All language subtitles for 1. The Studio Shoot

So I have my own journey as a photographer

and learning about light.

I was lucky in many ways that when I was young,

I was 19 years old,

I'd gone out to Sub-Saharan Africa

and I'd photograph the drought there for several charities.

And I took a photo of a young boy

with a withered maize crop in sunset.

There was a shadow of a leaf in the maize crop on his face.

And I won the young photographer of the year award in the UK

for everyone under the age of 35.

And I was 19.

It was a sort of spectacular start.

The problem with that is that I still knew nothing

about how to light photographs.

I saw a lovely light and I took it.

So what then came was this sort of series

of what I probably best describe

as really embarrassing events,

where I was given assignments to do shoots

where I was expected to know how to light.

I was expected to have experience

because I'd won this wonderful award,

but actually I knew nothing.

So what happened was I learnt on the job

and by learning on the job, you make a lot of mistakes,

You embarrass yourself, you lose a bunch of clients,

and you, I suppose come down to earth with a real bump

if you haven't done your homework before.

Now, I got into the situation 'cause I done this other stuff

that had gone well for me, it was quite weird

to then go and assist people.

So what I ended up doing was employing assistants

to light for me.

And the biggest problem with that was that

those images have absolutely zero of me in them,

there's no identity that you could say

that's a Greg William photograph in those pictures

because it wasn't my light, it was someone else's light.

And really my photos looked like any one

of 50 or 100 contemporaries could have taken them.

So what I would say to you is try not to do what I did

and try and learn this stuff before you start selling it

to other people.

Once you understand the fundamentals of light,

you're then free to apply that

to any lighting environment you find yourself in.

So not all our shoots are this big, but some are.

Huge studio, big lights.

These are 24K tungsten lights and they basically

create the equivalent,

I suppose it's the nearest we get to sunlight

in most of the shoots that we do.

So we have three of those.

I have one, I set up here through a 12 by 12 foot silk.

We have 10K lights with gridded softboxes,

backlights, big background, big wind effects.

We're recreating action so we need people to be blown around

and for their clothes to blow around.

We're doing a shoot today,

but it's too sensitive for me to share on this course.

But what we've done is basically create a sort of microcosm

of the lighting and the kit that we've got here

and rented a studio and put on a shoot,

especially for the skills protocols

to teach you how we light.

Over the years, I've sort of come to this default set up.

So it's my get out of jail free card

that when you know you've got to produce a huge amount

of looks in a very short space of time.

There's effectively six to nine lights

that I have on a board ready to turn on and off,

dim as much as I need them without anyone actually

having to move a light during the shoot.

And I can switch from one to the next in a split second.

The trick to shoots like these is preparation.

I set up my backlights, my shaping lights, my sidelights,

my front lights, my fill lights, fans, smoke machines,

whatever I need for the shoots.

I pre-light each one of them.

And when the actors come on, I can shoot 10 setups

in 30 minutes because I don't have to move a single light.

Now this is extreme and I appreciate

an expensive way of working,

but I think it's a really interesting illustration

for you guys to see.

There are times I'll do a poster shoot

that normally you'd want three or four hours for

and I have 20 minutes with the talent.

I have to do all number of different, full lengths,

different angles, down to portraits.

I need to backlight them, sidelight them,

front light them, soft light them, harsh light them.

And there's no other way for me to do that in the time

as when I have all my lights all set up

and all on one DMX board, ready to roll.

So be clear, I'm not mad enough to think you're all gonna

be able to go out and rent 10 huge lights

and set them up every time you do a shoot.

But what I hope I can convey is what each of these lights

is doing.

And once you understand that,

then you understand where to put the lights

that you do have at your disposal

for the picture that you're trying to take.

So whether you're in a studio

or you're just in a location

that you've just walked into,

what we're talking about here are the fundamentals of light.

In the next chapter, I'm gonna talk about the difference

between constant light and flash.

But for the example that we've got today,

we're using constant light

so that you can see the light actually

falling on the subjects.

So this is a 10 kilowatt fresnel or fresnel

depending how cultured you are light.

Firstly, that's what it looks like,

and it actually says 12 on the back,

but it's a 10K bulb in there.

So firstly, barn doors, the idea of barn doors

is that you can only allow so much light through them.

These unclip like this.

So this is the fresnel lens.

You'll see the chicken wire on the front

so that if the lens cracks, which it can do,

it doesn't explode over everyone.

And the glass gets kept within it.

These are pretty dangerous.

It is off innit guys?

It's off?

So if you open it up, you'll see the lens here.

And then this is the bulb.

You never touch a bulb cause the grease of our skin

could help to the glass to crack basically.

So in the back here is a way to flood and spot the light.

And the further it goes back,

the more spotted the light becomes.

So you've got the light bulb.

You've got that mirror bit in the back

that goes through the lens

and it is an incredible light, with the reflection behind

and the lens, it makes the light so much more powerful

than just a 10 kilowatt bulb would in a normal power lamp,

which would be a lamp without the lens.

So nearly all the lights I use are fresnel.

And whether they're tiny little day dose,

150 watt light through to the 500, 650s, 1K, 2K's,

5K's, 10K's, up to the 20, 24K's, which are up there.

They are the most controllable because you can zoom them

because you can barn door them.

You've then got, you can dim them.

You can put scrims into them that make them less

or more bright.

So it's just an incredibly diverse lamp

for recreating whatever kind of light you may want.

And on film sets these are the staple light

of the film industry, and there are led versions being done,

but nothing is getting as bright as these lights yet.

Hopefully it won't be long till they do.

So for power, we have generators running outside.

To light these at the moment,

you do need a studio with a lot of power to run them.

The light that I use a great deal

is called the barger bag light.

And this is six 1K bulbs.

And on the back what you'll see

is that there are three sets of plugs.

Now house power can power a 2K light

but it can't power a 6K light.

So what you do is you split it into three times two bulbs

and you go to different parts of the house power.

And that means that you get a six kilowatt light

from house power.

So it's the most efficient way of getting a 6K light

without needing a generator.

And with this light, I put a gridded softbox on it.

And that's my staple light in my studio

when I have to travel with the light,

I travel with this because it packs down really small

fits in a case.

And this light I've shot probably 80% of my portraits on

this one light with a soft box attached to it.

So this is a soft box.

I think that's a medium.

Amazingly, you get bigger than that.

This is a medium and this is a,

what we call it a crate or a grid?

So, the grid basically directs the soft light in one place

rather than letting it spread out everywhere.

And it does mean you get soft light,

but more of a sort of bite of contrast,

which I particularly like.

There are three choices when shooting hot lights,

one is to shoot led, which I do often,

but it tends to be lower power output.

Then there's shooting tungsten,

which we're doing here and shooting HMI.

HMI is effectively daylight

and tungsten lights are tungsten.

So they create a warmer light.

And there's something for me about the sort of,

there's information you get in people's skin

in tungsten light that just feels like cinema to me,

HMI's are somehow cleaner and I prefer

that dirtier cinematic grit in my pictures

that tungsten lights gave me.

So even though we got loaded lights up here,

you'll probably never see more than two on at the time.

The first look we're doing will be one light.

And I often, for the most part, I only ever use one light.

We've obviously set this up and it is elaborate

and I don't want anyone to be put off and think,

"Oh my god, there's a lot going on there."

This is for the purpose of illustration.

Anyone that follows my work will see that the vast majority

of the pictures I put out are taken in ambient light.

And there's something about learning about lights

in this way, that when you then walk out on the street,

as I just did, and you see the sunlight

breaking through the shadows of a building, you go,

"Oh, that's actually not dissimilar to this light."

Studio lighting and the light

that you find out on the street

should completely correspond with each other.

So what we're doing here is understanding the correlation

between ambient light that you find

when you're out and about shooting

and how to recreate that within a studio environment.