Original subtitles

Okay, you don't have to do stop it

just you don't have to direct every little

thing I do.

I can do it without your direction.

I'm a capable human being.

Okay.

We'll figure out a way to have this.

Yeah, I'm gonna get to that after I

get to this.

Stop.

All right, guys.

Yes, welcome back.

Welcome back to the remote has been for

four days now.

So to here we go.

Okay, group three, episode two, group three, just

just start with a quick recap for everybody

what we chatted about in the first class.

So we talked a lot about our foundation,

right?

We talked about getting lucky, buying tickets, talked

about our whole documentary approach, right?

We talked about the all in balls out

approach and the shooting shit out of it,

right shooting through the entirety of those moments.

Yeah.

And getting that sweet spot right in the

middle.

And the idea of getting open to receive

to receive the moment to receive the story

and keeping that stick on the ice.

Yeah.

And mostly about the idea of making it

about them and their story and their experience

and their wedding as opposed to you and

your camera.

And then we got into the gear bag.

And hidden behind our little webcam.

It says gear.

We talked about gear.

And really the two most critical pieces there

in our mind is not what's in the

gear bag.

It's actually that we've simplified it down as

much as possible and minimized our decision making

with regards to equipment as much as possible.

And that we've practiced to the point of

muscle memory.

So everything in the bag has a purpose

or multiple purposes, and we know how to

use it.

So basically, to sum it all up with

gear, doesn't matter what you use as long

as it's reliable.

Yeah.

And then we chatted about our settings.

And the only one I'm going to really

reiterate the importance of at this point is

the back button focus, right?

That back button focus.

So many of the photos we're going to

be deconstructing today just wouldn't have even been

possible if we didn't use that back button

focus feature.

So if you have not switched your camera

yet to back button focus, do so.

Because I will hunt you down and find

you if you don't.

And we talked about our order of operations

for natural light and ISO and then aperture

and not being afraid to F it up

and layer those stories and then shutter speed.

I think it's confusing when you say F

it up, when you up your F stop.

Okay.

I like to say F it up.

I know.

So increasing the aperture to a higher F

stop number in order to have a deeper

depth of focus, right?

The layering potential.

Yeah.

And then of course, we chatted about composition

and not letting those rules prevent you from

doing something new and different and exciting.

And getting your camera into places where your

eyes don't go, right?

Getting your camera away from five foot six,

two to three meters away.

I love postcard.

Yep.

And, you know, freeing your mind about the

idea of composition having to be correct, right?

But watching the backgrounds and also the edges.

Eric and I, when we're shooting, we're often

dragging our eyeball corner to corner to corner

to corner, looking for those clean and simple

edges.

Always.

We'll talk a lot more about composition, obviously,

once we start looking at some.

And then of course, we chatted about light,

natural light and exposing to the highlights.

And a lot of you have posted some

of your assignment pictures in the group, which

has been awesome.

And then we tried to start to sound

like a broken record now with that idea

of exposing to the highlights.

As we get more into this course and

more complex, it still goes right back to

the very basics of exposing for those highlights.

And then with the off-camera flash, that

three-step process that we chatted about, right?

Shutter speed, one to hundredth of a second,

properly exposed photograph, upping your aperture to get

the ambient exposure you want, to get that

drama that you want in the photo.

And then, and only then, turning on your

flash.

Then controlling those two exposures independently, one at

a time, right?

One at a time.

First the canvas, then the painting.

And then you guys had some homework, right?

You did the lightest subject.

And I love the photos we've been seeing

in the group with that.

And then the second exercise was paint with

canvas.

And just so, it's been requested a few

times and I'm going to get around to

it today, hopefully.

People have requested that we write, create a

document with all the exercises in it, just

so you guys can refer back to it

without having to go and, you know, back

to the videos.

So I'll put that in the Facebook group.

I'll put a document that has all the

exercises lined up.

Because after today, we'll be up to four

exercises.

That's right.

Yeah.

And then you guys already saw this example,

but I did it in between the second

and third groups.

So the other groups haven't seen it, but

this was just an example of that three

-step process, right?

It's by no means a good photo, but...

Choose a low ISO, 1,200th of a

second, properly exposed, and then increase the aperture.

Yeah.

So F2.8 here.

And all we've done here is up the

aperture, right?

Up to F10 to get that drama we're

looking for.

Do it gradually, keep tasting the soup until

it has whatever drama you want in your

canvas.

In this case, Erica went all the way

down until she was properly exposed for just

the highlights.

Yeah.

And then we add our flash, right?

And really, when I look at this image,

I should have tasted the soup a little

bit more.

I didn't feel like working it more because

it's a shitty image as it is, but

it was just for demonstrative purposes.

But if I'd moved the flash a little

bit at a harder angle or put it

a little bit closer, I could have prevented

all that light spill that's on the cupboards

to the right as well.

Okay.

So we'll do a quick question and answer

here before we get into things.

So Jodi, here's what I'm thinking with question

and answers.

And I just want to do a little

advisory here with regards to questions.

So we're going to ignore questions that aren't

related to what we're talking about.

So if someone asks us a question about,

um, I don't know, uh, dance floor lighting,

and we're talking about silhouettes, we're going to,

unless we're on a dance floor photo, we're

not going to address those questions because we

can go on so many different tangents.

We could go on for three days.

Well, we have to remember, we have to

remember guys that, that, you know, in the

context of our full workshop, where we have

40 or 50 hours to deliver everything within

a small group of 15 people, we can,

you know, dive into each and every question,

but with, you know, 70 or 80 people

in the group and having this limited timeframe

to get as much value across as possible,

we have to stick to relevant questions.

Yeah.

So Jodi's going to manage the questions again.

Um, Jodi, don't worry about giving us their

names.

Um, you can just give us their first

name if you want, but is there any

questions yet?

Uh, there was just one, but it got

kind of answered within the group and it

was about layering.

Oh, okay.

Well, we're talking about layering tomorrow or the

next session.

So we'll save that one for the whole

bunch of examples.

So if that's the case, then we'll, uh,

we'll dive into today.

And I think we can just keep it

in this mode, right?

Let's get in that mode because they're going

to have to see our mouse.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we'll keep it in this mode so

you guys can see our mouse here.

Let me double check that everyone's.

Oh yeah.

We have to check the OA.

Why is this asking me to sign in?

I'm not there.

What?

Have you not, have you not been recorded?

I don't know.

It's saying sign in now.

We've been, we can, I can hear you

and I think everybody else can hear you

fairly well.

Okay.

Just fix the, fix the password because that's

not the password.

Record button is blinking.

Yeah.

Okay.

We're just, uh, I don't want to touch

this just in case it is blanking.

Okay.

Yep.

Okay.

It looks like it's recording.

Okay.

Well, so just let me go here.

This is how we can go.

Okay.

We've got nobody in the waiting room.

Okay.

Good.

Okay.

Go back here.

Okay.

So this is what we're going to dive

into today is, uh, the two men toolbox.

Yeah.

And, um, sorry, go ahead.

Yeah.

So basically when, when you guys show up

to a wedding or you guys show up

to shoot this, there's three things that are

going to differentiate you as a photographer.

Um, there's three things that you bring with

you to the shoot and that'll differentiate you

from other photographers.

So one is, sorry.

One is your gear bag, right?

The physical gear that you bring to your

lens, to your wedding, to cameras, your, your

flashes, all that sort of stuff.

That's your gear bag.

The second is your psyche, right?

We talked about this in class.

Number one, this is probably what differentiates us

the most, which is, this is our whole

approach, our philosophy, um, our whole, basically our

mindset and our mental fitness when we show

up to a wedding day and then, and

then our toolbox, right?

This is like our repertoire of techniques, photographic

techniques that we've got up our sleeve that

we can pull out of our toolkit and

use to solve whatever, whatever problems we're trying

to solve, to tell whatever story we're trying

to tell.

Right.

And so those three things combined is what

differentiates us all.

And, um, we, uh, we decided to structure

this whole course around this toolbox idea because

when Eric and I looked at the various

options on how we could, how we could

organize it, like we could do all natural

light and then we could do all manufactured

light, or we could, we could break it

down by part of the day.

We could do bride prep and then groove

prep.

And then, but we realized we don't really

follow any formulas that any part of the

day, other than maybe like family formals, right.

Sometimes ceremony a little bit.

Yeah.

Those are a little bit formula.

But the thing that we did, we do

see common themes coming up in our work,

regardless of which part of the day, regardless

of whether it's natural light or off camera

light, we sort of have these, these, these

tools that we keep falling back on that

we keep relying on to, to help us

do our job, right.

And to solve, to solve compositional problems or

to solve, um, challenges that we're running up

against.

And in your, in your gear bag, you

don't, you know, we don't go show up

at our first shoot with, you know, 12

lenses and four cameras and four flashes, right.

We slowly, we did, we did that on

our second wedding.

We went to the camera store and rented

eight lenses and three cameras, and it completely

screwed us over because we were so, we

had so it was the paradox of choice.

We had so many choices that we couldn't

make a proper decision.

Yeah.

Well, and creativity really does come from, come

from limitations rather than infinite options.

So you, you build up your gear bag,

you know, one lens at a time when

you piece of equipment at a time, the

same with our toolbox, right.

Our, our techniques, we learned them and we

practice them and we become competent at them

one at a time.

So we build up this, this toolkit, um,

gradually as well.

Yeah.

And the way Lani and I have sort

of cut our teeth on each of these

tools that we're, we're going to go through

is first we would practice them on each

other, right.

At home, in the downtime, on our kids,

when we're out for a walk with our

iPhones, you know, we just practice the idea

of the tool on learning mechanics, learning the

mechanics of it.

Right.

Then we would bring it into engagement sessions,

right.

Engagement sessions or portrait sessions with, uh, not

on a wedding day though, where there was

no time constraints, where we could take our

time, where we could experiment, where we could

try something that might really suck.

Right.

And then, and only then when we're competent

in that scenario, we'd bring it into the

portrait session of a wedding day, right.

The portrait session where there's way more things

within our control and we're directing it.

And then the Holy grail is when we

can incorporate these tools into a documentary setting.

Right.

And it does definitely take that progression because

you've got to get those mechanics down before

you can, before you can, um, use them

with intention and meaning, right.

It's like a piano player.

They have to know the song by heart.

They have to have that muscle memory.

They have to know how to play the

song before they can play it with feeling.

And it's the same with, with photography.

So just keep in mind.

Because we're going to show, we're going to

show you guys, you know, obviously a lot

of examples of each tool and a lot

of them are lifeless representations of the idea.

Okay.

That's, that's how we start when we're learning.

We're not creating these, these deep, meaningful, uh,

award-winning photos yet where we're learning the

mechanics of it.

We end up creating lifeless representations of it,

but that's an important stepping stone that gets

to the next level.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, um, of course we're going to be,

let's press the down, just push the down

button and not the forward button.

The down button.

Yeah.

We're going to be showing you and explaining

the how of course, right.

How did we execute it?

How did we solve the problems, et cetera.

Now, but Eric and I had intentionally decided

not to include the metadata.

Obviously we're going to share the important relevant

metadata, which lens, what focal length, if the

aperture shutter speed was important, we'll obviously share

that, but we're not going to flash it

up on every photo for you because we

see too often photographers just put the blinders

on.

They see those numbers and think that, Oh,

if I just put my camera settings there,

I can make this photo.

And it's not the way our creative process

works.

Well, and really plus those numbers are going

to be entirely different in a different situation,

in a different scene, with different ambient light

and different, uh, different things happening.

So, and, and running are constantly adjusting on

the fly, right?

Like we can never walk into a scene

or walk into a portrait and know what

our settings are going to be like, it's

a constant, you know, tasting that soup and

adjusting as necessary.

And it's, I don't even know the metadata

to be quite honest for most of the

photos, because it's not really something we pay

attention to.

We don't, we don't pay attention to the

numbers so much.

We pay attention to, does it need to

be darker?

Does it need to be brighter?

Do we need to layer more stories in?

Do we need to layer less stories?

And we're going to walk you guys through

those mental steps with each of the photos.

Okay.

And, and also explaining, um, you know, when

we've chosen to do it, uh, and where

we've chosen to do it.

And most importantly, why, what, why did, were

we led to doing this in that, at

that time in this situation with our cameras?

Yeah.

And it's usually like most of the photos

that we're going to do construct for you.

Um, I'll just reiterate, it's never us walking

into a scene and saying, okay, we're going

to do this.

We're going to like that post.

We're going to put the car.

It's always, it's almost like climbing a ladder.

It's like we get to the first run

and it's like, okay, we promised all of

our way through that first run.

What else can we add into this to

tell an additional story?

We get to the second run.

And then we keep on climbing the ladder

as we're going through that creative process.

It's never a, an initial vision that we're

trying to execute.

And other than when we're practicing and learning

these tools, the tool never comes first, right?

It's not like I want, I'm going to

do a silhouette now.

It's the problem is presented.

The scene is there.

And then we choose the tool to solve

that problem or to help us achieve what

we're trying to, trying to achieve.

Okay.

So here's our, uh, here's our toolbox.

Okay.

So we're silhouettes, backlight room light, shadow propulsions,

shoot throughs and layering, bokeh panoramas, otherwise known

as burnizers, reflections, and then our secret weapon,

which is the most advanced of all these

tools.

If we have time, if we get there.

We have time.

So this is what we're going to go

over today.

So I'm going to take you through silhouettes

and then mine is going to take you

through backlight room light.

And that's for everyone's own good.

That's for everyone's own good.

And he's actually probably going to, hopefully I

will physically leave the room because yesterday he

sat in that chair and beaked at me

the entire time.

And then the kids get, I won't go

with that with you guys.

Okay.

So, so what we're going to start doing

now, and I'm going to leave the room.

I just, you have to be within range

so you can hold the camera for me,

but just don't buddy in at the time

and start taking over.

So we're going to deconstruct a bunch of

examples of each tool, starting with the silhouettes

and with each tool, the progression we're going

to follow with you guys is we're going

to start with simple, straightforward examples.

Okay.

Um, you know, and many of these tools

are not brand new, right?

I mean, it's not the first time you've

ever made a silhouette.

Okay.

So we're going to start with, I do

remember that moment.

The first time we ever made it.

Oh my God.

Do you remember it was in Banff national

park.

And it was like, Oh, Holy shit.

We just made a silhouette.

Anyway.

So, well, and then we're going to make

our way up into more complicated examples.

And also we're going to start with natural

light examples, all natural light, and then we'll

move into manufactured light examples, showing you how

you can, and you can achieve the tool

in both natural light scenarios and off-camera

flash scenarios.

And we'll go from portrait examples of the

tool.

So examples where we've used the tool in

a very sort of more controlled setting, right.

During a portrait session.

And then we'll move towards where we've used

the tool in a documentary setting.

All right.

So we're going to start off with silhouettes.

All right.

You're Can you hear me?

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

You want to check in with Joey just

quickly?

Anything I should address?

Maybe check the waiting room.

No, there's no waiting room.

Right.

It's turned off that setting.

So yesterday's class.

So I guess zoom this week changed their

privacy settings.

And it like, it literally happened in one

day where they changed their privacy settings so

that everybody that joins a zoom session automatically

gets put into a waiting room, which has

never happened to us before.

And we weren't prepared for it because it

was brand new for us.

And so yesterday, when we were teaching our

class, we started teaching and there was like

60 people in the waiting room and we

didn't even know it.

And so yesterday was a gong show as

well.

Next week's going to go so smooth.

Jodi, anything I should address before we get

started here?

There's only one question.

Okay.

And the question is kind of a difference

between mirrorless and real time.

Is there a difference in how you build

drama between a mirrorless and a DSLR?

Nope.

It's that same three step process.

And that's by fireflies.

What?

Who's?

Fireflies.

That's the name on the...

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Yeah, no, it's the same three step process,

whether we're shooting DSLR or mirrorless.

I mean, the only difference with mirrorless is

that you can see your exposure, right?

So with DSLR, I am looking down a

little bit more and making sure the exposure

is, it's got the drama that I'm looking

for.

Whereas with the mirrorless, I don't, I don't

have to do that chimping in or to

make sure I've got the right exposure.

Really?

I didn't know that was an advantage for

mirrorless.

Oh, it is.

It makes the shooting process a lot quicker,

actually.

Yeah.

Okay.

But it also feels like you're operating a

computer a little bit more than an actual

camera.

So it's got its pros and cons.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

So just meet yourself there, Jodi, and I'm

going to go into silhouettes here.

Put that away.

Okay.

So silhouettes are really easy to do, really

easy to achieve, but they're very hard to

do well.

Okay.

Because it's the tiny little differences, like tiny,

minute little differences that make all the difference

in a silhouette.

So when Manny and I, let's just say

we're going out for a portrait section, portrait

session, one of the first things that we

always ask ourselves is where's the brightest spot?

Where's the brightest spot?

And can I place my couple there?

Or can I wait for something to walk

through there or something like that?

Right.

And all we're doing with silhouettes is what

we talked about in the first class is

we're exposing for the highlights with our subject

or our humans in the shade.

Right.

That's all we're doing, exposing for the highlights

and that highlight more often than not in

a silhouette is the sky.

Okay.

So what's more important than the actual silhouette

is the negative space.

Okay.

It's the negative space that makes a silhouette,

not the actual silhouette itself.

So in this case, the negative space in

between their legs, you guys see my mouse?

I hope so.

The negative space in between their legs, this

triangle here, this triangle over here, the negative

space in between their hips here, the negative

space in between their torsos.

And the fact that there's a little bit

of negative space in between their hands and

their torsos is a really important detail as

well.

So this was December 28th.

This is in Bath National Park.

This is about 20 minutes from our house.

And it was minus 30.

I don't know.

It was freezing.

It was minus 30 some degrees outside with

windchill.

I think with windchill, it was actually minus

38.

So it was cold.

So these people had come all the way

from Ontario for this engagement session.

So we couldn't reschedule.

The nice thing is when it's that cold,

it's really beautiful.

And the air is really clear and crisp,

but you can imagine they showed up to

the shoot with about 16 different layers of

clothing on looking like it was really hard

to get a nice, sleek, and sexy silhouette

where they didn't look like the Michelin Man.

So this is why we chose a wider

lens.

I've got the 24 on here and why

we've got them fairly small in the frame.

And so in order to get that sleek

silhouette, what we had them do is it

was very obvious to Lenny and I where

the bright spot was in this scene.

We got to this meadow.

We're like, oh, there's a spot right in

between those trees.

And there was a small difference, a small

little change that I made that made all

the difference in this photo.

So initially, can you go grab the camera

Lenny and stand by the front door?

Because I took a walk yesterday.

Oh no, there's one here.

I'm like, you just got cameras lying all

over the place in this house.

Okay.

So initially when we walked into this meadow,

we could see that opening between the trees.

But if I had taken a photo from

this standing position, the couple would be silhouetted

on an area of less contrast, right?

They'd be silhouetted down here in this darker

part of the photo.

We want to get them in as high

area of contrast as possible.

That's really important with the silhouette.

If we can't get them on the brightest

part of the sky, then we need to

get them on the next best thing to

the area of highest contrast.

And sometimes that's the difference.

And then this case is the difference from

going from here where I was standing to

laying down on the ground.

So in this case, I'm laying down on

the ground in order to get the couple

on that brightest part of the canvas.

Okay.

And then all we have to do, all

we have to do is basically run back

and forth between the opening, right?

So they're just running back and forth and

we're shooting as many frames per second as

they want from that one tree to the

other tree.

And you can really feel the energy of

people's movement in a silhouette.

So if they're walking stiffly back and forth

and they feel awkward, you can feel that

in the end result of the photo.

You might not be able to label it,

but there's like this undefinable thing that you

can feel.

So really make sure when you're having them

move through those poses, that you're giving them

an energy to focus on, right?

So often we'll have them do a few

laps and it'll feel stiff and awkward.

And I'll just be like, make sure you

guys have a frolic in your set.

Like pretend, which is really funny when it's

like minus 32 outside, I'll be like, pretend

you're skipping through a field of daisies, picking

flowers with a basket in your hand.

And then you get this more energetic jump

to their step and it transfers to the

final image as well.

Okay.

What's that?

Yeah.

Okay.

So this one is the bright spot is

on the ground, obviously, right?

The bright spot is the reflection of the

mountain.

And there's a few wishes I have for

this image.

So this image, first of all, just to

say was taken with a 50 millimeter lens.

I thought it was a 35, we had

to go check the metadata yesterday.

But it was a 50 millimeter lens were

up on the road.

And a couple are down below us.

And right here on the bottom edge of

the frame, framed out is a parking lot

and an outhouse.

Okay, so we've eliminated that from our frame.

Here's what I wish for this image, though.

And this was something we were trying to

problem solve as we were shooting it, right?

I wish their whole body was silhouetted on

that reflection.

See how this little outcrop here cuts off

their torsos.

That does really affect the end result of

the silhouette, right?

Because because their legs don't pop nearly as

much.

So that unfortunately, is ice.

So we couldn't have them step that far

out.

But we had them stand on the edge

as the very edge.

We had them.

Sorry, I'm the fatigue is hitting me and

I can't get my words out properly.

We had them stand on as far on

the edge as they could, right in order

to get their at least their torsos, their

full torso silhouetted, and especially their hands, especially

their hands, those are the most important thing.

But you know, if they if this was

the edge right here, they had been one

step back from the edge.

And that line that you see right here

was crossing through their hands, that would make

a big difference in the final in the

final image and how pleasing it is to

look at.

So those are the tiny little details, you

know, our couple standing here versus here that

make all the difference in a solo.

Okay.

Two things with this photo one.

Again, we've got that area of highest contrast,

right?

So we've got our couple on the area

of highest contrast, the brightest spot, where's the

brightest spot?

And can we place our couple there?

And can we move adjust as our couple

is moving to make sure that we're keeping

them on that brightest spot as they move

in and out of position.

So one of the things I often do

is we trick our couples, we trick our

couples into think they're into thinking that they're

going to a certain rock or a certain

place for a portrait.

But really, the more interesting photo is their

journey to that location, and their journey away

from that location, right?

Because that's when you can get something unexpected,

something more real, something that you can't pose.

And so what really makes this photo is

again, the negative space, right?

We've got this wonderful triangle of space here,

we've got my wish for this is that

her toe isn't quite touching the ground that

would take this photo to the next level.

If her toe was like, let me see,

her toe was like this.

And there was that little bit of a

few pixels of negative space under her toe.

That would be amazing.

This, this, that's probably one or two pixels

of negative space under her chin, right?

But it makes it makes all the difference

right there.

I'm not loving Shane's silhouette, because he's more,

he's more globular, right?

But the fact that her silhouette is so

good, it makes up for the fact that

Shane's isn't so good, right?

And then these are just tourists.

These are tourists that are there taking photos

of the sunset, but they give the phone,

they give it context.

Again, where's the brightest spot?

The brightest spot was right through those opening

of trees, we're exposed for that highlight.

And we have the camera down on the

ground again, down on the ground to eliminate

the horizon.

So we're often shooting from these really low

angles, especially with silhouettes, because the difference, especially

if you have a wider lens on the

difference from going from here to here to

make all the difference in your composition.

So if we had shot this from standing,

you would have been able to see the

ocean behind them.

And the horizon line probably would have gone

through their torsos right around here.

Okay, so I put this one in because

it's an example of a silhouette that's not

really that interesting.

And it's not because we've not paid attention

enough to the negative space, right?

We've just got distracted by the technique, and

we are missing the moment between the couple.

And you really can't tell where his nose

ends and her nose begins.

So we need that negative space in between

those silhouettes in order to make it work.

Right?

Again, we're shooting from a low angle here,

we're down.

And that's in order to, to get the

couple on the bright spot, right?

So we're shooting really low down up through

the branches, branches are also silhouetted on the

sky.

Right now, when we're shooting from that low

angle.

And so let's say you guys are shooting

me from a low angle, right?

What's going to be here, I'll go up.

It's as if you're shooting me from a

low angle.

Oh, that's too high.

Can you hold this low?

Like, like I said, you're shooting from a

low angle.

Okay, there we go.

Okay, so if you're shooting me from a,

there we go.

So this is all this is often the

angle we're shooting our couples if we're trying

to get them in the sky, right?

And this doesn't work so well, right?

Because the closest thing to the camera is

my shoulder, or the butt, or the butt,

right, which is going to make them look

bigger.

And it's not going to be a nice

sleek silhouette.

So often when we're shooting from those low

angles, the couple have to accommodate for that

fact, they have to compensate for that fact.

So we're literally have them lean over the

camera like this.

Right?

And that's all they do so that the

face is the closest thing to the camera.

Right?

And that it doesn't, you can't tell in

the photo.

Thanks.

You can't tell in the photo, but it

accommodates for that fact that you're shooting, or

compensates for that fact that you're shooting from

that very low angle.

Okay.

These again, were straight portraits right now.

And we're straight natural light portraits.

This is one of my favorite silhouettes we've

ever made because it's probably one of the

few silhouettes.

Oh, you guys get to watch Lonnie do

yoga behind me.

It's one of the few silhouettes that we've

ever made where you can actually see the

emotion.

You can see what they're feeling because of

the negative space, right?

We've got this wonderful negative space in between

her teeth and her lips here, right?

We've got this negative space between his chest

and her neck.

And we've got this negative space in between

in the nape of the neck there.

And that makes all the difference.

Just that little bit of negative space there

makes her form so much more sleek and

sexy looking.

Right?

Again, we have them on the brightest part

of the sky.

And that doesn't necessarily mean our couple has

to move.

It means we have to move, right?

We have to move and adjust accordingly to

make sure they're on that area of highest

contrast.

Because this wouldn't be nearly as interesting if

we had them silhouetted over here.

Right?

So always having them on that area of

highest contrast.

So this was in St. Lucia.

It was not on the wedding day.

It was a day after session.

And we were obviously in the water with

a couple here.

And one of us was shooting this lens,

which is a 35 1.4. And then

one of us was shooting with the 85

1.8. And we're both shooting this at

the same time, obviously in the water with

the couple.

And what we had the couple do instead

of that static pose portrait, static posing, we

had them move through.

Right?

So what we had them do, want to

demonstrate this with me?

We'll pretend this is the water.

Is we had them dunk in and come

up.

Dunk in and come up.

Oh, God, squats.

Oh, my legs.

So we had them coming in and out

of the water continuously.

Of course, they weren't doing squats because they

were in water.

But the reason we take that approach is

that we can get something more unpredictable.

Right?

We can get something more real.

And like, I mean, I could never be

creative enough to say, okay, we're going to

dunk in and out of the water so

that we can get a drip coming off

the chin at just the perfect moment.

Right?

That's that magic element that you can't get

with that static pose portraits.

Also, if you didn't tune in yesterday, we

did a free workshop in the two man

workshop group, which is the big group on

Facebook, on posing as best we could with

with social distancing.

We did online posing with Tree and Joss.

But we explain our whole approach to posing

there and we go into incredible detail.

So if you've got any questions about the

I'd recommend that you watch that first.

Okay, now back to this photo, I want

you guys to pay attention again to the

negative space.

Okay, so because that's, that's what makes all

the difference in this photo, right?

These like five pixels, right here, that's so

small, but that that little bit of negative

space is so important.

The negative space in between their mouths, the

negative space under their chins is really important.

This triangle here and now take a look

at her hand.

Because the hand is really key in this

image.

It's probably the most important part of the

silhouette is her hand.

So Lenny's gonna hold the camera for me

again.

We don't have any view outside our window

today.

It's a whiteout snowstorm.

Okay, so Okay,

okay, so there's my silhouette.

So now I want you to notice the

difference between if I'm like this versus this,

right, that little tiny difference.

You know, you can't see my profile, you

can see my profile.

And I want you to notice what happens

when I put my hand on my face.

This arm up, like if I were to

have this arm up, back up, so your

hand isn't no, like, backwards.

I'm talking about my chin right now.

Okay, so you can see that hand cuts

off my chin, right?

So sometimes we can just switch hands.

And that makes all the difference.

Sometimes we can't have a really depends on

the height of the bride and the height

of the other couple, right?

Just if there's a large height differential, sometimes

that arm will cut off that silhouette of

the chin, which is really, really important.

So just be really cognizant of that.

Okay, now let's look at the hand.

Okay, so I want you to maybe just

zoom in on my hand here.

Okay, so now I want you to notice

the difference between this silhouette of my hand

and this silhouette.

This is fine.

Okay, so this versus this, right?

This is more like a claw.

It kind of looks like a swan head.

It's not really recognizable human form.

Whereas this looks like a hand and it's

so much more graceful.

And so, yeah, okay.

So, and that is the tiniest minute change,

right?

That is literally...

No, I'll wait till you got that back

up.

All right, that is the tiniest minute change.

That is literally someone moving their thumb from

here to here, right?

What are you doing?

I was going to try it again.

Yeah, nothing's going to work.

There, the finger bone.

Okay, this will quite work.

Do that during the layering section.

So those tiny little changes, even just an

inch in the change of the hand can

make all the difference in a photo.

And hands are super...

They communicate more than anything else in a

photo, right?

They communicate almost more than facial expressions, right?

Because you've got two hands and they take

up way more...

Like if you just look at the screen

right now, my hands take up way more

pixels than my eyes do, way more pixels.

So by that mathematical equation alone, our hands

are going to communicate way more than our

eyes in a photo.

So they're really important.

And a lot of brides and grooms and

couples, they express their tension in their hands,

right?

Their tension gets...

So if their hands like break over and

it's tense, you can really feel that in

the photo.

So just have them relax the hand a

lot.

Some brides fall into this really naturally.

Others, they look super awkward.

One of the cues that I learned from

Davina and Danielle was have them almost touch

their thumb and their middle finger for those

brides that are extra awkward.

Have them almost touch their thumb and their

middle finger and it kind of puts their

hand in a nice position, okay?

But most important is that it's relaxed and

that hand is communicating what you want it

to.

When I think silhouettes are best used actually

is when they layer an additional story into

the frame, right?

We always think of our silhouettes being the

main subject of our photo, but I feel

like they're best used when they layer that

additional story into the frame.

So in this case, this silhouette over here

is giving us context, right?

It's telling us what's happening on the beach.

And when I was taking this photo, I

didn't want anybody to know I was taking

this photo because if people knew or were

posing for this photo, it wouldn't have the

same feeling and energy that it has right

now, right?

So Lanny was having them head on over

here on off to the camera left for

a portrait up on a stump.

He was doing a silhouette as well, getting

them up on the sky in the bright

spot.

And I just said, okay, guys, head over

to Lanny.

But instead of walking behind my camera, walk

in front of my camera, James, make sure

you help Joanne with her dress.

And as they were traveling between this tree

and this tree, I had my camera on

as high frame rate as possible, right?

Hoping for what I got over here.

Because this silhouette is more important than this

one, right?

I've got nice negative space here, but his

legs aren't great.

But what I was really going for was

that little bit of tension that, you know,

three pixels in between his foot and his

ball, right?

And then she was facing him, thankfully.

And she wasn't taking a sip out of

her drink.

So she's a great silhouette as well.

Same thing here, right?

Madeline and Timmy were with us on the

shoot.

And they were getting in all the frames

and driving us crazy, actually, until we decided

to start using them.

And this is in Thailand.

And it's easy to say, oh, man, you

guys got to shoot in Thailand.

This looks amazing.

It looks beautiful.

But this was the ugliest, dirtiest parking lot

I have ever been into.

We were right by a market.

And we were trying to find a place

where we could get the sky.

And we found this parking lot.

It was just an abandoned parking lot.

It was all tarmac.

And there was garbage all over the place.

So we were trying to figure out how

to simplify the frame, eliminate all that, and

simplify the frame down to what was interesting,

which was the sky.

Okay, we found these cement cylinders because it

was a construction site on the side.

The kids were playing around in them.

And once we embraced the fact that they

were part of the story, and they were

there, we came up with this.

Ray and Momo were obviously framed through this

cylinder here.

I have my camera really low to the

ground, as low as I can go, um,

because I want them silhouetted here.

And I don't want to cut off their

torsos.

If I'm standing up, this horizon line here

is going to go through about here.

Right.

And then of course, Timmy's playing in here.

Malin's playing with a piece of rebar over

there.

And then I'm just shooting as many frames

as I can.

Last natural light portrait.

Okay, so we've got the bride silhouetted inside,

right?

There's one bright spot.

And then the groom is outside and he's

lit by the sun.

Again, we can silhouette and natural light in

the same photo.

And actually one of the exercises that we're

going to give you guys today, once we

finish up silhouettes, is going to be something

very similar to this, except it's going to

be with off camera flash.

Okay, Jodi.

Questions?

Yes, I have some questions.

When you're shooting loads of frames to nail

it, do you always take time to check

the camera and make sure you've got that

one shot?

Or is there a point where you give

up if it's not something, if it's not

coming together because the clients are getting bored?

Uh, well, yes and no.

Okay, so if we've got the time and

I can check and make sure we nailed

it, um, I will.

But there's many times where, no, we don't

have the time.

Like, I won't go and check and make

sure we've nailed it.

But I shoot enough that I think, um,

there's a chance that I've got it.

Like, for example, with this shot, I didn't,

it was minus 38 outside, so I didn't

bother checking to see if I got it.

But I had, I shot like probably 200

shots in rapid fire as they ran back

and forth along that ridge.

And I knew my focus was bang on

because I did check that, um, before, you

know, I back button focused on that ridge,

zoomed in, made sure it was sharp.

Then I had them run back and forth

a couple of times.

Uh, that's a good question though, when to

give up on the shot.

Um, and that really is, is personal and

it really comes down to what you're feeling.

If you really, really believe in something, I

would encourage you to keep working it, um,

regardless of if the client is getting bored,

but, but it's your job to make sure

that the client isn't bored, right?

Like it's your job to keep communicating and

saying, you guys, this is Epic.

This is going to be so worth it.

This is, you know, you're going to want

to blow this up by 20 or 30

and put it on top of your fireplace

or whatever.

Like we need to communicate the fact that

it's worth it.

If we, if we're working through it.

Totally.

Um, a couple of questions with regards to

distancing for, uh, the shots that you're kind

of working towards here.

So number one is how are you communicating

with the couple when they're not far away?

Are you yelling?

Are you prepping walkie talkie?

So on and so on.

Okay.

So many of them, they're not as far

away as you think.

Okay.

So they're not all these photos I've shown

save maybe this one, we could communicate with

the couple by just by elevating our voices.

And even here, uh, we could communicate by

yelling, which I'm very good at.

I'm very good at yelling.

My voice travels far.

Um, there's been a few instances, like maybe

I can count in one hand where we've

had to use a cell phone to communicate

with them.

Um, but that's in 10 years.

Like it's, it's not very often that we're

that far away that we can't communicate.

And we'll give them instructions.

And sometimes, yeah, we'll be like, Hey guys,

head down to that peninsula there.

And, um, you know, I just want you

to walk back and forth between that rock

and that tree and we'll demonstrate how to

do so before they go down there.

Um, I feel like there's, there's some questions

around focal length, but then also aperture.

So maybe just a few of these, if

you don't mind saying what aperture was used,

I have no idea.

I literally have no idea.

Mostly I bet you.

Well, most of these are probably pretty wide

open because we're isolating, right?

The ones where we've got additional layers like

this one, we've got a few different layers.

So this one's probably higher.

This one's probably around F seven because you

know, I want it sharp on ran Momo

there, but I also want to be fairly

sharp in the foreground here.

This one, they're on the same plane of

focus, right?

They're similar distance from my camera lens.

So that's probably F 2.8. This is

wide open at one, two, this is wide

open at one, four, all these other ones

are likely fairly wide open.

Um, because, because of what we're trying to

do with the photo, we're going to show

you some examples coming up, uh, where there's

a more documentary setting and we're trying to

layer many different things where we're up at

about F 22, but I'll, I'll let you

know when that comes up.

Okay.

Um, and then a couple of questions around

timing for the best silhouettes, um, sunset, sunrise,

middle of the day.

Yeah.

Okay.

So for these natural light silhouettes where we're

outside, yes.

Sunset or sunrise is definitely easier.

You're going to set yourself up for success.

If you go out for this in a

nice sunny day during sunset or sunrise, it's

going to be way easier.

It's way harder to achieve midday when the

sun is high in the sky, but we're

going to show you some techniques that you

can use with your off camera flash where

you can do it at any point during

the day or indoors.

But the examples I've all, I've showed you

here are all outdoor examples and they've all

taken place, um, when the sun is low

in the sky.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Maybe except for this one.

I think this one was mid afternoon.

Do you mind sharing focal lengths one more

time for some of the shots that you're

showing?

Uh, 24, 54, 50, probably 35, probably 16

to 35.

Don't remember.

This one's 35, 85, probably 16 to 35

at around 28 or so.

35, 35.

Hang on one sec here.

I've got to figure out where Katie's question

is.

Okay.

When you are shooting with couple tiny at

edges of frame, can you quickly walk through

the focus process?

This may be a repetitive question.

I apologize, but I'm being asked to make

sure I ask it.

Sometimes when doing these types of shot, even

with back button focus, recompose on the same

plane, I still find edges of lenses aren't

as sharp.

Even with the primes, it works about half

of the time.

Actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a challenge we all run

into and it's, it's my, any and are

not immune from that as well, especially if

they're at the extreme far edges of the,

uh, of the frame and we'll experiment with

different things.

I mean with Canon, um, it was a

problem for sure.

Like it's definitely not as big an issue

with Sony as it was with Canon.

Um, that breaks my heart.

I know, I know.

Uh, but my best advice is just to

zoom in and check, right?

If you're in portraits and you have them

on that extreme edge, zoom in and check,

zoom in and check.

And then, you know, try, try that.

The back button really does help.

I'm not sure if you use back button

focus yet, but that really does help you.

That makes all the difference.

Um, if you're finding it's still not sharp

with center point recompose, then try the toggle.

Uh, but if you're at a wider focal

length, like 35 or 50, I feel like,

and your couples are really small in the

frame, um, that back button center point recompose

should be good for you.

If you're using an 85, one, two, and

you know that you're really narrow depth of

focus, then you might need to use the

toggle, but yeah.

I give time for one more question.

Yeah.

One more.

Okay.

Perfect.

Um, I think it's a good one.

It is a difficult question to ask because

obviously we don't want to be focused on

body composition when it comes to our clients,

but exact same time.

Um, do you change your approach to silhouettes

if your couple are larger or don't have

a sleek silhouette?

Um, and then trying to write without coming

across as offensive was written there.

Yeah.

Um, no, I don't really change my approach.

I mean, uh, we might not do them

as much.

We might not do them as, although no,

I mean, our couples know what they look

like.

Right.

So, um, I'm not going to accentuate it.

I might, I do tend to use wider

lenses from further away.

Um, and, and especially, you know, 16 to

35, if you place your couple in the

center of that 16 to 35, it's certainly,

um, what's the word.

I call it Boeing.

Yeah.

It, you know, it's, it's, it doesn't, you

know, whereas if you silhouette them using an

85, be a lot trickier to, to, so

lens choice is definitely a big thing, but

no, it's, it's, we, people are what they

are.

We don't try and hide what their bodies

look like.

Totally.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Okay.

Thanks, Jordi.

Okay.

So now we're going to move on to

examples of where we've used silhouettes, still natural

light.

Um, but they're going to be all photo

documentary examples.

Okay.

Exact same concept though.

We still ask ourselves the same thing.

Where's the brightest spot, right?

In this case, I noticed when the bride

got in the car, I noticed when the

door was open, there was a bright spot

right behind her and she was sitting waiting

in this car, uh, on the way to

the tea ceremony.

She was waiting for her groom.

She was probably in there for about 10

minutes, right?

Which is often the time.

It's one of those transition times where photographers

put their cameras down, right?

But this is the time when there's opportunity

for so much more.

If you keep your eyes open, right?

So a first step is noticing that second

step is exposing for those highlights, right?

And then waiting for something to happen.

So I just made sure I did.

And this is why we're not pure photo

journalists, right?

I did open the door to that car.

I had to open that door because the

windows were really tinted.

If I didn't open that door, there wouldn't

be a bright spot.

So I opened the door, kept it open

while she was waiting there and waited for

a moment.

Most attention was on her phone.

It wasn't a good silhouette, but when she

took out her lipstick, it was perfect, right?

And this, again, it's that negative space.

It's that negative space in between her mouth

there and that negative space between her lipstick

and her lips.

Okay.

Lani's taking a detail shot here, but it's

the exact same concept.

He's exposing for the highlights and there's a

bright spot at the back, right?

And he's just taking a detail shot of

the ceremony site, right?

The aisle runner, the ribbon, but you notice

this bright spot.

And you notice when someone walked by, it

would give a perfect silhouette, right?

He might've been at a little bit of

a higher F-stop as a result, right?

He might've upped his F-stop a little

bit.

I can't remember.

It was, this was a long time ago,

but in order to get these recognizable as

legs, okay?

This is actually during a portrait session, but

it's not a posed portrait.

So one of us is taking posed portraits.

And then as the other one's doing the

more posy stuff, the other one doesn't put

that camera down and doesn't start, stop looking

for what?

Yeah, I got it.

I got it.

Exposed for the highlights.

Where's the brightest spot, right?

The brightest spot is the sky.

If we were taking this from a standing

position, you wouldn't even see the sky.

Right?

The sky would be eliminated from the frame,

but by getting down low, we can expose

for those highlights and use that sky as

a canvas on which to silhouette something.

Right?

So we just, their hands are reaching out.

They're almost touching and we've got that negative

space between them.

This is a great dress detail shot.

So when Lani was shooting this, he basically

had two choices, right?

He's out on this porch and he could

shoot this direction, which was a nice, clean

backdrop.

We've got sky, we've got ocean, we've got

nothing else.

Right?

We've got a few boats in there, but

they're not, they're not screwing with his composition

in any way whatsoever.

If he were to shoot the other direction,

so exposed for the highlights, but shoot the

other direction towards the room, he would have

been, you know, have light on the groom's

faces, similar to the light that's on me

right now, or sorry, on the groom's man's

faces.

But there would be all sorts of other

things in the frame, right?

There'd be the bed, there'd be the hotel

room, there'd be clutter, there'd be intersecting lines

and window panes behind people's heads.

Right?

So it was obvious choice for him to

shoot this direction because he's got a clean

canvas as the background.

And because he's got such a clean canvas,

he can really up his aperture.

He can go at a really high F

-stop without having to worry about distracting things

in focus behind people's heads.

Right?

Because he's got that clean backdrop.

So he's probably up and around F11 here,

I would guess.

Right?

Trying to layer these three stories together.

Right?

And making little micro adjustments as he's shooting,

little tiny micro adjustments to make sure that

there's bubbles around everybody's heads.

Right?

My favorite part about this photo is the

silhouetted chest hair.

I don't think we've ever silhouetted chest hair

before or since.

And I just love that part of the

photo.

This was in a church and I was

pretty much stuck here the entire ceremony.

I wasn't allowed to go to move around

a lot.

Lenny was on the other side, sort of

stuck there.

And I mentioned this in the first class,

right?

Every highlight in your photo, every highlight in

your composition has to have a purpose.

And I was really struggling in this position

because there was this window right here, this

window right here, which I was eliminating in

most of the frames because it was a

highlight without any purpose.

But I noticed that when the priest put

his hand up and if I shifted my

composition slightly, I could line his hand up

to be centered in that highlight so that

it was silhouetted on that highlight.

So it's basically this silhouette is giving this

highlight purpose, right?

Without that hand there, that highlight would have

no purpose whatsoever.

And I'm probably pretty high f-stop here

as well, right?

Because I'm trying to layer this, the bride

and groom, her parents, as well as this

hand coming in in the foreground here.

The dreaded cocktail hour, which is the worst

part of the day because it's boring, right?

People are just talking and mingling and eating

canapes and you can't get a good photo

and it feels awkward because you've got your

camera up and people are just wanting to

have conversations.

And it's like my least favorite part of

the day.

But it's nice when it happens on a

rooftop at sunset, right?

So Lanny probably parked himself here for 20

minutes during cocktail hour and he was trying

to get what he achieved here, which is

bubbles around everybody's heads, right?

And that's not something you just wait to

line up.

You don't just wait there and wait for

the bubbles to line up.

Especially if you have a wide lens on

your camera, tiny little micro adjustments all of

the time, accommodating for people's movements and accommodating

for trying to get those bubbles around people's

heads.

Because that's what makes this photo, is the

fact that there's separation between all these silhouettes,

right?

Maybe not so much right back here and

right back here, but that's okay.

Did a good job on all the other

ones.

And this is one of the photography that

only becomes second nature when it becomes habit

in real life.

And when you start to notice it in

real life, when you start to notice clean

backgrounds and bubbles in real life, it becomes

second nature when you have a camera in

your hand.

So for example, if I'm sitting across the

table from Lanny at dinner and there's a

windowpane going right through his head, I might

just adjust my chair slightly over to the

right so that there's a backdrop behind his

head.

And it's kind of annoying, but at the

same time, it allows me to practice the

craft of being a photographer when I don't

have a camera in my hand.

And it's, what was I going to say?

It's gone out of my brain.

When you have the camera in your hand,

it then becomes second nature because you've been

practicing it throughout the entirety of your life.

So keep that in mind.

Okay.

This is the last natural light documentary example.

Okay.

And again, I've got, just like in this

shot here, it's very similar technique that Lanny

did in this shot.

I'm really high on the high F-stop

because I have a clean backdrop.

I have a really clean backdrop.

I don't have a lot of distractions back

there.

So I think I'm probably at an F22

here because the soccer game is happening right

in front of me.

And then quite a ways back is Lanny

and Madeline and Timmy doing races on the

beach.

And Lanny, this is one of the benefits

of having a partner that's also a photographer.

Lanny knew exactly what I was doing here.

I probably sat here for a good 10

minutes shooting through this soccer game, making all

these little micro adjustments, trying to get separation

between all the soccer players and Madeline and

Timmy who were doing foot races back and

forth on the beach.

They did not know I was taking the

photo because if they knew I was taking

the photo, they wouldn't have done that.

But Lanny had them doing these foot races

back and forth on the beach and kept

on looking over to me to see if

I'd got it yet.

But what I was hoping for and what

I eventually got was this silhouette here with

the separation of the ball and the separation

of all the soccer players.

Most of the frames, probably 250, 95%

of those frames or 99% of those

frames, there was overlapping silhouettes.

But what I was going for was obviously

separation in all the silhouettes.

And I would have pre-focused with my

back button focus.

And because I'm an F22, I've got a

ton of forgiveness.

But I would have pre-focused on Lanny

over here and I just would have focused

once and then I would have shot through

that 10 minutes.

Just making all those little micro adjustments, probably

250 shots in order to get this one.

Okay, so we'll open it up to questions

again, Jodi, and then we'll get into flash

examples.

Perfect.

I think we don't have too, too many

questions.

But there's one that's for slide 58, asking

if it was choreographed or not.

But I believe you answered it when you

said the last natural light image for documentary

mode.

But maybe if you just want to touch

on that.

This one?

No, this is not staged or directed in

any way.

Because how would we stage or direct this?

Okay, you're going to point your fingers, you're

going to hold your beer out, you're going

to like lean back with the cigarette in

your mouth.

You're going to stand there with your chest

hair, like we are not creative enough to

come up with a situation like this.

This is simply observing, right?

Observing what actually is.

And reality is really interesting.

If you're open to observing it, if you're

wrapped up with trying to fake scenarios like

this, or set up scenarios like this, you're

missing a whole bunch of magic that exists

naturally.

Plus the guys, when they receive the photos,

they remember the fun they were having as

friends versus the photo shoot that I was

conducting.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you wait in one spot to get

the perfect shot?

Or you take safe shots in between as

well?

It really depends on the scenario.

In this scenario, no, Lani would have stayed

here for a bit, because this is a

safe shot.

There's nothing risky about this shot.

And it was the obvious place for the

camera to be.

That being said, when we go and take

getting ready shots, I mean, I'm there often

six hours of getting ready.

So I've got the space and time to

do this.

I'm just going to address any post-production

questions we're not going to answer right now.

We'll wait until the day comes where there's

post-production talk.

Are you shooting f22 on a Sony?

If so, how often are you cleaning your

sensor?

That's a good question, actually.

Our sensor, yes, I do shoot high apertures

on the Sony.

And God, the amount of dust removal I

have to do in Lightroom and Lani has

to do in Photoshop is ridiculous.

Yeah, we should be cleaning our sensor way

more than we are.

Apparently, there's a new firmware update that allows

you to change lenses with the mirror closed.

Someone just posted that in the group.

That is definitely one of the cons of

the mirrorless is the freaking dust.

My God.

And our sensor is so dirty.

Yeah, I get mine professionally cleaned every year

before the start of wedding season.

But yeah, we've never got ours professionally cleaned,

but we probably should.

Okay, I'm going to move on, Jodi.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so now we're going to go into

flash examples, flash portrait first, and then flash

documentary.

Okay, this is still natural light, but it's

a good progression into the next shot.

So where's the brightest spot?

The brightest spot is down here.

I'm exposed for it, and I'm waiting for

something to walk through it.

This next shot is very similar in terms

of the aesthetics, but instead of asking ourselves,

where's the brightest spot?

We've asked ourselves, where's the darkest spot?

Our eyes are drawn to the areas of

highest contrast.

So our couple are either going to pop

in the brightest spot, or we can make

them pop in the darkest spot by creating

our own bright spot in that dark spot.

So essentially, all we've done here is we're

exposed for the pool in the foreground, one

two hundredth of a second.

It's not nearly as dark as it looks,

right?

We've dropped our exposure down, so it's nice

and dark, but we had no problems focusing

on this, right?

We've got the couple in the dark spot,

and they're standing in front of a pillar,

right?

They're just standing in front of a white

pillar, and they're holding the flash with an

orange gel pointed at the pillar.

That's it, just like that.

And the pillar is maybe two meters away

from them.

Yeah, pillar is about two meters away, so

that light spills, and like if we had

that light right up against the pillar, it

wouldn't spill enough to give us the bright

spot we needed to place their silhouette.

A little bit lifeless though, right?

Penguin pose, the more technical the shot, the

harder it is to get that moment out

of the couple.

It's good eye candy though.

Dark spot here is the culvert, right?

So again, we've exposed for the brightness.

We've exposed for the clouds in the sky.

We're one two hundredth of a second.

It's midday here, so that's pretty bright, so

we're probably up at around f11 to get

that darkness that we're looking for in the

foreground.

And then we've just created our own bright

spot behind the couple.

This was a few years back before we

were shooting with the a1 and before we

had the b10.

We actually had to use two speed lights.

Two speed lights pointed at the wall behind

them to get the power that we needed.

And a little, just like you know in

natural light, we're trying to get, we're trying

to line our couple so they're right in

front of that brightest spot.

The same when you're using flash, right?

You've got to be very precise with where

you point your flash, and the difference between

pointing your flash here versus here versus here

can make all the difference in terms of

them being centered on that bright spot.

So zoom in, make sure that bright spot's

right behind them, and adjust accordingly.

This is obviously much easier if you're shooting

with a partner or you're shooting with an

assistant.

You know, in this case, I remember I

was the one lying down holding the flashes.

In this case, mine would be like a

little bit more to the left, and I

just do a little bit of micro adjustment

with the flash to get that bright spot

lined up behind them.

Okay, so this is in India, and where

the reception was, they had this beautiful reception

space that was surrounded by this grass amphitheater,

and the grass amphitheater was strung with lights,

right?

Little Christmas lights, and we knew we wanted

to feature those somehow in a photograph.

Initially, we were shooting the other direction, and

we couldn't get rid of highlights that weren't

adding anything to the frame, and this, when

we looked this direction, we just saw a

brick wall, but we knew if we used

that brick wall properly, we could simplify the

frame down to the lights and the couple,

and when our couples are this small in

the frame, it often makes sense.

It makes more sense for us to silhouette

them than us to flash their skin, right?

Because they're so small, you're not going to

be able to see their facial expressions.

You're not going to be able to see

the way they're looking at each other.

You're not going to be able to even

see their features, right?

So, they're so much more recognizable as a

silhouette, and their body language is more recognizable

as a silhouette as well.

So, when they're this small in the frame,

it often just makes sense to silhouette them.

So, we found this brick wall.

We've got, I think, it's a 35 lens

here.

We've got them up in the, obviously, upper

right corner there.

It's not nearly as dark as it looks.

We've stopped it down to expose for those

highlights in the grass, and then I'm standing

right over here.

I think I'm probably in the darkness, or

I've been photoshopped out.

I can't remember, and I'm basically pointing the

flash at the brick wall behind them so

that the brightest spot is right behind them,

and I've got a blue gel on, and

the reason I have a blue gel on

is because blue and yellow are contrasting colors,

right?

They're on opposite sides of the color wheel,

so the blue makes the orange or the

yellow make look more yellow, and the yellow

makes the blue look more blue, okay?

So, that's really, you'll see that a lot

in our photos, these contrasting colors, right, that

are on opposite sides of the color wheel.

Okay, here we've done the exact same thing,

exact same thing.

We've created our own bright spot, just like

we have in this photo, except in this

photo, it's a long exposure.

It's a long shutter, right?

So, the shutter here is probably one, if

I remember correctly, it's either 30 seconds or

40 seconds.

So, we've got the camera set up on

a tripod, right, and we're pointed towards the

Aurora board.

Actually, Jodi was here for this shot.

Jodi was holding the flash for this shot,

right, Jodi?

Anyways, we'll talk.

Yep, that was in the middle of the

night.

Yep, middle of the night.

So, the couple, so a few things about

night photography, first of all, okay, so when

we are going out for a night shoot

with a portrait couple or with a wedding

couple, our couples need to know two things.

One, they need to know we might be

out for, we wouldn't do this in a

wedding, obviously, but if it's a portrait shoot,

we might be out for an hour or

two hours and they might get one or

two shots out of the experience.

So, first of all, they need, we need

to set their expectations about that.

Second of all, this is why ISO a

million.

This is where you, this is the situation

where you go into ISO a million, not

for the final shot, but for figuring out

and composing your way to that final shot,

okay?

So, this is a 40 second exposure.

If we had to test all our compositions

with a 40 second exposure, it would take

ages to get that composition we were looking

for, right?

So, up that ISO as high as you

can go, figure out the composition that you

want, then once you've got that figured out,

you can put your camera on the tripod,

exactly where you figured out where it needs

to be, and then you can drop your

ISO, right?

So, you drop your ISO down, we're probably

at around ISO 3200 here, one 30, or

sorry, 30 second exposure, and because it's such

a dark night here, it's a super dark

night, there's no moon, there's no light pollution,

we're in an area of the mountains where

there's no lights whatsoever, we can pop that

flash at any point during those 30 seconds,

okay?

At any point, and it freezes the couple

in that moment, right?

If there was some light pollution, if there

was a moon out, if there was some

spillage of light from a hotel nearby, it

would be a different scenario, okay?

It would be different in that the flash

would still freeze them in that moment, but

you might get a little bit of what

we call ghosting, which is like a hazy

thing around the couple because it records the

entire 30 seconds.

So, in that scenario, we might have the

couple, we might flash the couple and then

have them walk out of the frame within

the 30 seconds, so that we don't have

that ghosting effect.

But because it was so dark here, it

didn't matter.

So, it would look like this, the camera

was on the tripod, okay, Jodi, shutters open,

okay, guys, almost go nose to nose, not

quite touching, okay, Jodi, pop the flash, pop,

okay?

Then you wait for the exposure to finish,

then you wait 30 seconds for the image

to load, and you're like, oh, not quite,

you guys were touching noses and there wasn't

enough separation between you, let's try it one

more time, okay?

So, that's basically, in a nutshell, how it

works.

We could go way more into detail in

star shots, but we're not going to at

this point.

This is a similar thing, except in this

case, we've used a video light instead of

a flash, and probably just because we were

more towards the beginning of our career, and

if we were to go back and redo

this shot, we would use a flash.

But because we're using a video light, we

can't freeze the subject, right, we can't freeze

the subject.

And this couple had been on Aurora watch,

meaning if the Aurora Borealis came out, we

were going to call them, and they were

going to come out and do this shoot,

but the Aurora Borealis forecasting is kind of

like the weather forecasting, it's only right some

of the time, and we went out for

the shoot, and Aurora Borealis never came out

whatsoever.

But we noticed we had our video light

out looking for our gear, and we accidentally

shone the video light towards the lake, and

we noticed that it lit up all the

seam coming off the lake, which was beautiful.

Okay, so we put our camera on the

tripod, there's a lot of light pollution here,

not just from our video light, but there's

also a moon out.

So, cameras on the tripod, I think it

was about a 20 second exposure, because that's

that's about as much as you can get

away with when you're not freezing your subject

with a flash.

So, 20 second exposure, that couple is standing

in front of the bright spot that we've

created using our video light, as still as

possible for 20 seconds.

So, if you were to zoom into this

photo, they're actually not really that sharp, right,

whereas if we were to do this with

a flash and instantly freeze that silhouette, they'd

be much sharper.

Another wish I have for this photo is

that we shot it slightly up higher, like

just another inch higher, and the groom's head,

Tim's head would be cleared from the horizon

there, and then they'd be centered in this

bright spot, as opposed to having that darkness

up there.

Okay, last one here, and if you want

more details on how this photo was taken,

go look at the B10 commercial.

This was done as part of a campaign

for the B10.

Okay, this photo would not have been possible

without the B10, because it's way stronger than

the speed light.

Okay, so this is midday, midday, super bright

sun.

We've got Joseph and Devika here, and we

put them in the shade because, again, we

wanted them to pop out of the darkness.

I wanted them to pop out of the

darkness.

So, we've got the B10 lighting them.

It's actually even got a magnifier on it,

making it even stronger, and one of the

most stressful things about this commercial was that,

A, we had limited time.

B, you can't see it in these photos,

but there's stray dogs and rats and literally

logs of shit running under my feet, and

I mean that literally, like people would flush

their toilet, and the sewage from the toilet

was running right under my feet as I

was taking this photo, and then the most

stressful thing was pro-photo was like, you

guys, I need you to take a photo

using two B10s because we need to demonstrate

how you can use two B10s at the

same time to achieve what you're looking for.

I was like, well, I wouldn't use two

B10s in this scenario, and they're like, it

doesn't matter, just make a photo where you're

using two B10s.

So, I've got the B10 on Joseph and

Devika, and then I'm like, well, I don't

know what I'll do with this other second

B10, so I lit up this bicycle in

behind just for, I don't know, just to

give them what they wanted, but it actually

turned out really great because this bicycle that's

being lit, this B10's also lighting up this

wall here, and as we were shooting this,

obviously, we've got the locals watching us here,

and this little boy, this happens to be

the frame where he walked by, and I

was definitely cognizant that this little boy was

walking by, shooting as many frames as I

could per second so that I could frame

his silhouette on this little bright canvas right

here, which is being lit by the second

B10, okay?

Okay, so let's go on to questions.

Jodi?

Perfect.

Got a couple questions here.

Are you both linked to the same flash

unit when shooting portraits in tandem?

Yes, sometimes, although very rarely are we doing

the same thing, like for portraits, like while

one of us is taking one portrait, the

other is doing a 360 around them and

trying to find something else.

So, we can link to the same flash

units, but normally only one of us is

shooting at one time during portraits, and then

during other sections of the day, like speeches,

for example, Lani's going to get into that

a little bit later, but we are each

controlling our flashes independently.

We each have a flash on the light

stand.

Okay, the next question is, do you use

a grid for flash silhouettes or just bare

flash?

Depends, depends, right?

Depends on so many different things.

I would say more often than not, no

grid, right?

Because the grid would make that cone of

light quite a bit smaller, right?

So, if that cone of light is smaller,

then we'd have to back up to make

that cone of light bigger, but then we'd

have to up our flash power.

But again, it's just tasting the soup, right?

It's tasting the soup.

It's trying it without the grid.

If the light's spilling everywhere and destroying what

you're looking for, then stick a grid on

it.

If it's too small a cone, and you

can't center your couple on it, then maybe

you take the grid off.

It's really a case-by-case scenario.

There's no formula.

The next question I'm going to ask, because

I think it might just help to break

it down a little bit, it's that one

of the shot where I'm holding the flash.

Yeah.

For the long exposure night shot, why not

place the couple against the mountain shadows?

We did that, or yeah, there's a different

shot where we had them placed against the

mountain shadows.

I think the biggest reason it wouldn't work

is the perception.

It looks like the mountains are close, but

they're really, really far away, so there's no

way.

You certainly wouldn't be able to bright spot

the mountains.

That's for sure.

There's no way our flash, any flash, would

be bright enough to make a bright spot

on the mountain.

If we put our couple against the shadow

of the mountains, we would probably back flash

them or rim light them, which is the

next tool we're going into.

The next question was, what is the white

spot?

It's an umbrella.

Yeah, it's a lighting umbrella.

That's right.

It's the one and only time we've ever

used a lighting umbrella.

Okay, I'm switching over to the other side.

In the last image, the Profit ad, why

is the area behind the couple dark?

Because they're in the shade.

They're in the shade, so they're in the

shade of a building.

Again, watch the BTAN commercial.

You'll see exactly what it is.

There's a big triangular shady spot.

They're in the shade of the building.

The light that's on them is from the

BTAN.

Then the next question is, why didn't your

flash light up the shadow on the wall?

Because of the angle that we have it

coming in at, and we've got it fairly

close to the couple.

What else?

It's literally just out of frame, but if

we had backed up with the flash, the

cone of light from the flash would be

bigger, and it might have lit up that

shadow.

The flash was barely strong enough, barely strong

enough, even with a magnifier on it, to

light up Joseph and Devika.

Okay, for night portraits with some ambient light

slash light pollution, do you change your order

of operations for your settings?

Nope.

No, it's still ISO first, aperture, and then

shutter speed.

The only difference with night portraits is that

we're placing the camera on a tripod or

a stationary object, and we've got those really

long shutter speeds.

How are you pre-focusing on couple when

they're walking past the back lit walls?

Like for example, the roof lights with the

blue light spot.

This one?

Yeah, well it's we're just, what do you

mean how are we pre-focusing?

We focus on them.

Yeah.

Like how do we pre-focus?

It's not nearly as dark as it looks

here, right?

Remember that the exposure is dropped down, so

it looks much darker than it is, so

it was no problem for us to focus

on that couple.

So we would have just pre-focused on

the spot using our back button focus that

we talked about in the first lesson.

So pre-focus on that spot, and then

just had them walk up and down that

hillside, and we wouldn't have had to, because

we've already pre-focused, we wouldn't have had

to go on and regain focus again.

It's not actually nighttime in the shot, so

you're able to pick up.

It is nighttime.

It is nighttime, but there's a ton of

light there, like look at all those lights,

right?

A ton of light flooding in there, we're

just underexposed.

Okay, I think that's good.

Okay, cool.

Okay, so I got one more section, guys,

and this is documentary silhouette using a flash.

Okay, so here, this photo is exactly pretty

much the same as this photo, right?

We've got a pool in the foreground, and

we've made a bright spot in the background.

The only difference is here, it's real moments.

It's nothing that we've set up, right?

So we've set our exposure for one hundredth

of a second, like always, and we've set

our aperture for the natural highlights, which is

right here.

This is all natural light.

This is the bar where people were getting

drinks, right?

And all these highlights down here are the

reflections of the highlights in the pool.

Then we just set up our flash.

We noticed that all the women were getting

up on this table to dance quite often,

so we just have a flash behind this

woman here, and it's pointed at the bamboo

wall.

There's no grid on it because the grid

would have been too small a cone.

It's about two or three feet, probably three

or four feet from the wall, and it's

our flash creating all of this light here.

Okay, and we've just set the flash power

to match the exposure of this highlight over

here.

Okay, in this case, and this was accidental,

but Lenny knew the groom was taking a

shower in here, and he just said to

him, you know, if you leave the window

open, I might be able to do something

cool from outside.

So he went outside, and he'd had his

flash attached to the showerhead.

He didn't know what he was going to

do yet.

He just placed his flash there.

Anybody noticing the beautiful silhouette of Lenny right

behind me now that we're talking about silhouettes?

So perfect.

Look at that bright spot back there.

Okay, so he's got the flash attached to

the showerhead using the NanoClamp and the NovaFlex,

which we talked about in the last lesson,

and he wasn't actually trying to put a

bright spot on the wall, but that's the

way it worked out, and it actually worked

out really well because with the groom this

small in the frame, he's way more recognizable

as a silhouette versus skin tones, right?

So he set his shutter speed for 1

to 100th of a second.

He's probably exposed to the sky there and

the rooftop.

He's going to have a really high aperture

as a result and just pre-focus on

that spot, and this is the one that

turned out.

He's got great negative space under the chin.

He's got negative space in between the arm

and the body, and I believe after the

groom turned on the shower, the entire room

steamed up, including the window, and Lenny wasn't

able to get anything else.

Anything else you want to say about that

photo?

I think I got it all.

Yeah.

Okay.

Speeches.

Obviously, we're again exposed for the highlights.

We're exposed for these lights and the dusk

sky.

These are wedding photographers, and I'm Grace and

Matt out of Philadelphia, Right Start Photography, and

I'm sure they very intentionally made sure those

speeches happened during the blue hour.

I'm sure that was a very intentional decision

because it's perfect.

We're set up for those highlights.

We've got a flash coming in from the

camera right here on the bride and groom,

and then we're just, instead of flashing the

speaker, our ultimate goal is always to include

the speaker and the reactor in the same

frame.

That's always what we want, and instead of

flashing the speaker here, we just silhouetted them

because it's a more interesting composition, and then

of course we waited for those moments where

instead of the speaker looking out towards the

audience, which is where we're photographing from, we

waited for those moments where she turned and

looked at Grace and Matt, right, because when

she turns and looks at Grace and Matt,

we've got the silhouette of her profile, right,

and we've got that separation of her mouth

and the microphone, which is exactly what we're

looking for.

Okay.

Two more examples.

Okay.

So, bride was getting ready in this room.

I'm exposed for the highlights, the sheer curtains

behind her.

I was probably in that room for about

three to four minutes getting pictures of her

getting her dress on with a tighter, you

know, in there closer, and I decided just

for variety, I'm like, well, I'm going to

come out of the room and take a

picture peeking through the doorway to make it

look like I'm peeking in on a private

moment, and when I stepped out of the

room, there was this cat sitting on the

top step, which was like, oh my god,

that's amazing, but of course I'm exposed for

the highlights in this room.

I'm in complete darkness with the exposure that

I've got.

Luckily, I had an assistant that day, Krista.

She's actually taking this course as well, and

I just quickly said to Krista, and I

still have the transmitter.

I always have the transmitter on my camera

just in case I can switch back between

natural light and off-camera flash very easily.

I just said, Krista, as quick as you

can, grab the flash and point it at

the wall behind the cat.

So, she grabbed the flash.

She pointed the wall behind the cat.

The flash was a little bit too strong,

but I only had time for, I think,

one or two shots, and then the cat

got pissed off and roamed off, right?

Because the flash is pointing at the wall,

we could get away with the fact that

my flash power wasn't exactly where it needed

to be.

It was a little bit bright, but we're

pointing it at a wall, so if it's

blown out, whatever.

It's not a big deal.

Okay, last photo.

This is an example of one of those

photos that was just climbing the ladder, experimenting,

trying to take it to the next level.

This is the fourth time the bride got

her hair done that morning.

Literally, it was the fourth time she got

her hair done.

I had been getting her hair done photos

for like three hours at this point.

Everything was running behind, but that's not my

problem.

So, I just decided to take a risk.

I'm like, well, I'm going to try something

different because I've got so many photos of

her getting her hair done, I'm just going

to take a risk.

So, I'm like, well, everybody backflashes hairspray these

days, so I'll stick the flash in behind

her and see what that looks like.

So, I set the flash in behind her.

This was sort of the first step and

took a few images, and I noticed when

I was chimping, when I was looking back

just to see if my exposure was right,

I noticed that when she held up the

mirror, the flash bounced off the mirror back

into her face, and the flash has a

grid on it here.

So, you know, that's why it's not lighting

up the whole rest of the room, right?

And I was like, whoa, that is really

cool.

So, I worked that a little bit.

Then I worked that for probably five or

ten minutes, and I'm like, okay, well, what

else can I incorporate into this?

And there was this highlight behind the bride,

a window, right?

And that highlight would normally be problematic, right?

Unless there's something that we can use it

for.

The bridesmaids were getting their makeup done in

front of that highlight.

So, I decided to back up a little

bit, include that highlight in the frame, and

I obviously had to adjust my settings, right?

I went a way higher f-stop than

I would normally go because I wanted to

include this story and this same frame.

So, I'm probably around f9, right?

Because I want to make sure this is

sharp enough to be recognizable.

If I was a really low aperture, this

wouldn't be sharp enough to be recognizable in

terms of what's going on, right?

And then I stuck there probably 20 minutes

waiting for this moment where she was lifting

up the mirror, which was very often because

she was so picky, to line up with

this moment, right?

Shooting the shit out of it, shooting about

150 frames, trying to get these two moments

to line up, right?

And as the makeup brush is coming in

towards the lips, I'm shooting rapid fire.

And as the makeup brush is coming out

from the lips, or face, or wherever she's

doing, I'm shooting rapid fire, right?

To try and get that tension, that little

bit of separation between the makeup brush and

the face.

I did cheat a little bit with this

image because the way the bridesmaids were set

up against the window, they didn't have a

perfect profile.

They were facing more like this.

And so, when she got up to use

the washroom, I turned her chair slightly so

that when she sat back down to get

her makeup finished, I had a side profile.

I had a nice side profile as opposed

to a profile like this, which wasn't nearly

as pleasing.

All right.

So, that wraps up off-camera flash examples

of silhouettes.

So, we'll do one more question and answer,

and then Lani's, and we are going way

over time today as usual, and then Lani's

going to get into room light.

Perfect.

I have four questions I've copied over here.

I'll read the ones on the other side

if there's time.

Does your creative silhouettes that you come up

with, like the guy in the shower, always

work out?

Or do you- No.

No.

You just never see the ones that don't

work out.

Perfect.

Answered that question.

The question was, do they ever ask you

about them or- No.

No.

I mean, we take 12 weeks to deliver.

By the time we deliver, they've forgotten all

that stuff.

For the toast shot from Grace and Matt's

wedding, do you also have shots from that

toast with the toaster lit?

And if so, at what angle was the

light coming in from to light her?

Uh, not in this composition.

So, basically, Lani and I usually split up

speech shots.

So, one of us is shooting the speaker,

or one of us is focused on the

speaker, and one of us is focused on

the reaction, okay?

Lani's, this is Lani's shot.

He's focused on the reaction.

He's focused on the bride and groom, but

our ultimate goal with all speech shots is

to include the speaker and the reactor in

the same frame, right?

So, I would have been shooting, I would

have been more focused on the speaker.

I can't remember where my light was, but

I would have also been trying to incorporate

those two stories into the same frame.

It would have been from a different angle,

but I can't remember, to be honest, where

I was.

Perfect.

Are you more conservative with the frame rate

when using flash for documentary shots?

Do you ever worry about the strobe light

effect being intrusive or distracting to the clients

and guests?

No, I don't worry about it, because when

you've got a grid on, you're not noticeable

at all.

You really aren't.

Like, if I don't have a grid on,

then yes, it's sort of lighting up the

whole room, but when you have a grid

on, it's very subtle, and I'm not, you

know, I'm not worried about disturbing anyone.

Perfect.

For the mirror shot, were you bothered by,

for the mirror flash shot, weren't they bothered

by the flash going off a lot?

No, no.

She didn't even notice.

She was so wrapped up in her hairdo.

Like, look at how stressed she looks.

Plus, again, it's got the grid on.

If you're spending 10 to 15 minutes waiting

for a frame to line up just right,

how are you delivering as many images as

you do?

It seems like you'd only be getting 20

to 30 per hour instead of like a

hundred.

Oh, well, obviously, guys, we're not doing this

for all the photos, right?

Like I said, I've been doing getting ready

here for four hours.

This is just maybe 5% of the

shots are the ones where we're sitting and

waiting for something to line up, but there's

two of us, first of all.

We shoot long, long days, and it depends

on the situation.

Situations like this, yeah, we're waiting for something

to line up, but if there's a lot

of moments going on and hugging and they're

opening gifts and they're reading letters and all

that stuff, obviously, we're not doing something like

this.

We're focusing on more storytelling, more just squaring

up with the moment and capturing the entirety

of that moment from start to finish.

You also mentioned that how long this makeup

session had gone, so you had time.

Yeah, exactly.

You had time.

One more question?

Yeah, sure.

Do you ever ask the couple and or

speakers to move to a position so the

speaker and the couple can be in the

same shot?

Rarely, very rarely.

We have before, for sure.

If the couple are hidden in the corner

behind a big table and we just can't

seem to get a great angle, we might

say, and we feel like A, it won't

impact their experience, and B, it'll make their

experience better.

They can actually see the speaker.

We might suggest that, hey guys, would you

consider maybe putting two chairs out in front

of your table to look at the speeches

or listen to the speeches so that you

can hear them better.

I'd say that's maybe two or three times

in the last 10 years we've done something

like that.

Perfect.

Maybe time for a bathroom break before-

Yes, let's do it.

Actually, I'm going to explain the exercise and

then we're going to do it.

Great idea, bathroom break.

Exercise three is basically what we want you

guys to do is find a natural light

silhouette.

Find a natural light silhouette, a highlight, where's

the brightest spot, place something there, a human,

a milk jug, a cat, a stuffed animal,

whatever.

Natural light silhouette and then in some other

place in the frame, in a dark spot,

use your flash.

How you use your flash is up to

you.

You can use your flash to make a

bright spot and make another silhouette so that

there's a natural light silhouette and a flashlight

silhouette in one frame, or you can use

that flash for skin tones on your subject.

That's up to you.

The element is two highlights in your frame,

one of them being a natural silhouette and

one of them being a flash.

Let's do bathroom break and then it's over

to Lanny.

We will post these exercises in the group

for you guys.

We'll just do three minutes right now.

Jodi, just throughout the break if there's any

other, if you want to scan the questions,

if there's anything relevant that we've missed, or

if anybody has something else that comes to

mind, you can let me know.

We'll take another two minutes, guys.

Grab a coffee refill or a cocktail refill,

depending on where you are in the world

right now.

60 more seconds, guys.

Hi, Lanny.

Hi, Jodi.

There is a request.

Is it still cool to see a two

-man wedding?

So we can't have these images fit within

a usual wedding from you guys.

Yeah, we were just getting some permission from

some clients, so yeah, it's cool.

We're going to share that for you.

I'll share it.

Yeah, that's the main thing we ask, guys,

is that you just honor the trust of

our clients and each other, and it's for

your eyes only, okay?

No sharing their private wedding gallery beyond your

own personal.

We'll send that link out by email.

Okay, perfect.

There's one more question.

Excuse me.

That's kind of overall on student portal, Facebook

group.

Maybe if you just want to explain how

people navigate getting to these spaces.

I think there was a little bit of

confusion kind of throughout the week.

Where this happens is this happens in your

student portal, and we send out an email

the night before with the link.

We just messed up today and sent the

wrong link.

There's basically three areas, okay, or yeah, three

areas.

There's these live Zoom calls, which you can

access one of two ways.

A, the email I send out, right, the

link, or in the student portal.

Okay, you should have your own login for

your student portal that you got when you

purchased the course.

Okay, and then so that's the first is

the Zoom call.

The second is the student portal.

Okay, once we are done these recordings, right

after today's lesson, we will post this video

into the student portal for you so you

can go and re-watch it.

Those will be up there for a month

for you.

Until May 15th.

Until May 15th.

The third place, which we just created because

people were asking for it, is the Facebook

group.

So the Facebook group, I sent out an

email a couple days ago with a link

to a Facebook group, and I'm approving people

every day that have signed up for this

course, and that's where you can post your

assignments.

You're welcome to ask questions in there.

You're also welcome to ask questions in the

student portal, discussions, stuff like that.

It's a temporary Facebook group.

It's only going to be for the duration

of this course, just because I just don't

need it.

We don't want another Facebook group in the

long term.

But try to keep the conversations that are

relevant to this course in there, rather than

in the bigger two-man workshop group with

over 10,000 people, because it's confusing for

them to get it mixed up with the

free workshops.

And so just keep all that stuff in

that two-man deconstructed group that we created

just for you guys.

Perfect.

So it'll come as a link for the

Facebook group.

Your original login will be once you've signed

in for, or when you've been accepted into

the program.

That email, that first email that got sent

out, is how you access the student portal,

and find the link for the Facebook group.

That's basically it.

Yeah, the Facebook group is called Deconstructed.

Two-man Deconstructed Participants, I think.

Perfect.

Thanks, Jordi.

No worries.

Okay, is everybody back in the bathroom?

Ready to dive back in?

Okay, so that's silhouettes.

Check.

Next up, backlight rim light.

And this is the natural progression, because it's

very similar in that we have the light

source in behind our subject matter, right?

In the silhouettes, we've got shadows on highlight,

like what we have up here behind Quinn.

Shadows on highlight.

Backlit on a bright background.

That's a silhouette.

Rim light is created when we have backlight

on a dark background.

Okay, so that's what we see over here

behind Dave.

Okay, so we're going to start deconstructing a

few, and I'm going to start with a

straightforward natural light portrait example.

Okay, this is just natural backlight, right?

The light source is behind our subject matter.

In this case, Eric and I were walking

up that path with our couple after their

ceremony to go make some portraits.

And as soon as we came around this

bin, and we saw this backlight, it was

like just sparkling light coming down, filtering across

the rocks and all the foliage.

And so we were like, this is amazing.

So one of us stayed right there with

our camera, and the other one of us

led the couple up the steps, up the

trail.

And so I was shooting, and all I

did was expose for the highlights, which is

basically the backlit veil, right?

And shot the whole sequence as they made

their way up and told Brian, Brian, your

job is to help Jen with her dress.

And then we actually, because this is portraits,

to make sure we got it, we had

them go back down that last set of

steps and make their way up one more

time.

And Brian, just really make sure you're bending

down, you're helping her with the train.

Probably did it a couple times, okay?

And so that's just to set the stage

for this tool, is to just understand what

this is in a straightforward, natural lit portrait

scenario.

So I'll move into a natural lit documentary,

okay?

Out on the golf course with the guys

in the morning, so the sun is low

in the sky, we've got a nice magic

light.

And the whole time I'm trying to make

the best shots I can of what they're

doing, which is just hanging out, playing golf,

smoking cigars.

And whether or not I'm documenting stuff like

that, or we're outside trying to make portraits

with our couple, one of the things we're

often asking ourselves, like Erica said, where's the

brightest spot, which is often the sky, and

can we get our couples up on the

sky somehow?

Or where can we backlight them on a

dark background?

Okay?

That's an easy question to ask, and it

will often...

Erica?

It's very loud.

That's a good question to ask yourself that

will often lead you into a good spot

to go, okay?

And in this case, I've realized that if

I moved around to this angle, I happen

to be able to shoot them backlit, the

sun's behind them, but what is behind them

is not lit by the sun, okay?

And that's what's making them pop.

And anytime that we see something floating in

the air, little particles like cigars, and cigars

come out if it's raining, hairspray, champagne spray,

any mosquitoes floating, anytime there's floating particles in

the air, we're thinking backlight, okay?

Whether it's natural light or making our own

backlight.

Backlight makes that shit glow, okay?

So as soon as I see those cigars

coming out, I'm trying to get myself in

behind to backlight the smoke, okay?

So that's all I've done here.

Again, exposed for the highlights in the sky.

And we touched on this in the first

class is when we're outside, that's often what

we do is we just set our exposure

in for the highlights in the sky, and

then we don't really have to change our

settings too much because we're set up for

silhouettes, right?

When we're shooting one direction with the light

source behind them, or when we come around

the other side, we're set up for property

exposed skin tones when the sun's hitting our

subjects, okay?

So then next we're going to move into

off-camera flash examples of this tool.

But for now, let me just check in

with Jodi.

If you guys have any questions about backlight,

natural light backlight, let me know right now.

There are no questions right now.

Okay, we're good to go?

Perfect.

Okay, we're good.

We might clock in under three hours.

So let's dive into manufactured backlight, okay?

Starting with portraits.

So Eric and I usually get anywhere from

zero minutes to an hour for our portraits.

It's always less than we think.

With some of our couples, portraits aren't a

priority.

And so we end up not spending much

time on them at all.

Or if it is a priority for them,

we encourage them, we tell them, guys, we

don't need much time.

We would rather have 20 minutes in good

light than two hours at high noon sort

of thing.

So if we can carve out a little

bit of time for us in nice light.

Otherwise, if portraits are a priority and they

don't want to take an hour of their

day away from their friends and family, we'll

offer the option to do a day after

session.

So some of our clients, maybe a quarter

of them, will hire us to do a

day after session.

And that just takes some of the pressure

for portraits off of them.

And then we'll go out with them for

an hour in nice light the next day.

But this is at the actual wedding.

And we had about 10 minutes for portraits.

And by the time we actually got able

to start making portraits, the sun had already

set.

Okay, so we lost the good light, we

got 10 minutes before we have to get

them back to the reception.

And so for this photo, what we did

is Erica aimed her camera, she put the

ocean behind her, and she aimed her camera

up towards the palm trees into the sky.

And we're going to make our own light,

right?

So she's choosing a low ISO, 1 200th

of a second.

And then she's upping her aperture to expose

for the highlights in the sky.

And that's what brings out all the drama

in the sky and all the mid tones

in the palm trees fall away into darkness.

So within that dark spot, because remember Erica

talked with silhouettes, where's the bright spot?

Then when we're the other question we'll ask

is where's the darkest spot, right?

Can we make them pop in there?

So we had our couple go up into

that darkness.

And then I'm with the couple, Erica shooting,

and I'm crouched behind them with no grid.

Okay, grid comes off whenever we go in

behind because we want the light to wrap

around them.

So remember, we keep it zoomed all the

way out, no grid.

So I'm crouched behind them like this, trying

to be small and high myself.

I usually hold the flash up near my

eyes so I can see if Erica's camera

can see my flash.

Because if it can, she's going to get

a big flare.

So I'm trying to hold the flash as

high as I can before it pops up

right between the the nook of there, just

above that little triangle there.

So the flash is right about here, and

maybe two to three meters behind them-ish.

Okay, no grid, but a quarter cut CTO

gel.

And then as soon as Erica popped the

neck, as soon as the flash fired, I

knew it was going to be something cool

because of Erica's reaction.

We didn't realize that that flash was going

to light up all the humidity in the

air because this is right on the beach,

and there's all these little floating particles of

moisture.

And so that single speed light in behind

is rim lighting the couple all the way

around, and it's backlighting this cone of moisture,

and obviously backlighting all of this foliage here.

Okay, so one speed light zoomed all the

way out, no grid.

And my job as the lighter behind is

to hide the flash for Erica.

And then while she's tasting the soup, making

the adjustments for her, right?

Backing the light up a little bit more

if it's not wrapping around, zooming it in

if it's spreading too wide, and coaching them

with the pose, right, to get into a

nice nice position.

All right, exact same thing here.

Okay, so when we're driving up this road

in Hong Kong, we noticed this bright spot

on the road, and it was a misty,

foggy, foggy day up on the mountain.

So we went outside, and we basically had

the couple walk back and forth in front

of that bright spot for us, okay, with

Keith holding Flossie's dress, okay, as they're walking

back and forth.

And we would have made a bunch of

silhouettes of that.

And then we decided to try adding a

back, adding a back flash, not really knowing

what we would get, but thinking maybe it

would make it more interesting.

And of course it did.

So basically, it looked like this.

No grid again, crouch down, hide behind them,

and hide the light, and then moving with

their movement, right?

So back and forth, back and forth, pop,

pop, pop, pop.

So that's what's giving the dress that that

cool backlight, and that cool spray of light

there through the fog.

Okay, so here's a pretty extreme example of

what rim light is.

This is in a in a bathroom, and

obviously it's a post-portrait, but what we've

done is we've killed all the ambient light,

okay?

So one two hundredth of a second, and

then increasing the aperture until all the ambient

light in the bathroom disappears from our exposure,

okay?

Then turning on the flash, putting the flash

behind them, and then basically just tasting the

soup, getting it dialed in so we're just

exposed for that sliver of light around our

subjects, okay?

Whether or not there's a grid, whether or

not there's a gel, whether or not we're

zoomed in or out is just a matter

of tasting the soup.

We look at it and we adjust.

Do we need to add a grid?

Is the grid too much?

Do we have to take it off?

Do we have to change the gel?

Should we zoom in a little bit?

Should we move it closer or farther away?

And that just comes through experimentation and tasting

the soup.

Okay, a very similar example here in the

next one, except we're outside now, okay?

We're outdoors, and again we've darkened the exposure

down for the highlights in the sky here,

right?

So all the mid-tones in the mountains

and the forest behind them are completely dark,

and then we're making our own highlights behind

our brides here, okay?

And it was a lot of soup tasting

and adjusting as we went to try to

get the rim light wrapping around both brides

entirely, and what we eventually realized is we

couldn't pull it off with one light, so

we had to bring in a second light,

okay?

So we brought in a second light, and

what it looked like behind the girls here,

I'm crouched down like this, holding both of

the lights up like this, so there's one

light in behind Madeline and one light in

behind Katie here, okay?

No grids, because we're outdoors, and we're trying

to get maximum spread, maximum wraparound on that

rim light, okay?

One thing that, looking at this now, that

would have been worth trying, Trevor Daly calls

this the Hollywood lighting setup, which is the

same thing that I just showed you, the

same thing we did here, okay?

One light in behind each subject, but when

they're facing each other like this, if we

angle the lights in like that, so the

lights are hidden behind each subject, but then

those lights now are short lighting each subject

coming across their face, and we have more

more fill light wrapping in and around, so

that would have been an interesting thing to

try here, okay?

Next photo, exact same lighting setup, but it's

a combination of our manufactured backlight mixed with

natural backlight, okay?

So same couple, obviously, and this was only

possible because of, as a consequence of the

environment we were in.

If we happen to find, see something, you

know, this isn't something that I could go

and pull off today necessarily, or even this

week somewhere here in Canmore, because it's rarely

you find a space where you have this

much foliage, this large of an area that's

being backlit, okay?

And it was actually midday, it's like 11

a.m., but at our latitude, even at

11 a.m., the sun is still in

the southern part of the sky, so this

is looking south, and so the light is

backlighting the foliage, and when we expose for

those sparkly highlights, this is what it looked

like, and we chose a lens, I think

it was the 35 millimeter lens, and got

into a position where we could try to

fill as much of the frame with those

natural backlit leaves and expose for those highlights,

and then we noticed that there was an

area, we found a spot where there was

an opening within the bushes that we could

bushwhack our way into, so then we're now

in this little dark alcove, and then behind

the girl, this, because it's high noon, we

couldn't have pulled this off with a speed

light, honestly, we would have needed a few

of them, so we used, we used the

power of the B10, so just crouched in

behind them with one light, no grid, and

that's what's giving the rim light around the

brides here, right?

And this is actually one of the very

few times we've ever used high speed sync,

because we were, we could, because we had

enough power, and so that allowed us to

shoot it at a wider aperture, which made

these, these backlit leaves in the foreground more

interesting, because they're, they're out of focus, okay?

So that's what's happening there.

Okay, another example, same thing, one light in

behind the couple, and the order of operations,

the way this, this starts, if we go

back to the off-camera flash, the three

steps, is first, we expose for the ambient

scene, which, which is the cityscape, right?

So at 1 200th of a second, we

increase the aperture until we're exposed just for

the highlights in the city scene behind, right?

This is on the Brooklyn Bridge, and then

we bring a light in behind, and we

turn the flash on, and we dial it

up or down to give us that backlight

rim light, okay?

And we adjust it so that we have

as much rim light as possible, and, and

then we taste the soup, because one of

the, one of the issues that'll come up

if we're choosing to do this, is we'll

look at how much fill light we have.

Sometimes they might be completely dark, there's no

fill light, and we might like that, or

we might not like it, so we go

do something else, or we could bring in

another light, okay?

Which we haven't done here for a couple

reasons.

One is, there happens to be a fair

bit of ambient light on the Brooklyn Bridge,

like, like plenty of light to focus, so

that's a little bit of the fill light

is from the ambient light, plus they're, in

this case, they're both wearing white.

The groom's wearing a white, a white suit,

so that backlight bounces up off of their

clothing, and helps to fill in some of

the, some of their face.

One trick we've, we've learned is, because often

our bride will be wearing white, but the

groom's wearing, wearing black, so in those cases,

if you're backlighting, and you don't have enough

fill light, if you offset your couple, so

instead of standing facing each other, you offset

them so that the bride is a little

bit closer to the backlight, that allows some

of that, more of that backlight to bounce

up off of her white dress, and fill

in both of their faces for you, okay?

Next one, exact same space on the Brooklyn

Bridge, with the exact same couple, and the

exact same lighting setup.

All we've done is, we've backed up and

switched to a bigger lens.

This is, I think this was actually a

70-200 lens, okay?

So, same thing, nothing's changed, but the key

here is, we needed to find a position

relative to them, to shoot from, in order

to have them backlit on a dark part

of the background, a dark part of the

ambient canvas, because you can imagine if, if

this, if they had lined up with this

part of the background, or this part of

the background, they obviously wouldn't pop.

We wouldn't have those, we'd be, we would

be popping their bubbles, right, around their heads

here.

So, that takes a little bit of experimenting,

and, and moving your camera, moving them up,

down, to line it up with the area

where they're going to pop.

Okay, so again, anything in the floating in

the sky, thinking backlight, so when it's raining,

and this, this is just a sprinkle, guys,

one light, you get one light in behind

the rain, and it looks like a deluge.

So, all, all Erica's done here, is she's

exposed for the highlights in the venue, right?

The windows, and the up lighting up on

the castle, and then we've made our own

highlights with a speed light in behind.

Okay, and it's the same thing, I'm literally

just trying to be as small as I

can, hiding down in behind the bride's train,

as, as they walk back and forth.

Okay, and, you know, rain, rain shots, rain

shots are done all the time, right, because

when it's raining, we all go put a

light in behind the rain, okay, but, you

know, they're often lifeless, because that's all we

do.

It's like, it's a penguin pose, they're behind

the rain, everyone's doing it.

What makes it sing, what adds that something

special is, is movement.

Okay, this one, this one, so the backstory

here on this one is, it's in, it's

in London, not in London, it's in the

UK, and this is Jamie Bott, he's a

really good wedding photographer in the UK, and

it was actually one of the first times

that we had a client fly us across

the Atlantic Ocean to come, come shoot their

wedding, and, you know, so we're feeling the

pressure, and, you know, so Jamie is obviously

super into photography, Charlotte, Charlotte not, I mean,

Charlotte could care less about the photos, she's

doing the photos for Jamie, but we were

all inside the venue here for the reception,

and Eric and I were kind of feeling

a bit stressed out, because we'd had only

10 minutes for portraits in the middle of

the day, and it was claggy, overcast, rainy

day, so we didn't feel like we had

any epic portraits for them yet, and we

knew that it was this nice blue hour

outside, it was dusk light, we knew there

were some funky trees down, down around the

venue, but we weren't sure if we should

go and ask them if, you know, if

you guys want to go outside with us

into the rain and make some portraits between

soup and salad, and we ended up asking,

we said, well, we just, let's just ask

and see, so we went and we asked,

and of course Jamie was, yeah, let's go

do it, absolutely, and Charlotte was like, okay,

here we go, so Erica had the camera,

took the camera, okay, and she ran outside,

went ahead, and she had the transmitter, okay,

on her camera, and she ran down and

found a spot by the tree, kind of

knew where we were going to go, and

I stayed back with the couple, and we

went and got the umbrella, and we went,

we got Charlotte's rain boots on, and then

we started heading out, and as we're walking,

I've got the flash, and the flash is

firing, so I know Erica's shooting, okay, so

that's my cue to get the light in

behind them, right, so I'm like crouched down

like this, trying to hide the flash from

Erica's camera, and basically telling them, hey guys,

wake down there, just, yeah, make your way

down the hill, down towards Erica there by

the tree, and meanwhile, the flash is firing

the whole time, okay, and the thing about

backlight, when you're making backlight, it's much more

forgiving than when you're lighting the skin from

the, from the front or from the side,

okay, you got to have that flash power

dialed in, in just the sweet spot, right,

when you bring the light in behind, you

get much more forgiveness, you can be too

bright, you can be not bright enough, and

you can still make it work, so by

the time we got there, actually, Erica said,

cool guys, we got it, awesome, thank you,

back to the party, okay, which was great,

we literally had them out for two minutes,

we did do, we did do one more

portrait of them standing there under the tree,

and it was, it was nowhere near as

interesting as this one, it was lifeless, okay,

because this one had real natural movement, okay,

same with snow, this is the exact same

thing, only these are all snowflakes, except for

these ones here, these are Christmas lights on

the tree behind them, okay, sometimes with snow,

snowflakes, one of the tricky parts can be

getting focus, so you just have to work

with that, make sure you got it, sometimes

it helps to put a light on the,

on the subjects to get the focus, but

all that, all that's happening here is the

exact same thing, one speed light holding it

in behind the couple, and then all of

this fill light is just coming from the

venue, all we've done is stepped outside the

lodge, into the snow, made one quick portrait,

and then popped back inside, okay, just two

more, okay, Erica already kind of talked about

shooting at night, and how to get the

stars, and some of those, some of those

key elements, the biggest one being that it

takes time and commitment, and so for that

reason, it rarely happens, we rarely have the

opportunity to do it at, at our weddings,

because well, a, our couple, and us, ourselves,

are exhausted, and it's usually the last thing

we feel like doing at the end of

the, of the party, is going out into

the dark to make a star shot, and

it's rarely the, rarely the case that, a,

we're in an area of, with, with no

light pollution, and b, it's, it's, it's a

clear night, right, with no clouds, and no

moonlight, okay, but in this, in this case,

this is, this is, why can't I think

of names right now, uh, what the heck

is his name, he's an alumni of ours,

Lindsay and Jason, this is Jason, and yeah,

and Jason's a wedding photographer, so he's into,

he's into photos, right, and their wedding happened

to be out in the middle of nowhere,

in this, in this field, so no light

pollution, they had a clear, clear, starry night,

so we went out after the party at,

like, two in the morning, and spent probably

almost an hour trying to get star shots,

and we tried a whole bunch of things,

right, before we ended up trying to figure

this out, because all the other things weren't

working.

We used an app to help us figure

out where the Milky Way was, and that

kind of helped us figure out where to

put the camera, and set up on the

tripod, down nice and low, angling it up

to fill the frame with as much of

the sky as possible, okay, this would have

been our 16 to 35 millimeter lens, probably

in the 24 millimeter range-ish, okay, ISO

a million until we have our composition figured

out, and then dropping that ISO down to

whatever, whatever you can, you feel comfortable with

noise-wise, 1600, 3200 ISO, okay, f 2

.8, because we want to let as much

light in as possible without having to leave

the shutter open too long, okay, this would

have been about a 30, 35 second exposure,

because any, any longer than that, you start

to get movement in the stars, you can

already see a little bit of movement there,

okay, and then speedlighting behind them, okay, and

a lot of stoop tasting, we're backing it

up, moving it in, we ended up having

to use two speedlights, actually, because we couldn't

get it to wrap all the way around

both of them, so we had one for

their upper bodies and one for their lower

bodies, and then we were also flagging the

flash with, with our hand to try to

keep the spill light off of the ground,

okay, there was still a fair bit of

spill light that we burned down in the

post, but we're trying to do our best

to control the light as best as possible,

and it takes time, because, you know, each

exposure takes 30 seconds, and then another 30

seconds before you can view it and realize,

oh, we need to change the pose, or

we need to change the light a little

bit to get it just right, okay, so

that's what's happening there, and what I'm going

to do now is, I'm going to jump

ahead to this one, just to give context

for the last one that I'm going to

deconstruct before we do questions, I will deconstruct

this one for you guys after, but I

just want to point out an area, because

the next photo I'm going to, I'm going

to show you was made up here, so

the camera is right here, the bottom of

this slope, pointed up the slope, and the

couple are standing up on this hillside here,

in between these uplit trees, okay, so that's

where we went, we went over there with

the couple to make a portrait, and these

are obviously, these are the, the pin lights

blanketing the, the grass slope in that other

photo example that Erica was showing you, so

then we'll go here, okay, so this is

what we, well, this is the last thing

that we did up there with the couple,

of course, we did, you know, we had

them walking back and forth, frolicking back and

forth, you know, silhouetting, doing various things, but

almost always backlighting them in this situation, and

exposing for the highlights in the trees, the

uplights, and the, and the highlights, the pin

lights on the grass, right, and making our

own highlights behind them, and that freezes, freezes

them, freezes the action, so we did a

bunch of those, and then Erica started playing

around, and experimenting, and trying different things, she

had her 16 to 35 millimeter lens on

her camera, and what she did is, she

slowed the shutter speed down to like almost,

I think it was like a half a

second, okay, and then while this, and then

of course adjusted things accordingly, so she was

still exposed properly for the highlights, but then

while that shutter was open, she just quickly

zoomed, zoomed the, zoomed the lens, I think

out, and started to get interesting funky things,

didn't look like this yet, then we started

working it, right, and playing around with the

length of that shutter, and, and so then

eventually this was the best version we got

of that, and that's all it is, exposed

for the highlights in the scene, but then

zooming the lens while the shutter is open,

and so all of the ambient highlights get

that blurry motion effect, right, but the highlights

behind them, that's not ambient highlight, that's the

flash exposure, remember flash is speed of light,

so it freezes the action, okay, but it

took a fair bit of finessing, and playing

around, and problem solving to get to that,

okay, okay, so let's, let's hop in for

questions there, Jodi, okay, I've kind of selected

a few to try and limit too many

repetitive questions, yeah, to cut the natural light,

do you always up the aperture first, or

increase the shutter speed, so what we do,

again, is always that, that three-step process,

so we start with the ambient exposure, and

we usually start with a low ISO, and

1 200th of a second, okay, so that's

first, then we increase the aperture to darken

the scene, simple as that, because we can't,

we can't change the shutter speed any faster

than 1 200th of a second, so we're

kind of locked at that, we can only

go slower, which would let more light in,

so it's the aperture, okay, when pointing a

flash behind a couple, where do you aim

on their bodies to get the back light

to wrap, and reduce flare, right, so as

a starting point, we're usually two to three

meters behind them-ish as a starting point,

and we're trying to, we usually, if it's

two of them together, facing each other, we're

usually limited as to how high we can

hold the flash, because if we go too

high, then the flash comes through between them,

and get a big flare, so we hold

it as high as we can, well, while

still hiding it from the camera, and we

just aim it straight line of fire through

the subjects towards the camera, okay, that's where

we start, then we start adjusting to taste,

so then we, sometimes we realize, oh, we

got to angle it up a little bit

more, or we got to, you know, we're

going to need to flag it on the

left, because it's spilling onto something, or we

need to bring in a second flash, because

we can't get it wrapped all the way

around, or we need to back it up

more, because it's going to wrap around, so

as a start, we always start like that,

and then just adjust to taste.

Okay, any tips for someone doing this on

their own?

Same thing, you just have to use a

light stand, right, and then some kind of

a modifier to prevent it from spilling in

any direction, exact same thing, so basically, you

replace your voice activated light stand with an

actual light stand, but then nothing else changes,

you just have to go physically make those

adjustments yourself, right, you can go reposition the

light, take off the grid, re-angle, change

it, back it up, whatever, it's, nothing changes,

other than it's, other than it's a slower

process, slower process, you got it, okay, if

we can go to slide 96, I think

I know what this question is kind of

getting to, how do you focus, please explain

the process for slide 96, so I assume

it's the fact that, yeah, so focus, focusing

in the dark is one of the tricky

things, and you basically need to get a

light source on onto your subjects of some

sort, and the iPhone is probably your best

bet, unless you've got like, our A1 has

a modeling light, so we'll just turn them,

one of us will turn the modeling light

on, shine it on the couple, remember your

camera, your camera is locked onto a tripod,

so once you get the focus, as long

as your couple doesn't change, you shouldn't have

to get focus again, so, but it takes

a while, you know, so what we do

is, we put a light source on them,

if you don't have a modeling light, just

use an iPhone flashlight, okay, shine it on

the couple, if that's not bright enough to

get focus, just turn the flashlight straight towards

the camera, hold it right beside your subjects,

and aim it towards the camera, and that

gives you a bright spot to focus on,

and then what we'll do is, we'll, you

know, we have it positioned on the tripod,

we'll usually, you know, angle it down, lock

the focus, and then recompose it, get it

locked in, take a test shot, and then

zoom in, check that it's focused, if it's

not, fix it, if it is, good, check,

we've got focus, and now we can start

solving all the other problems.

Perfect, just a refresher was, what did you

say the shutter speed was on Jason and

Lindsay's image?

This one?

Shutter speed would have been somewhere between one

one-hundredth of a second and one two

-hundredth of a, oh, sorry, sorry, my bad,

the shutter speed was 30 seconds, 30 or

35 seconds, because that's as long as, that's

about as long as we can leave the

shutter open at this focal length, before we

start to get movement in the star trails,

starting, starting to form.

Right, um, when backlighting, what's the starting distance

from the couple that you would normally start

with for placing the flash, and also the

angle?

Two or three meters straight towards the camera.

Perfect, um, do you use front or rear

curtain sync, and are you on mechanical or

electronical shutter?

Okay, good question, so, um, first of all,

we always just go use the default, which

I assume is front curtain sync, okay, um,

unless there's a reason to switch to something

else, and I'm, I can't remember if we

did, if one of the problems that we

tried experimenting with was rear curtain sync, I

think we didn't, I think this is front,

front curtain sync, so I'm going to say

99.8 percent of the time, we just

leave it in the front curtain sync.

We don't do a lot of shutter drag

stuff, honestly, it's, it's a very, it's one

of the first time we've, times we've ever

tried it, um, and then with mirrorless, you

have to shoot a mechanical shutter, so we'll

shoot an electronic shutter, you know, all day

long, for the most part, for natural light,

because we like to be able to use

the silent shutter, but when we, when we

switch to off-camera flash, we have to

go into mechanical shutter, because it doesn't work

with electronic shutter.

Okay, one more question?

Yeah, on that, with the Sony, there's two

things that you have to change, it took

us a while to figure out, we have

to, we have to switch to mechanical shutter,

and we have to go in and turn,

um, turn the off-camera flash setting to

on, so those two things have to happen

in order to make off-camera flash work

with the mirrorless.

Okay, gotcha.

Do you start your flashes on TTL, and

then change for manual, or starting point for

your manual flashes?

Yeah, no, we never, we never use TTL

or TTL, because it's entirely unpredictable and unrepeatable,

so the only way that tasting the soup

approach works, is if we're shooting in manual

flash, because that way, if we taste the

soup, and we realize it needs a little

bit more salt, we can add that little

bit more salt, and know that the next

frame is going to be exactly like the

last one, plus that salt.

We don't have to worry about the camera

in the flash deciding to throw a whole

bunch more salt in there without us knowing.

Yeah.

And then, and, and honestly, we don't, we

couldn't even tell you what our flash is,

we usually just, once we turn the flash

on, we usually just fire it at whatever

it was left last time, and then taste

the soup.

So often the first exposure will be way

too bright, or not bright enough, and then

we just, we just dial it in.

Perfect.

And also, also just keep in mind guys,

the whole kind of three-step process for

off-camera flash, and the tasting the soup,

that stuff only has to happen when you

start, um, that concept in that scene, right?

Once you get it dialed in, like for

example, we're going to look at some dance

floor shots.

On the dance floor, once we've got it

all dialed in, nothing changes.

We don't have to keep going through that

process for every single frame, right?

As long as the light stays the same

distance from the action, and nothing changes in

the ambient scene, once we've got our settings

figured out, we can just leave it, right?

Just check it once in a while.

We don't have to go back and go

through the full three steps every time we

take a, take a shot.

I think we're good.

Cool.

So this is, so now we're going to

move into off-camera backlight in documentary scenarios,

okay?

And um, so this is like, you know,

this is the last piece.

This is once you get comfortable with the

mechanics of it, to the point where you

can pull it off in real time, real

action, in response to reality.

This is not off-camera flash.

This one I'm showing you here.

This is, this is actually just ambient light,

okay?

These lights here that are backlighting, rim lighting,

everything on the stage are just the house

lights, the DJ lights.

And when I, you know, when I walked

around and walked up to the top of

this slope, I realized looking down that if

I exposed for those, those highlights, then the,

all the mid-tones in the whole area

just fell away and you had this nice

poppy rim light on the stage, okay?

So let's talk about, uh, this one here.

So the groom went to have a professional

shave on the morning of his, of his

wedding.

And so of course I'm there to tell

the whole story.

So I go with him right along to

the parlor and he's there for like an

hour, uh, or an hour and a half

with, you know, with his groomsmen.

And so I'm documenting that, that whole time.

I'm not directing anything.

I'm just basically making, trying to make interesting

compositions and tell that story.

And there's a lot of, with groom prep,

there's a lot of nothing.

Um, I rarely have an opportunity to do

something like this because, uh, you know, with,

with the girls often they will sit in

one place for 45 minutes and have their

hair done and then they'll sit in one

place for half an hour and have makeup

done.

Uh, with guys, groom prep is like a

whole lot of nothing, sitting around, shooting the

shit, watching the game, whatever.

And then they get ready in seven minutes

flat and they never stay in one spot

for more than 20 seconds at a time.

So this was a rare opportunity for me.

The groom is obviously sitting in one spot

for however long it took him to have

his, his shave.

So, and I don't start with this, right?

This isn't, and it's not a preconceived idea.

Ooh, I'm going to get this shot and

this is how I'm going to execute it.

I'm just playing around as best I can.

Obviously I'm starting with natural light.

I'm trying to get scene shots of the

whole parlor.

I'm going in close and getting various things.

And eventually, you know, after five or 10

minutes, I'm deciding to bring out the flash.

Okay, let's bust out the flash now and

see what we can do.

So start making some light.

Um, of course I'm by myself, right?

So I put the flash on a, on

a light stand.

And what I'm going to do, if I'm

going to be making my own light, I'm

probably going to be either doing some dramatic

short lighting or backlighting.

And as soon as I notice the little

particles of, of, uh, uh, shaving cream or

whatever, whatever it is, those little dust particles

floating, as soon as I notice that I'm

thinking backlight.

Okay.

That's where I'm going to position my flash

on the light stand.

I'm going to walk it around and put

it in behind.

Okay.

This was probably a 50, 50 millimeter lens.

So the flash is hidden behind them and

or up kind of out of frame, just

one speed light.

Okay.

And I can't remember, this was a while

ago.

I can't remember if I had a grid,

I might've started with a grid.

And if it, if that was too, too

tight, I would have taken it off.

It's usually a consequence of how big the

space is.

If it's a big room, you can usually

get away without a grid, but if it's

a small space with low ceilings and close

walls, you're probably going to need a grid

to prevent it from bouncing off of the

walls.

Cause what I've done here is I've, I've

killed all the ambient light, right?

I've basically chosen my low ISO and my

one 200th of a second, and then after

it up increased the aperture until all the

ambient light in the parlor was darkened down.

So there's nothing in the background showing up

in my ambient exposure.

Okay.

Then I turned on my flash, position it,

taste the soup and dial that flash up

and down.

And then, you know, I probably would have,

once I figured that out and figured the

angle and figured the lighting out, I probably

would have kept shooting for quite a while.

Every time that hand, every time the hand

came in and the fingers and the powder,

I would have been shooting pop, pop, pop,

pop, pop, pop through those moments and hoping

to get something interesting.

So this would have been the most interesting

frame from that.

Okay.

And also keep in mind a lot of

this, a lot of the getting ready stuff

where we try stuff that's creative and we're

making our own light.

We're usually only doing that when we're bored,

when there's not a lot of emotion and

expressive interactions and moments happening.

In those cases, we're just going to be

getting back to basics and filling the frame,

right?

Getting close.

But if we're bored, then we might start

playing around with stuff like this.

Okay.

Or if he's sitting in one spot for

more than a couple minutes, I'll start playing

around with stuff like this.

But it's also important to keep in mind

that once we find an idea or a

concept or a composition that we really believe

in, and that we realize we're going to

have to work for it, we're going to

have to be patient, we're going to have

to wait, we're going to have to shoot

through moments and time it.

Sometimes that's a matter of sitting there and

waiting and, you know, for five or 10

or 15 minutes.

And, and whether or not we keep doing

it depends on how much we believe in

that composition and how many other important things

are happening, right?

We have to sort of like, we have

to like hedge our bets.

If there's an important moment happening over there,

I'm going to give up on this, I'm

going to go and get that moment.

But I can always come back to this.

So sometimes, you know, we'll have two or

300 attempts at an idea.

And we may have spent half an hour,

45 minutes trying to commit to that composition,

but it hasn't been uninterrupted always, you know,

it might be five minutes, and then something

else happens in some other place, or it's

no longer lining up, we'll go and we'll

shoot that.

But then when it lines up again, or

once it's, you know, there's nothing else that's

really important, we'll come back to it.

So often, we'll keep coming back to these

concepts and ideas as things line up.

But that doesn't mean that we have to

shut off and we can't go and do

other things intermittently.

Okay, this is like three in the morning,

Costa Rica, and it's not the first time

that this bride has jumped in the pool.

I think we barely caught it the first

time she did it, like with on camera

flash or something.

But this is now two hours later, and

everybody's in the pool, it's a big giant

pool party.

And you know, this is like the 12th

time the bride has jumped in.

So by now we're playing around with off

camera flash.

Okay.

And of course, we're almost always trying to

use that that light as a backlight source,

because there's water droplets and splash droplets in

the air, right?

And if we backlight it, it glows.

So what we've done here is we've just

positioned a light on a light stand on

one end of the pool, right, plopped it

down, aimed it out across the pool.

Okay.

And then we have to go and find

an area to shoot towards the flash in

order to backlight.

But we have to have that flash either

out of frame or hidden behind an object.

Otherwise, we're going to get a big distracting

flare.

Okay, so in this case, we crouch down

right behind this girl who's sitting on the

poolside, and in order to hide the flash

behind her.

So that's obviously rim lighting her.

It's also backlighting the spray.

And this is the frame that was timed

when the bride jumped in again, and it's

backlighting there.

All of the light here in this whole

shot is all our light.

It's just our backlight.

There's no ambient light here.

There was plenty of ambient light, plenty of

light for us to achieve focus.

It's right beside the venue.

So there's all kinds of ambient light.

But we've underexposed the ambient light to the

point where all of the light is being

made by our flash.

The only actual ambient light in this frame

actually are these highlights down underwater, the lights

in the pool.

Okay, that's the ambient exposure.

Everything else is from our flash.

Okay, in this case, there would be no

grid because we're backlighting.

We want it to wrap around and it's

an outdoor venue.

So there's no walls or ceilings to worry

about.

Okay, so I'm going to cut to another

example of the exact same thing.

Okay, so one flash in behind.

Now, when Erica and I shoot dance floor,

we already talked about it, we're 16 to

35, pretty much at 16, trying to get

in there close and fill the frame with

the action.

And the way that we light the dance

floor often is teamwork.

One of us is shooting, and one of

us is lighting.

Okay, and you can you can achieve the

same lighting on your own working with light

stands, your success rate is just much lower,

right?

Because when we work together, one of us

can focus on just getting in there and

filling the frame with the action.

And the other one of us can focus

on trying to make as best light as

possible with as many of those frames as

possible, right?

Moving with the action, lifting it up, moving

it left, right, trying to avoid the shadows,

and always trying to have that nice interesting

short light coming in on the action.

Okay, and so in this situation, that's what

we would have been doing.

And often we'll put that light up on

the little monopod, up on a boom, so

that we can move it around, right?

But as soon as we see something like

this happen, bride grabs champagne bottle, we're thinking

backlight, right?

We're going to switch to backlight right away

because we want to illuminate the spray.

Okay, so what we would have done is,

this was a small dance floor with a

low ceiling.

So I think we were actually lighting with

grid.

And so as soon as this happened, grid

comes off, move the flash in behind the

action.

So whoever was holding the holding the light

now moves in behind the action, moving with

the action, trying to keep it hidden from

the camera so we don't get the big

flare.

And a lot of the frames would have

had a big flare, right?

But this one happened, it was hidden enough

that it turned into rim light, backlighting all

the droplets, and then all of this light

just had the consequence of that, right?

It's cross lighting the six pack.

That's just all I'm focusing on as the

lighter is just playing hide and seek with

the shooter.

Straight line of fire through the action towards

the camera.

Okay, they go up, I go up, they

go down, I go down.

Erica's camera goes up, my flash goes down.

Erica's camera comes down, my flash goes up.

Straight line of fire through the action.

And this is a fairly, this works partially

because the venue is fairly bright.

There's plenty of ambient light in there, we

had no problems focusing.

You know, most of this light here is

just fill light from the ambient and plus

a little bit of dodging.

Okay, so it works in this situation.

One flash in behind.

Okay, diddle.

Exact same thing.

And we switched to this as soon as

it happened.

We've never seen this before.

We have never seen it again.

But as soon as we saw it, it

was like, holy crap, what are these guys

doing?

Apparently it's a thing.

It's called whaling, where you spray alcohol into

your buddy's buddy's mouth.

We're good.

And so right away, we switched into backlight.

We brought our light source in behind the

action, no grid, trying to hide it.

So in this case, it's hidden behind behind

Lee here.

And then this is just again, a happy

accident that is coming across the groom's chest

here and cat happens to be catching a

little bit of the bride there.

Okay, but the whole idea is to hide

it so that we can back backlight the

spray.

Okay, same thing here.

But this works because in this venue, again,

there's enough ambient light, there's a little bit

of fill.

In this case, it's the exact same thing.

One flash in behind to backlight the champagne

spray.

But we also have an on camera on

camera flash.

Okay, so this on camera flash is a

it's firing B, it's acting as a transmitter

and triggering the off camera flash, which is

in behind.

Okay, so the backlight is given the kick

light and the back spray.

And then the on camera flash is giving

us the fill light because this is outside

in the dark.

Without that, they just would have been silhouetted,

which might have been interesting and fine.

But we chose to use use that on

camera flash as an actual fill light source

as well, so that we could see detail

in there in their faces.

Okay.

So another example of the exact same thing.

Okay, one on camera flash, one off camera

in behind.

And in this case, because we had ceilings

and walls, this is on an indoor dance

floor, then on camera flash, if we can

avoid having to point it straight at the

subjects, we always will.

So it's usually an on camera bounce flash,

we usually aim it up and tilt it

off to the side a little bit and

bounce it off the ceiling and the wall.

So the fill light is cut is a

little bit softer there and less harsh.

And then we've got the kicker light, see

these highlights back here, which is the back

flash hidden in behind the subjects.

You can pull this off on your own

without a partner too.

It's just your success rate is much lower

because you have to move your light stands

and you can really kind of only shoot

in the one direction to have things line

up for you.

Okay, on camera bounce combined with a backlight.

Sparkler exits, we almost always use that backlight

in behind.

So one of us is shooting and usually

backing up with them.

And the other one of us is usually

crouched down behind them two to three meters

behind, walking with them to give that nice

kicker light.

You see this little rim of light?

That's why they pop.

And with sparkler exits, usually that's all we

need because there's quite a lot of ambient

light that comes off of the sparklers themselves.

And often that'll take care of the fill.

Or like in this case, we had a

videographer right beside us.

So right beside Erica, she's backing up.

There's a videographer.

He's got a big video light on his

camera.

And those videographers' video lights are usually, it's

really flat, right?

Because it's coming from just a horrible angle.

So it's very flat.

But that kicker light, having that flash in

behind, really makes it pop.

Okay, another example of the same thing.

On-camera bounce flash combined with a flash

in behind.

And that's what's giving this rim light coming

in from behind.

Okay, just two more guys.

Erica already talked about speeches a fair bit.

And again, I'll just reiterate that we usually

split up and one of us will focus

on the speaker, the speech, and one of

us will focus on the reaction, the bride

and groom, the family, okay?

And we usually take turns and sometimes we'll

switch after each speech.

So in this case, this is Erica's shot.

And her job is to focus on the

couple.

Okay, so the bride and groom over here.

So she had her light on a light

stand over here coming in from the side

with a grid.

And you can see the difference between the

short light and the broad light, right?

It's great on the groom.

It's nice and short.

But it's broad lighting the bride here.

So it's nowhere near as nice.

But it is what it is.

So that's what Erica was doing.

But she realized that given where the podium

was, and given where the bride and groom

were, she could orient herself and her camera

in a way to include the speaker and

the reaction.

And whenever that's possible, we're going to try

to do that.

And so when she realized that, all she

had to do, because I of course, was

shooting the speaker.

So I was over here somewhere.

And I had my light coming in from

the side on the speaker.

So Erica realized that she could orient herself

and move my flash a little bit and

use my light source, which is sidelighting my

speaker for me as a rim light in

her frame.

So that's all that's happening here.

Two flashes, one camera right coming in on

the subjects, and another one hidden in behind

the speaker and straight towards the camera.

And in that case, all we do is

we just switch to the same channel.

So we're now sharing the same flashes.

Okay, another example of the same thing.

And this is in each in each of

these like this one's obviously the rehearsal dinner

the night before.

But I mean, this is like the fifth

speech.

So you know, first speech, we're not making

anything this interesting yet.

We're finding our way towards this and solving

problems that we as we go and realizing,

okay, shoot here with this lens, we can

line them up.

If we move our flashes, we can light

both speaker and reaction.

Okay, I know that was a lot right

there.

So before we, before we introduce the last

exercise, let's go to actually, yeah, I'll do

I'll explain the exercise and then we'll do

and then we'll do questions.

Okay, so for this exercise, what we want

you to do similar to the last exercise,

but in we want you to give your

subject a really good rim job in the

dark.

Okay, so again, you're gonna you're gonna find

a composition, maybe you could combine it with

the previous exercise where you have a highlight,

and you have some sort of a natural,

you're exposed for the highlight, you have some

sort of a natural silhouette in that highlight.

But then within the darkness of your frame,

we want you to use use your flash

and light your subject.

So for this one, we want you to

rim light them, they have that light in

behind.

Okay, we'll describe these exercises for you guys

in the group as well.

All right, Jodi.

Okay.

With the shaving image, was it framed like

this, or shot wider and cropped in later

to give you more scope of the movement?

It was, I can't remember, it was probably,

for sure crop to some extent, but it's

a bigger, it's a fairly big, it's not

like it was a wide lens.

It looks like probably 50.

Or actually, at that time, I think we

were still using a 24 to 70.

So it was probably, you know, between 50

and 70 millimeters, and then probably cropped a

little bit.

Yeah.

Perfect.

For pic 101, what would your flash output

output be set to normally?

Probably, probably pretty low, like, like a, like

an 130 second ish.

But I don't know, I couldn't tell you.

And you know, if I went back and

tried to do it again, it would just

be tasting the soup and getting it until

it looks looks right.

I think that's the answer the second part

of this question too.

Which is?

Okay, this is, feel free to say it's

an editing question, but possibly more of an

editing, but any chance of seeing the in

-camera exposure of the whaling shot, and the

one before it, we find that the foreground

details can often be near to silhouette and

look pretty bad when dodged to lift.

Yeah, I'll show, I'm going to show you

guys lots of before and afters, failure cameras

compared to the final, the final artisan edit.

And a lot of those examples will be,

yeah, so that's where you can see how

much we dodged or burned in either direction.

So yeah, you'll see lots of before and

afters.

Perfect.

For your on-camera flash, are you using

ETTL?

No, never.

And for the reasons explained several times.

Do you ever gel the flash or sparkler

exits?

Yeah, whenever we're lighting skin, we always, we

always start with a quarter cut CTO and

then eyeball it.

Definitely if they're, if they're walking through a

sparkler exit.

And if we have the chance, we'll probably

test the light on each other first and

see if that's looking about right.

And that tends to work, but with sparklers,

sometimes you want to choose an even warmer

gel because you're essentially trying to balance the

light with that warm sparkly fire light.

So sometimes you might have to go to

like maybe a half cut.

Do you use any modifiers on your on

-camera flash for your dance shot examples, domes,

diffusers, modifiers?

No, it's either a bare bulb or a

little, I don't have one here, Profoto has

a little dome.

And Megmod makes, I don't know what it's

actually technically called, we call it the Megboob.

It's like a big dome thing that goes

on.

We used to use that sometimes.

And all it really does is just softens

the falloff between light and shadow a little

bit.

But that's it.

Or if it's a low ceiling, close walls,

we'll have a grid.

And sometimes, and you can combine those.

So you can use a grid to control

the spill of light.

And then you can put the dome on

top of that to kind of just diffuse

the falloff a little bit.

That's it.

Okay, I feel like this is going to

be an opportunity to punt Profoto.

But when shooting a high frame rate during

action, do you experience a lot of flash

misfires?

We used to with our cannons.

Yeah, because that was AA batteries.

And so even when we'd use those, what

they were called, but those rechargeable AA's, which

were a lot better.

Yeah, the flash rate, we would miss every

second one.

And then as the battery power got lower,

we'd miss like two or three in a

row until gradually, then we'd switch the AA's.

Once we switched to the Profoto, simply because

of the lithium battery.

Lithium battery is much better for that.

Godox use lithium batteries as well.

And plus on the defense floor, we're often

shooting at the flash power is often right

down at like 164 or even 1128.

Or on the Profoto, we're down around like

2.5 or 2.8. So we can

shoot like rapid fire, high frame rate and

not miss any exposures.

Unless we were up around half power, full

power, we wouldn't even have to worry about

that ever.

Perfect.

I think that's good for now.

Yeah, well, that's it then.

This is your last chance guys for questions.

Because I use Godox with lithium and

still have lots of misfires.

I was curious if my power was too

high.

Well, your power has to be what it

has to be based on.

Yeah, based on based on Erica.

I got it.

Right.

Yeah, your flash power has to be what

it where it has to be based on

your other settings and how much ambient light

there is.

So if you're finding that your flash power

is higher than you want, because you're missing

shots, the refresh rate isn't keeping up with

you, then the only way to get away

with a lower flash power is to be

going to be to change your other settings.

So you could choose a higher ISO.

And or you can choose a wider aperture,

right?

And or you could choose maybe a little

bit slower shutter speed, we'll go down to

100th of a second.

Because remember, the flash freezes the action.

So we're often we'll choose one over 100th

or one over 125th.

Somewhere between one over 100th and one over

200th works pretty well.

And we're often 2.8 for aperture and

1600 or 3200 ISO.

And that allows us to shoot at, you

know, save the battery power, miss less shots

to shoot at a much lower flash power.

Okay, question is, do you always start with

a low ISO?

We Yeah, when we when you make off

camera light, we generally choose a low ish

ISO.

Because essentially, what we're doing is underexposing that

ambient anyways.

So, you know, we'll choose usually somewhere between

100 and 800.

Unless, you know, like a dance floor situation

where we want some of that ambient DJ

lights to come in, and we don't want

to be shooting at high, high flash powers,

we'll choose like 1600 or 3200.

What percentage of the time?

What percentage of the time are you shooting

with an on camera flash in addition to

an off camera flash at a reception?

Depends on the reception depends on the space

depends on the DJ lights, the ambient light,

how big or small the space is.

So, Eric and I, it usually takes us

four or five songs to figure out the

best lighting setup for that night in that

space with that ambient light, that DJ.

Okay, so our first dance shots are never

our best in terms of lighting.

We'll get on the floor, we'll test some

various ideas out with each other, try to

get the settings dialed in.

But then it takes four or five songs

before we figure out, okay, this is what's

working best.

And then we're tasting the soup and adjusting

the settings until we get it dialed in.

And then we keep the light that distance

from the action for the rest of the

night, and stick with that technique for the

rest of the night.

Sometimes that happens to be an on camera

bounce flash and a back flash, right?

And it's hard work, but we'll stick with

that all night long.

Sometimes it's just one off camera flash coming

in from the side.

Okay, so sometimes it's 100% of the

time on a dance floor, sometimes it's 0%.

It's just a consequence of playing around and

trying out and see what looks best in

that situation.

Every dance is different.

One more question?

Yep, last one.

Last one.

Any issues on focusing with off camera flash

on mirrorless because of they don't see infrared

from the trigger?

Right.

So that's one of the drawbacks with mirrorless.

Of course, the focusing technology is much better

and way more intelligent.

But one of the drawbacks is with mirrorless

technology, it doesn't work with the AF assist

beams.

I don't know why, but it just doesn't.

So we have to figure out other ways

to achieve focus.

We are only just starting to experiment now

with our Sonys on the dance floor.

So it's a learning curve for us.

We're figuring it out on a bright dance

floor with lots of ambient light.

It's not an issue because these things focus

really well, even in pretty dark situations.

But on a really, really dark dance floor,

I'm not sure how that's going to work.

We're learning.

Are you only using Sony now or are

you switching?

We're in the process.

We've been in the process of switching for

like a year now.

But you don't have Canon at all?

No, we do.

We still have our Canons.

But of course, we're slowly acquiring our lenses

and everything that we need.

So the last few weddings, what we've been

doing is Sony for everything except the dance

floor.

We're using our Canon on the dance floor.

That's what I figured.

Yeah.

Okay.

Perfect.

But not for long.

We're hoping to figure out how to do

the full switch.

Nice.

Okay, great.

I think we're good.

And so that's silhouettes and backlight, guys.

And what day is it?

Saturday.

So Tuesday, we're going to dive into shadow

propulsions or throwing shadows, shoot throughs and layering,

and Bocca Panos or Berneiser methods.

Okay.

And that is it.

So thank you all.

And we'll see you on Tuesday, whatever.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks a lot, Jodi.

Stop share.

Do I need to do anything other than

just end meeting, Erica?

Start recording?

Stop recording.