Transcript:
In this video, I’m going to give you five tips and techniques for cloudy or rainy days. My name is pie. And I’m one of the founders of Lin and Jersey Photography and Slrloungecom were teaming up with Adorama to bring you a new series of photography. Tutorials called Master your craft right here on Adoramatv. So let’s dive in what’s up, friends. My name is Pai and welcome to Adoramatv. So we’re gonna go ahead and dive in with tip number. One backlighting is going to be a fantastic technique that turns out awesome pictures pretty much every time. So here’s all you need. Just grab your flash, put it up on a stand. And in fact, if you zoom in on this image, you will notice directly behind our couple. There’s the flash stand and we would, of course, Photoshop that out in the final image, but it has a roughly 250 watt second flash on it so this would be today equivalent to like a Profoto b10 Or let’s say a Godox 8200 Whatever you got is totally fine. One of the things that I like to do when I’m shooting These types of images is I actually like the slightly more warm look, so I’ll usually cool the white balance here. I’m going down to 4400 Kelvin, and then I’m adding a CTO gel to the flash. You can use a half CTO or a full CTO. This is a color temperature, orange gel. And I like that look because it sort of creates this warmth, but then it also exaggerates any of the blue tones in the background. Now this is one of my setup shots and I do like this shot a lot, and by the way, the rain that you see here is really just a fine mist If it was actually raining hard, which we don’t get enough rain in here in California, but if it actually was raining hard, this would be far more pronounced, but I wanted to start with this wide image to show you something when you’re using this technique, you want to make sure the background whether that’s the sky or whether it’s like, these bushes is essentially darker than the rest of the scene, right. You want it to be dark because you want the raindrops to be lit up. So if you are shooting it against the sky? You need to make sure that the baseline exposure is dark enough that the lit rain will actually stand out. If you go with too bright of a sky, then it kind of just blends together, so when we zoom in on this image, we get to this final shot so again. Even though it’s very fine mist it, it turns out really nice in camera. This flash was placed roughly five to six feet behind them. You’ll get different effects with that distance, so play around with it. Number two rain puddle reflections. So wherever you’re walking around, look for little puddles, you’re going to use these for reflections. Now, of course, you can shoot the typical reflection where you kind of get down low place the camera against the surface and shoot the subject where you can see their full reflection, but this go around. I wanted to do something a little bit different instead. What I’m doing is really working. The models pose and I’m looking down into the reflection and shooting down into it to show the model silhouette against the sky. Keep in, mind that with this kind of a shot. You want to really work the pose and make sure that you have the right negative space? This shot is made by the negative space between the legs, the arms, everything and even having the subject look towards a direction where you can see the profile of the face, but once captured, you get these really cool and fun. Abstract images using this technique number three is to maximize dynamic range. So look, there are some places where you get a lot of gray skies when you have clouds. Seattle, Vancouver? If you live there, you know what I’m talking about, But oftentimes cloudy days. Give us those beautiful clouds and detail and texture. Sometimes we even see blues in the sky. What they also do, is they? Cut down that direct sunlight and give us just enough room to squeeze all the information into a single shot. Now here’s how to do one of these shots. What you want to do if you look at the exposure, you want to set up your exposure so that you’ve pushed the blacks to the edge without clipping? You’ve pushed the whites to the edge while retaining as much of those highlights as you possibly can. I usually like to bias this towards the shadow side, meaning like I usually like the camera to preserve all the shadows, so I don’t get any muddy green tones and shadows and then let the camera pick up whatever highlights. It can. If I press J and you look at this because it’s a Cloudy day, and we have this kind of limited dynamic range. This is the only thing clipped and these clouds up here are the only bits where they’re just tiny bits of white that might be blown out. I’m gonna go ahead and just apply HDR natural from the crush pack under visual flow presets. Now, what happens upon this single click? I’m gonna show you on the right side. What it’s doing so you can set up a preset for yourself if you’re not using this system, but what happens is it lifts out everything and retains all the detail and all I have to do now is drop in this radial burn right over my subjects. I’m going to press shift M pull the radial burn over, hold down alt or option if you’re on a Mac or PC and you’re just going to drag to exaggerate this burn where it brings all the detail in now all I have to do from here is just adjust to the right white balance. Get my exposure where I want it. And if I want to tweak any contrast or anything, I can do that as well, but look at this. We’re going from this image to this final image in just a few clicks now to set up your own HDR preset it’s. Really, the magic is happening right here. Where we’re pulling highlights down, you’re pulling shadows up, pulling whites down, pulling blacks up. You can adjust the color as you like, we’re using quite a bit of dehaze to pull the sky back and then we’re using a s curve to add more contrast back to the image, because when you actually flatten out, so if I were to just turn off contrast, you’ll notice that when I pull the highlights down, bring the shadows up whites, everything gets flattened out in the image, right so to bring our contrast back, we need that s-curve, and then we also need a little bit of added contrast to boost it up a little bit. This is the fun part about these high dynamic range shots on cloudy days Is you can get these crazy images that look amazing, and it’s just a matter of a couple clicks in post and the right exposure when you are shooting it in camera. Make sure you get all the detail possible. I’m going to give you a little bonus. I’m going to give you all a free preset right now. So if I drop down into the visual flow retouching kit, you’ll see under here. We have sky and cloud under enhancements. I want you actually to pause the video and dial in these settings and save this as your new sky and cloud enhancement brush. So all I got to do now is just drop this right over the clouds and what it’s going to do is add blues and lift a little bit more of the detail and texture. Now, once again, once you have this preset dialed in, you can hold down alt or option. You can drag it to the left or to the right to strengthen or reduce the effect, so I’m going to reduce it, so it’s a little bit more subtle, but there you go, that’s a little. That’s a little bonus for yall for those that are still here. All right, so number. Four, it’s a cloudy day. Use the sky as a soft box. Now this goes out to those of you. That are in Seattle and Vancouver and all those places around the world that get those gray skies, right, the sky might not be anything crazy, but what you do have on those kind of cloudy gray days. Is this gigantic soft box and all you need to do is get your subject into a position where they’re kind of facing up a little bit with the face so here I’m literally having my subject. She’s just sitting in a hedge, so there’s like a little head where there’s like a manhole. She’s sitting right on top of it around this hedge, and I’m just shooting down onto her as she kind of looks up into the camera, We get this incredibly soft and beautiful light that naturally brings out the eyes, it softens the skin. It just looks really great straight out of the camera, so use the sky as a soft box. Finally, tip number five is to recreate golden hour. Look, just because it’s a cloudy day. Doesn’t mean you can’t make your own backlight your own nice, warm tone sunlight coming through in the image. Now this will work on a cloudy day. It’ll work during dusk. It’ll work anytime you want to create that. I’m going to give you a few tips in doing so. Okay, so let’s take a look now. Just so, you know, I’m not lying here. Look at the time 753 753 It’s a raw file ain’t no funny business going on, all right, so all you have to do for. This technique is to get a flash behind your subjects now. What you’ll notice in this scene is we’re backing it off quite a ways you want to put one up to two full CTO gels on it, depending on the level of warmth that you want and ideally, you want a high power strobe, especially the further away from your subjects that you get so here, we’re using a b1 It’s a 500 watt strobe and we’re using it at full power because we want the sunlight to come from essentially where the sun would be in the scene, so you’ll notice it’s hitting all the trees and everything behind them. And this is the primary kind of nuance of this technique is. You need to make sure that it’s placed far enough backward. Actually, looks like that’s where the sun would be coming from. So once that’s in place. Well, here’s the shot without that sunlight. Here’s the shot with, and this is the next fun thing you can actually work the camera from side to side and reveal a flare, just like you would with the sun, So this flare is coming from that flash unit. The sun wasn’t actually out. It’s a fun technique that you guys can use, and if you want to see a full video on this, you can actually look up recreating golden arrow. We actually did this video quite a while. Back with Profoto, So we have a full tutorial from start to finish on exactly how to do it. I hope you guys all enjoyed the video. Please do comment below. I love reading your comments. Seeing what you guys would like to learn next. I know a lot of you want to learn more about lighting. We’re going to be doing quite a bit more lighting stuff. We threw some into this video as well and honestly, it’s about all the social interaction. I get other than planes flying overhead in my empty studio office. I hope you all are healthy and well, and I’ll see you guys in the next video bye.