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Shoot: Three Light Setup

Lesson 15 from: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

Shoot: Three Light Setup

Lesson 15 from: Speedlights 101

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

15. Shoot: Three Light Setup

Lesson Info

Shoot: Three Light Setup

Let's get our night cons out. Let's get our Ah, pocket was your doubt. And let's do some three light setups. How many? Great. Okay, so what we'll do here is bring Okay. So what I do here is I'm gonna get rid of this Flash this camera. Can you take this for me? Okay. Just put it on the table over there, and what we're gonna do here is we're gonna build our own light. I want to use the ambient light here and try to get that in there. We're gonna start building this light, try to make it nice and wonderful. It's gonna take us a little while because we have to actually set everything up from scratch. This is usually in the studio and be like, we're gonna take a break. And after the break, we're gonna show you love. So right now what we're doing is I'm just gonna walk over there and walk through this cycle so you guys can follow me. Yes, borrow Jen, get her into some warm clothes. Be good. Look it. So let me talk to you and show you what I'm doing here. We're gonna shoot with a Nikon d thre...

e. Yes. We're not gonna be shooting with the Nikon. We're gonna use a pocket wizard. Many inflect system. These guys are made for Nikon. You know what? I didn't even check to make sure the Zahra programs. Right. So I might not a program these, right? We only have two flexes. Okay, so we'll do two lights instead of three. It's fine, can you? Clear? Okay. So what? This is this is a mini. This is a pocket wizard transmitter that uses radio signals, and so we'll have to make sure it's all good on top of that, as this thing it's called on a C three allows me to remotely control my flashes so I can turn them up or down, using these little dials on the side. And so nice, because you don't worry about the position of the flash and making sure you can see, you know, that kind of stuff will be using that. Um, and also another thing. I'm just gonna come over to you, Nico, um, on the front here on this zone, controllers with this is there are switches and dials. So this switch here allows me to be in auto mode. That's what the A is. I could be in manual mode, which means I can control everything in manual mode. And if I'm on the white side of this dial, that's a that's full power all the way down to 128th power and zero is three stops down from full power, and then a is just full T tl. So Aiken, turn flashes on and off, and I can control them with this thing. It's pretty cool. And so what we're gonna do over here is we have what we call some flexes. So here's a flex right here. This is a radio, and it allows me to control this flash remotely. So this is a little bit different. So when we're controlling our flashes from a pocket wizard, you just turn it on. You don't send it to remote. You don't set it to anything. You just turn it on in full TCL mode, and then the flex is going to control all the functionality of this flash. So I will turn on my flex, make sure it's on. I think the batteries, Yes, we have batteries in there Duracell batteries. So they might be turn that on, make sure it's all good. This is going to give me a pop of light, making sure everything's going. I can hit test to make sure it's working. It is This is pretty cool. So gentleman and get this one as well. So I'm turning this one on again. Now that there's a sequence of turning things on with these guys first it's the flash making sure it's in the right mode, which is just normal. Tt l mode, which it is just TL nothing else. And then I turned on my flex once. That's on, It's all good to g o. This is an anti, and I'll put that up on. The other thing I'm going to Dio is, um I want one of these in a sock box. You have soft box? Yeah, So I want to put one of these on There's two different zones this instantly on his own A. This one's gonna be on zone B so we can control these independent of each other really fun. We're gonna get a soft box here so we can actually shoot some of this stuff in low light. Great. Okay. Locked that on there Okay. Now, the other thing is else you might need to help me out here. I'm gonna have to mount this on. Takes a couple seconds. I'm gonna put this on here. This way. Okay, Now we have these rigged up. Now, the cool thing is, um, now we can move this anyway, We want you. Don't worry about this sensor being able to see the light. You could go anywhere we want. The radio is gonna fire that you don't worry about it. Um, all right. Don't have Ogenyi. A look at that. All right, So the first thing we want to do is test everything, make sure it works. And so we're gonna go over here toward again, toward the edge. Keep working with some of that ambient light. Sort of gorgeous. Now that sun is starting to go down. Looks great. So let's have you right here, Actually. Have you right here. We're starting with son. Let's bring that soft box over. Yeah, Okay. So we've got this nice back light back there they're going to start working with. So first, I'm gonna, uh, balance my ambient light. Someone do that, I'm gonna shoot at aperture Priority mode. I'm gonna shoot it around 5.6. So I'm gonna take a shot with no flash. Flash on it is in turn off money. Yeah. So no flash. Take a shot. Good. Now this shot we don't have Thank you. So we can see that I'm gonna show you these tomorrow as well. So, you see, we have a nice background starting to turn. War interest is really what we want, but are, uh, virgin here? Our model, She's under exposed. We need to add some light. So I turn on my mini so I can now fire that flash. Let's make sure that it's actually up and running. I'm heading. Test. We're getting that. No fire. Make sure that that's firing. Make sure this is firing that one fired. Fired this from Not fired. No. Fiery. Okay, that might be a radio. That's Let's just use this one, then. Yep. Yeah. What? Does this one on here and see one e and C one and C one. Oh, there it goes. Try to fire from here. No, no. Okay, let's use that one Softworks. So the issue here is because I didn't play on this to set these channels and things. I have to configure those in a computer. And I think I did a demo about a week ago and I changed the configuration. I forgot to change it back. So that's my problem. But the sun is going down. We don't waste any time. So let me tell you what I've done. I have my camera on manual mode. I have my shutter speed set at 200 of a second. So I'm not using high speed sink. I don't want to waste any of this precious flash power. I have my aperture set to 2.8 because we're really now have much less light. My I s O is at 200. And so what I'm gonna do first No flash turning off my flash. And I'm going to just shoot Jen with the sunset behind her. Gonna get a couple of these shots, Okay, Now we have Nico here. He's gonna show with no sunset we get Ah, beautiful. Beautiful sunset right there. Can you see that, Nico? Okay, I'm gonna turn on my flash in time is of the essence. When we do this, my flash is set to normal. E t T l mode. No exposure, no flash exposure. Compensation will let the ninja of the pre flash try to figure out all of the settings here. So we're gonna get this shot here. Jen looked right at me. Yeah, that did not fire. Gonna look one more time, Might to back up. Just a hair. Good, good, good, awesome. Thank you. Ha ha. Look at this. Look at this. We have this beautiful sunset. The sunset is giving us a beautiful room light on this coat, and our flash is giving us a proper Phil. It's like that. So I don't play with this just a little bit more. I'm gonna add a little bit more flashier, using my flash exposure compensation. Gonna play a little bit with this background. Um, we only have a couple minutes to make this work, so I'm gonna have to go fast. This is something that you shouldn't try your first time out with. A paying client cuts good. Yeah, Just go with goat. Come to get this son. Any scene, son. Not in the scene. So I introduced himself. I'm getting too close. Very good. Ah, look at that. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful I love it. Love it. You're good. Keep just moving here, Get some vertical shots. We go spectacular. And I think, Oh, yeah, I have to turn on my vertical grip for it to look. No fire! No! Okay, I think I'm taking My battery's down to their max. We have extra batteries. Yes, just getting makes matters. Okay, No fire. I think I have killed on my batteries. Um, that's one of those things. We don't have an external battery pack for the Nikon. So shooting that fast, I think all that shooting tonight we have killed or batteries. Mostly that really quickly. This is the fun of speed lights too. You get all that sort of drama. Can I ask you a quick question? Let's ask a quick question. Alright? Daily photo would like to notice detail work with a pocket wizard, plus two in the hot shoe. Or only what? The cannon transmitter. T t l doesn't work with the pocket was there Plus to it all, TCL works with the, uh, pocket wizard, many in flex Onley. So it only works if the many in flex. Yeah, so if a plus to r plus three, you have to dio manual triggering only. Okay, let's just make sure that we have some juice here since our batteries that were no fire, no flash. Yeah, Let's just make sure we have battery power, okay? Yes, there were you finally. Okay, Beautiful, beautiful. Let it shooting away. And we're really This is when there's a couple things here that we're seeing some issues with, Um and that's the ninja of the of. The Flashier is having some issues when I change my, uh, my orientation. And so, uh, this is one of those times that this would be good to shoot in full manual move. Because as I'm adding the sun and taking this in a way, it's confusing how much flash it needs toe have. And so, um, let me just shoot this with no sun and then we'll shoot this with son in the shot and the sun in the shot. We get a lot less flash. And so I don't know, Nico, if you can see this or not, I won't do that. Okay? You're beautiful. So again, we're also having issues from shot to shot, from the shot to the shot. The flash is having so much power that external battery pack would really, really be beneficial. Issued a couple more, you get the cannon 1.2 and external flash. Also having someone that knows what they're doing on hand to help out really, really helped out. Okay, again, this flashes really doing a good job here. Love that. And our light is changing so drastically. I need to take my shutter speed down quite a bit. Do that. So now we're gonna do is we're gonna shoot, tethered, But this guy and you wanna modifier on your flesh. Now we're gonna gonna shoot it with no modifiers. But what I would like to dio show you another technique here. So, John, can you hold this for second? Got it. Another technique we have here is this this flash we have, We have the sunset picture and so I like you were going to even get the sense that picture of the cannon this flashes is firing a light this way. And if you notice our model is this way, she's tall. She's not wide right like tall, not wide. So what we want to do here is take this flash and we're gonna switch it so that we take the orientation from horizontal to vertical. I like to do this again. We have this problem with this being pointed down, so we're gonna try to see if we can bounce that in there. So we'll have John doing this to try to see if we can get that right there. Okay? And I'm going to zoom this manually to about 50 millimeters. Let's try some shots. Okay. This one. I'm gonna really push this. I'm gonna shoot at 1. shoot at one point to hear and see what my ambient light iss That's really gonna be overexposed. But we're gonna go for it, and you can see that it is way over exposed, which is sort of like we're gonna do is we're gonna try our high speed sink here. We're gonna take our eso down a little bit. Take this guy. I love that. And we need to under expose that background. So I'm gonna let high speed sink doing magic this a little bit here. So we're doing that a little bit more out of this. Okay, So why is this working when it didn't before? We don't have a flash modifier. The light is a much less, you know, after overpower so much brightness We don't have, like, flying off of the, uh, the water here, but really getting some really nice stuff here. I'm gonna shoot this in raw because I want to do some adjustments to this in post production so I can show you later some of the tweets that I make. I'm gonna back up just a little bit over here. Love that. Let's have gyms. Have you moved this way? Just a little bit. Can you move that chair for me drunk to make sure the flashes pointed at her? Ugo. Good. You're good. Okay. Showing too much. We're getting unflattering light from our flash. You see, it looks sort of like a flashlight. Let's grab, uh, a umbrella. And I'm really now, as the light just keeps getting lower and lower, we need less and less from our flash. We can do a lot more with it. Issue just a couple more here. This just beautiful you are. Just love it. Yes. So for that, we're gonna have to adjust this back. You could see that some of this stuff you really have to do it quickly. You could be high stress unless you're a seasoned pro. One of the things that I find interesting a lot of wedding photographers and, uh, shooters that are doing this kind of stuff. Almost all have at least a friend to help out. And now you know why? Because you need a friend to help out. It's really, really difficult to do this on your own. Okay, we're to see Let's see if it fires at all. This lens is one of those guys that has an issue. Ah, look at that. So by adding that modifier, look how we softened the light, it's really, really terrific. We're gonna do that one more time. We're getting some. Ah, getting a little lens flare here. Here we go. It's all right. Yeah. I love that. I'm gonna increase our shutter speed just a bit. See if high speed sink doesn't steal away. Too much of our flash. It doesn't. That's gorgeous. I like that really works. Okay. I like the shot that we got earlier with her. Nikon. I think that's the winning shot. We had the best results from that set up, and I think that we have what we need. But what I want to do is see if we have more questions. Um, one of the questions that somebody asked, and I want to answer it right now. And that is can you use the ambient light as the key and the strobe for the Phil and we can. So let's have you turn around and be this way, okay? And just come a little bit more toward me. Come over here. Okay, Chelsea, just put this over here. Here's the joy of the 1.2 lens. You guys stand right there. We have camera operators have kin in Susan. You have a house. Everything is behind us. Okay? I have a 1.2 lens, which means the Boca is gonna be mocha licious. All right? And look, what we get are key. Light came from our sun right behind us. Our fill light came from this light over here, and that feel like, is a little bit punchy. So let's take that, Kelsey, Let's move it. So it's a little bit back a little bit more directional to the back of her head. Here we go and moved to the side A bit more. There you go. Good. I want to back up just a little bit. We have Susan in Kenya, the whole crew back there, and you can't even see the crew in the background to see Howard. We've switched that up. You can definitely do that. And so yeah, I like doing that a lot. Everything with using the the ah, flash is a kicker light. You don't have to use modifiers as much. Get more light out of them. We have mark some questions about gels. Eso One question is from a J. Would would you recommend a CTO on the flash for sunset photos of the model? Yes. Um, I would. Because as the sun is going down is getting more and more orange than we wanna have our model to match that a little bit. And that's where you can sort of, uh, uh, play around with quarter half full cto gels. Um, I didn't put ours in the Paige, so we know what we're good. So, yeah, I know the impotent backs. I didn't match the right one, so we're good. All right, So, um, another question question. Thank you. Other question. From Geo Yah. Um, if you did not have the sunset to illuminate the background, how would you increase ambient, for example, Of trees were in the background instead of like, if trees were in the back row instead of light. So it depends on where the light is coming in. If the lights behind the trees, you're gonna have a really difficult time doing that. And you might not be able to do that if the sun was hitting the trees and you're in shadow. Um, then you've got sort of open shade, and you can do the same exact thing. Slow down the shutter speed increased, Theis. So it's gonna raise everything. You're gonna get more ambient light, and so it really depends on where the light is falling. But, like, right now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna try this, Okay? We're gonna shoot this way. The sun is over here. There's no sun there. So, John Kelsey, Kelsey, let's bring that flash this side going to see if we can raise the ambient light where the sun is not behind us. So I'm gonna shut off the flash for now. Yeah. So son is gone. Sorry, son. Okay? And I'm gonna shoot just a picture that is exposed normally. No flash. Okay, that's pretty beautiful. Thank you. 1. lens. OK. And then what I want to do is I'm gonna under explosion that picture just a little bit, OK? But increasing my shutter speed so my background is under exposed little bit. So what we can do here? Let's have this on. Should be on this table. We'll leave it on this side for now and just turning on. Uh okay. We'll see if this will fire. If you can see it, you might have to. I'm not sure you can do that with this. Very good. It fires. Okay, So what we have is that same exact situation that you just talked about Where you have a background that's not illuminated by the sun. How do we increase that background? Well, all I have to do is right now you can see that the backgrounds under exposed slow down my shutter speed, so I'm going to slow it down to 40th of a second. I'm leaving my flash in the same place and you can see I just drastically increased that background exposure so it works the same way. Take your shutter. Slow it down to get more light speeded up. Less light that impacts the ambient light, Not the flash. You can control them independent of each other.

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.

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