All language subtitles for 2. Breaking Down the Lighting

We've got five 10K lights up here.

One is our backlight, 3/4 backlights

and our 3/4 front lights.

I may pull these around to be sidelights at times.

And then I've got a 24K light. This is all tungsten.

I don't use HMI, but this'll be behind this big silk,

which basically gives me my fill.

So that even if I'm backlighting a picture,

which I do a lot, I still need to know

that I've got some fill coming into people's faces.

So that's where I get that from.

We've got six lights here. So this is light one.

Which is a, how would I best describe this?

It's a 3/4 backlight, very similar to the sun.

If you pan on me, sometimes I may come

a little bit more into the light

and you would see something very similar to that

on a sunny backlit day,

when there was maybe a frosting of cloud

in front of the sun, but that is basically that light.

I also have a big light behind,

giving a very soft ambient light.

So there is nothing filling me here.

We then moved from that to our light two,

which is our, as I described,

that sort of Rembrandt painterly portrait soft light,

which has the grid on it,

we then go to number three, which is our,

fill until we make it really bright

and it becomes your key light.

And this is a big 24K tungsten fresnel light,

into a big 12 by 12 foot silk.

We then go light four,

which is the reverse of this one.

Basically, it's another soft window light on the 3/4 there.

We then go to five, which is the opposite rear 3/4 light.

And then our backlight, light six,

which gives us a silhouette.

Interestingly, when we do movie posters,

you'll often have things where you'll have a character move.

And so when I move to here, we'd would bring up one as well.

And so that's able to shape me here.

And then when the guy turns to the right,

we bring on number five, turn down number one,

and that light's better serving me here.

And so the idea is that with one lighting setup,

we can create a whole number of different moods,

straight off a board without having to move another light.

So we have the 3/4 back light,

but I've also got this fill working.

And if we lose the fill, you'll see how much darker

this side of my face becomes.

So we've got the rear light.

That's giving me this sort of halo.

But we do have the fill on.

So if we lose the fill all together,

you'll see that I'm now much more of a silhouette.

And then if we bring up the other two backlights,

and this is kind of a real superhero light, I suppose.

That we shoot, we do a lot of movie posters in this light,

where it's all very wrapped, very sort of noir.

And then if you bring the fill up into that,

same lighting set up, but with the fill.

And often we'll do this in movie posters,

where you want to have that heroic backlight,

but the designers still need the information

in the foreground in order to, I suppose,

decide at a later date quite how much of the talent's face

they actually wanna see.

What this does, is it allows me to work incredibly quickly,

but to stress, there's never a point

where all of these lights are on.

In a lot of commercial advertising work,

whether it's movie posters, or traditional advertising,

people want options.

There's a lot of times that you maybe

don't feel like the most creative photographer.

What you're actually doing is delivering

a whole bunch of assets

for a designer then to build the pictures,

to then build the story and build the narrative.

So your job in those cases is to give them

all of the assets they need to do that job.

So backgrounds, I use these gray flats,

because I don't like paper.

You know, if you turn a fan on now, it'll flap about,

or someone bumps into it

and you have wrinkles in your background.

And then I also liked the floor to be gray.

And I like to, I suppose, give the client on a job,

a professional looking template

from which we're then sort of delivering the work.

So this is my go-to set up on those kinds of jobs.

The other thing with a background like this,

is that you're able to put the lights behind it.

So, you know, if you come and look back here,

there's a sodding great light stand there,

there's a flag stand,

which are leading up to these lights up here,

which are all nicely hidden behind the background.

Angle wise, you'll see the lights are all reasonably high.

And there is a reason for this,

that certainly about chin light,

there's something about a human's chin

that leads itself to the light being a bit higher

and creating a shadow.

And again, it helps to accentuate

features on people's faces.

So for the most part, my lights are normally

above chin height when shooting.

And that's no difference, of course, with sunlight.

You know, you rarely have the sun down here, right?

'Cause it will be lighting a different part of the world.

So there is something in how we're used to seeing light

and normally it's up high.

So I shot constant lighting since 2004.

And the reason I've done that,

is 'cause I affectively learnt to light

by being on movie sets and having

an incredibly fortunate position of watching

some of the world's greatest cinematographers light scenes.

I basically found the lights that I love to use

and a mate of mine, the photographer Glen Luchford,

said to me quite early on in my career

that if there's a light that you have in your house,

that you always like how that light is,

don't be afraid to literally unplug that light,

take it into the studio, plug it in and use that light.

So it's not about having necessarily a light

that's deemed as professional.

It's about having a light that you like.

The most interesting thing about strobe nowadays though,

is that every photographer is also a filmmaker nowadays.

It's very rare that you do a photo shoot

where you're not also asked to either make a BTS film,

or to shoot a moving version of the photo.

And of course, with strobe, that's kind of impossible.

When you shoot constant lighting,

you can hit record on a video camera

at the same time or straight afterwards.

And you are in the same light.

Contrast that with shooting strobe,

you have a modeling light,

that's different to the light you're taking a picture,

every time a photo takes it, pow.

And you absolutely break the feeling,

the authenticity of the moment that you're filming,

being the same thing.

When I'm photographing actors,

I get a far better performance out of someone,

if they're just able to be, and I'm shooting ,

than if there's constant flashes going off,

reminding them every second that they're in a photo shoot.

The other is, I like to see the light falling on people

and the modeling lights on strobes

never really give you an accurate view

of how your strobe hits.

To me, there's something about flash

that I always feel subjects look slightly embalmed.

It's almost like it's a shock to the skin.

Just how bright the light comes out.

There's a number of other reasons that I don't use strobe.

One is just how much depth of field

that you pull out of a picture on strobe.

You see a lot of photos

where absolutely everything is in focus,

often in what would be a low light situation.

So you might have a picture of someone

in a lovely wood-lined library and everything's in focus

and that's just not how life is.

It's not how we've, I suppose,

become educated to see things.

And as a result, I don't feel the images are so authentic.

The other really annoying thing for me about using strobe,

is that you often find yourself,

you shoot at the speed at which the flash pack recharges.

So you take your picture and it goes, bong, bing.

That tells you it's ready to shoot again.

And that bing, you sort of shoot a picture again.

And suddenly you're working to the rhythm of a strobe,

rather than the natural rhythm of the shoot.

So for me, how I light,

it's constant lighting the whole way.

But one thing important, 'cause obviously a lot of you

do and will use strobe,

is that hot lights are also the best way

for me to convey what the light is doing.

A backlit strobe, or a backlit hot light,

is still backlit, right?

So the principles, whether you're gonna shoot strobe or not,

the principles of lighting

are best illustrated here with hot lights,

so that you can see how that light is falling

and not just in that 1,000th of a second flash.

Okay. That's the end of my, why I don't like flash rant.

And apologies to all you flash lovers out there.

When you use constant light, you learn how all light works.

And what that means is that, you know,

the lions share of my shoots I don't light at all,

but I walk into an environment

and I understand what's happening

with the sunlight coming through the windows.

I understand what those little uplighters

are gonna do hotel room.

I understand what LEDs under a sofa

are gonna do to a situation.

You understand all these different practical lights,

ambient light, reflective light.

Once you understand the fundamentals of constant light,

you understand lighting,

you understand all the light that you ever shoot in.

Be it ambient light, artificial lights, you get it all.

And that's where you need to get to,

as a professional photographer.