not sure we could be more be more specific okay, I need to go back to that many flex question about the light zooming so um so what they're talking about and let's see if we could get a shot of this right here if I zoom my lens the flash zooms as well so there's a thing inside here going in and out zooming oh, I know what you're talking about this red going on right now that's the auto focuses system being going off that's what's happening you're seeing that yeah if that's the red you're talking about that's the auto focuses system mean that we talked about yesterday that's the red highlight ok so it's funny when I'm like oh yeah I could see you know the zoom in and out it doesn't it does two things mainly what it does is it's trying to match the angle of view of your lens and so that you haven't even distribution of light and so you have light in all the corners of your photo so it also if you have, like, a two hundred millimeter lens and you're zooming, you're trying to shoot way over there by assuming that light, you get more output it's like zooming in a reflector of if you have a mag light or something, you know how you consume that into shine light far away, it's the same essential thing, but you're narrowing that beam of light, so when you take the flash off your camera, you're not really concerned so much with getting that light to match your lens. And so most systems when you take the flash off the camera, don't zoom with the lens that goes away. And so it's, not just a mini flex thing it's a thing that exists for most control remote control units that zooming goes away. And so, that's, why you have a manual zoom here so the remember our flash is stupid, and so it doesn't know if you're shooting into a soft box, it doesn't know if you're sitting in two a perella it doesn't know if you want to shoot far away or close, so when that comes off the camera, remember, the flash might be a few feet from your subject, but you might be using a three hundred millimeter lens if that flashes zoomed in teo. Two hundred or three hundred millimeters you could have problems with that you might want your flash off camera to have a wide angle of light even though you're using a long lens and that's why when you take a flash off the camera zoom goes away it doesn't work because you're no longer matching distance and you're no longer matching angle of you so that that's that's the better answer that question thanks very much okay anymore are we ready to go on a ride along? Ok, we're moving right along so we're going to do next is we're going to start adding some modifiers before we finish I need to show you the difference between using the little white card up and no white carted off so what we'll do here is going to take a picture let's have you come forward a little bit and I'm having sarah come forward because we have this really nasty down light on her face so I don't want that I was going to take a picture bounced when I have this at a forty five degree angle so I'm not at a full straight up I'm in a forty five I know this is a forty five because it says forty five right there and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take a picture just with this bounce we'll take a picture take a look at sarah's eyes there's sort of dead see, dead eyes you're one of the bad guys, okay, so what we'll do is surprised how many people tweeted that yesterday when it I'm gonna add this little card just gonna pull that little card out and let's take a peek and see what this little card does. Hopefully you're not going to one of the bad guys anymore, and sure enough, if you look really closely and I don't know if in the control room when this picture comes up, if you can zoom in on the eyes that when I look at this, I can totally zoom in on eyes and you can see that there's definitely catch light in your eyeballs, so I don't know if they can't show you what else through here, there's definitely this little teeny catch light in the eyeballs, and that is what that card does, so if that works great, if not, hopefully we can zoom in in the control room and that's that's what that car does, it just adds that little bit of ok, I'm alive, that's what it is ok, so we're gonna do I want to show you the gary fong and how that works, so the scary fong is something that many people love, they've seen it, they love it, they know it and the way this works. John turn on the flash I stuck it right on my camera turned it off so like uh just needed okay, so what this is doing is this is taking the light and just throwing it all around and this works best in a room that has corners so don't do here is we need to get this so we have corners and so I could I could be right here so sarah come this way so I'm gonna be in this corner right here so I'm in the corner of the room and what this is doing is it's giving me light on the ceiling it's giving me light on this walls give me light in this wall and we should get a really nice soft light so notice that this also gets this up it's this up pretty high so I'll take a shot here and notice how soft that light is you see it's very, very nice soft light we still have that light underneath your chin and so that's. One thing that bouncing the light like this is always going to give you is this light underneath the chin but it's very nice and soft light so let's have your look one more time right at me chin up just a little bit very beautiful and I can take this and I can actually bend my camera this way and just keep that well, I like that portrait I like that very nice a very, very nice soft light it's very easy and so just adding that will really really help out if I take this off so I'm just going to take this off. We'll try that same exact portrait again same exact fortune again without our gary phone, we'll see the difference so we still have a nice soft light in this corner but it just doesn't it's not quite as even if you look really closely at the eyes and underneath the chin really it's the eyes were getting just a little bit more of a highlight in the eyes using our gary falling and after so we have that we have some other things here we have this guy right here this is a rogue flash bender and so to do that let's have john r john hold that what these guys do as they go on your flash and you can actually been these so you khun been these around to create different types of modifiers? And so what we're gonna learn here in a little bit is that to get a light that is small like this that's gonna create hard light if you can increase the size of that light, your life is going to be softer so that's what this does this actually goes right on your flash just like this, there's a little band that goes around this just sort of velcro is on there like that what's going to happen is this is going to flash into this. This entire thing is going to illuminate and now you increase the size of your flash, making the light softer. So this is sort of, like, effectively does essentially what a soft box does. In other words, it makes light larger and therefore softer. And so what we're going to do here is we're going toe have the camera guys turn around, we're gonna shoot toward the students. So you guys gonna come this way? So, sarah, come over here and we're doing this because way want to see what this is like, tio, to shoot with this and not bounce on any walls. So right now we're just going to use this as they're like modifier and no walls, and I can bend this a little bit farther forward farther up, I can do all kinds of stuff with it. I can even make this into something called a snoot, which I'll show you in a second. This is really cool. So now I've got this really large source of light you can take a shot and notice we have really nice soft light in her eye. Isen on our face we still have that shadow underneath the chin. We're not going to get away from that using these little lights, we have to go to a larger light source like an umbrella or soft walks to get rid of that. But this really is terrific because we can use it. Tio really add some light we can shoot from the side if you want, we could modify that light. I just I just got some contrast there, so look a little bit more toward me. There you go. Beautiful love it. Uh oh, look at that. We got nice soft light and that came from this, this rogue bounce and one of the things that I can do, john, I need you to help me again is I can take this guy was one of the things that I love doing, and you can just bend it around and it becomes this really small called the snoot. So this is called, and it can direct the light and something. So what I can do is I can say I only want, like, to fall right at this thing, ok, normally we would do this off camera, but this will actually create a vignette, so I'm not sure I my aim is good enough doing it right here, but I will try we'll see if we get light right on yeah so you can see this and only we do this off camera but you see in this picture how we have this cone of light that is right on sarah's face and nowhere else and so what we can do is we can once we take this flash off our camera we can add one of these and maybe just eliminate her face you have some other soft light around her and that will just make that pop or maybe you could use it on the background to add a little highlight that's what that does the other thing I wanted to show you on this photo if we can bring this up in light room again is on the the side of this and you guys concede this you can see the shift in color temperature see how the wall here is a different color than the light from the flash and that's a great example of when you would need to have a gel or something to match exactly what's going on or the other thing we can do kill these lights all to get well actually it's light from the sun so we can't kill it so the light we're competing with his outside coming in through a window and so that's what's causing that color cast and we can't shut that off can't control it so that's bouncing the light andi is susan do we have more questions? Susan is back in the hole is really small in here. We have many, many questions. Okay, let's have so many questions. Ok? Uh, let's, take a good one, but I would be asking about and then no, go ahead, let's let's do that. And then students, if you guys go back in there, we're going to get set up for the next little segment. We'll do some questions. I'm gonna keep this just in case we need to answer a question so reptilian would like to know if the zoom setting on the flash matters when using any of the modifiers. It does matter, because what we're doing is it zooms setting is going to say how it's the angle of view of the light coming out. So how much light is coming out and if it's coming out way out this way, or just very much so, if you want to illuminate an entire panel like this, you need to zoom your flash to something like thirty five millimeters or so it comes out wide to eliminate a lot of that. If you go to why you're going to lose some power, and so you'll have tio when you get your flash modifiers, there's, different sizes and shapes and to do some experimentation and figure out exactly what the best resumes are for the different uh different modifiers you have and so you'll know after you shot with him for little while you know okay here's my you know my road flash bender here and I'm going to send it to thirty five or fifty whatever and that's what I'm going to use all the time with my soft box I'm gonna sit into this so yeah, it does matter. Ok, cool uh question from christine besides the catch light is there any other reason that all these the bounce card um no ok let's see care barbados from barbados mar meadows like to have you ever heard of this spin light three sixty if so, what are your views on that kind of modifier? I don't know this been like three sixteen okay, let's see what else can we ask you? Um someone wants to know what your favorite modifiers for weddings but we know that you don't shoot at heart I do no wedding. So rima b would like to know what color gel would they use in this scenario? And this is the area we have sunlight coming in and I'd have to look at it but it looks like it's just a little diffuse so I might want to add a little bit of blue to that that so I made a quarter cd just a blue ok to add a little bit more let's see hee han nineteen ninety would like to know what to use the flash and rogue flash bender with a camera bracket yeah yeah so camera brackets they're great because they're going to get this up you know you're still gonna have that but you could do some things with your you know the higher that is or the farther out you can get your light the more options you have at shaping the light one of the things you can do with the flash brackett is not just keep your flash above on the one I have the really write stuff bracket allows you to throw your flash to the side like this and so now you get more sidelight and more contrast anything you can do with that one as you can get it like way up it's got like this crazy setting that you could get really really tall and so you can you can do some things with the flash bracket a really nice when gone that allow you not just a to keep the flash above the camera and eliminate the shadow that we talked about but you can also get it to the side of the camera quite a ways to add some some sidelight still nice cool okay should we take another one more? One more question okay um j b photos would like to know what's the effect of distance with square modifier I don't know exactly what it is but it's it's going to be around sixty eight feet maybe maybe ten if you really want to push it but we're gonna find out here in a second is when you take a light that's large and you move it far away you are effectively decreasing the size of the light and you're changing the quality of light from soft light too hard light and so you're sort of defeating the purpose of having this large reflector by moving it too far away that's why if you've seen like small umbrellas large umbrella really huge umbrellas or soft boxes that were made so you can get them far away and still have soft light and so the bigger the light the farther you could move it from your subject and still have soft light so we'll talk about that when we get in here we're talking about like modifiers and and how they work ok so we're going to go back in here on this other outside here uh sarah's gonna sit with me we're going to get all our cables it's sort of an adventurism it so if you walk into the sterile let you go in front when we come to come this way it's gonna be awesome here's the hallway that we call the creative life entrance this is where everybody goes here's our food it's really awesome is it back over here everybody's waiting on set. I love it. That's, a behind the scenes look, creative, live, check it out, cool stuff. You got a big smile on your face is good stuff happening. Great stuff happening.

Ratings and Reviews

Gary Hook
 

Mark's wealth of knowledge combined with his engaging and 'fun', experimental approach to teaching is a winner. I learned a great deal but what truly reinforces the learning is that he actually shows what he is talking about. He gets a question and quickly sets up the practical demo for the answer. Brilliant. Given that this session took place some time ago ( but by no means diminishishes the tremendous learning value) the lessons and knowledge are based techniques that will stand the test of time; however, if I was advising Mark on his teaching techniques, the main are a of 'focus' would be to be more effective with his demonstrations. He holds the back of the camera up, makes his point quickly and then moves on, just as the video is locking on. Great idea to talk about what button you are pushing, but when your fingers are obscuring the 'learning point' it diminishes the effectiveness of the demo. Overall great course which I will watch parts again and highly recommend it. Thank you PS Give both Kelsey and John and huge hug as they are all-stars making things happen!

Alexander Svishchenkov
 

Great! I'm so thankful to you, CreativeLive, for providing this great opportunity to learn an important subject of photography - Speedlights - from the professional Mark Wallace. He is such a good teacher and explains everything in real-life situations and on slides. As he fires his flash, I instantly see the resulting photo on my screen, so this is theory combined with practice. I'm in fact watching you from Belarus, and it's midnight, so I'm fighting with sleep, but I can't get myself away from the screen. this is my 1st CL experience. I'm very grateful for running a rewatch of the previous Day the following morning, so I woke up and saw what I'd missed. And it's totally free! Thank you so much for a true first-class education!

Aussie David
 

Truly a fabulous class. Mark has such a gift for taking a complex subject and making it so understandable and fun at the same time. Mark is easily one of the best instructors out there. Highly highly highly recommend this class.

Student Work

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