Studio Lighting for Natural Light Photographers | Gavin Hoey

I love doing outdoor location portrait photography, unless of course it's rainy, dark or cold, or usually all three at the same time. So today we're going to do studio-based photography for people who usually work out on location. To help me out today, I've got the amazing Chloe. Chloe's going to be the model for this indoor photo session, but if you're an outdoor photographer, you've probably got things like exposure and composition nailed down. All you want is an indoor solution that gives you the same convenience as outdoor lighting, and that's where this sort of light comes in, an LED light. It's a continuous light source, just like the sun, but you've got to set your camera up just to get the best out of it inside. So in my camera I'm going to turn on things like exposure simulation, as I've got a mirrorless camera. That will show me the exposure before I press the shutter, and it's normally something I turn off when I'm using flash, something I turn on when I'm using LED work, and then I'm going to dial in some settings. I like to work in manual mode, and really it doesn't matter what settings you use. The one thing I would set is your white balance. Set a custom white balance. Don't leave it to auto white balance, because your lights can be manually set as well. I love using the LCD screen as I'm doing portraits. It's a great way to work, but you shouldn't trust this screen for exposure, because if you set your screen for the brightness you need to work outside, when you come inside it can be really bright and give you a false sense of exposure. So look at the histogram, look at the blinkies, if you can turn those on, and that will give you a much better idea of how your exposure is actually doing. And then there's one more thing that I'm going to do inside of my studio, and that is get a bit of control over the room lights. So that means closing things like blinds or drapes, and turning off a lot of these room lights. So with the room lights turned out, we've got control over the light that the camera sees, because this light can be quite bright. In fact if I turn it on, that's at 20% brightness, which is more than enough for what we need today. If you want to find out about the gear I'm using, you'll find links in the video description down below. They'll take you back to Adorama. But why is LED light so good if you're a location natural light photographer? Well it is exactly the same as the sunlight. What you see is what you get in camera, more or less. So if I take a picture like this right now, I don't need any fancy metering. I can use my camera, and I can see that my camera tells me a thousandth of a second, f1.4, ISO 400, and I get a picture exactly as I saw it on the back of the screen. There's no real change. What you see is what you get, which is what you're used to. It also means that you can create your own light using kit that you've probably already got. So if you're a location photographer, you should have one of these. If you haven't got one of these, you definitely should get one. Five in one reflector. This is the inner diffuser section, and harsh light like we had there. Not a good look, but we could let a little cloud just drift in front of Chloe like that. That's going to soften up the light, and I can see straight away if I do nothing, this is going to be an underexposed picture. I don't have to take a picture. I can see it in camera, and I can see the correct exposure comes up at 400th of a second, and now we have really nice light on Chloe. It's that simple. What you see is literally what you get, and if you want to add in more lights, well you can do that too. So I've got a second LED light, because these things aren't desperately expensive, but well worth having more than one. I can control it from my phone app right here, and I can literally just see where the light goes. So I'd like this light to be a hair light on Chloe, and well I can see it actually working in real time. So I can put the light up there, and think yeah that looks about right. So that just puts a little bit of a hair light on Chloe without it becoming too dominating in the picture, and that's what I love about LED work. Once you've set your camera up, you can then experiment away, and you don't have to get bogged down in all the technicalities of lighting. So I think we should take a few photos like this. Chloe are you ready? Here we go. Okay let me clear this up right at the start. The thing that's on my camera's hot shoe is definitely not supposed to be there in this video. That is a flash transmitter. Yes I left it on by mistake. Oops. Anyway I thought it'd be really fun to make the two backgrounds into a bit of a v-shape. Put Chloe inside of that, and then to light it I'm going to put a backlight in. So the weaker of my two lights is going to act like the sun giving a rim edge look to Chloe, and then the stronger one I'm using as a fill light through the diffusing fabric, and then to mix it up even further. These are cct lights, so they can have a warm tone or a cold tone of light. I've gone with a really warm tone for the backlight, and the secret ingredient is a little bit of a huff across the lens, and that gives this slightly flary, slightly soft look, which I think works perfectly with these photos. So there's a couple of other things you should consider when you're working with LED lighting, and the first one is it can be very bright for your model. So something like a pair of sunglasses could be a super useful prop, and if you don't believe me that's 20 percent. Imagine having that in your eyes the whole time, and you're experiencing what a model is going to experience. So the model should be part of your exposure triangle. You've got your usual ISO, shutter speed, and aperture, but also think about what your model can tolerate, and factor that into your exposure. The other way of avoiding really bad flare is not to put the light directly in front of your model, directly in their eye line. You wouldn't do that if you were outside. You wouldn't make them stare into the sun. So why would it be any different in the studio? And in the studio, because you can move the light, you have the option of being way more creative than you can with just natural sunlight. So if I want to put a light to the side, I can put a light to the side. I can create dramatic shadows and get a picture like this. Of course I could soften the light up with something like the five in one reflector, the diffusing surface, or I could get a little bit creative and think well maybe I can use it to create shadows and shapes. The whole idea with being in a studio and having continuous light is you play with the light, experiment, and come up with some cool ideas along the way. So let's see how this looks. Okay it looks a little bit contrasty because we've got extremes of light going on there, but I've got more than one LED, so why don't I use this LED to fill in the shadows, and all I'm going to do is just bounce it off the ceiling of the studio. Now I've got this running at about 30 percent, and the main light is running about 20 percent, so these are not running particularly bright, and with that in mind I think we should take a few photos like this. So Chloe are you ready? Okay let's do some experimentation with light. So in my head I'm thinking this is an outdoor location where I've gone out and found a perfectly whitewashed wall in the summer with the sun beaming down, so that's the look I'm trying to create here. I'm doing it by using a fairly hard edge light, and also creating a warm tone effect in the images, but then to really give it that sort of outdoorsy feel I'm creating a little bit of a breeze. Now there's lots of ways you can do a breeze in the studio, and today I'm just using another five-in-one reflector with my assistant Freya flapping it like crazy, and blowing Chloe's hair around. The thing about location photography is the immediacy of the photos. You don't have to change lights, you just work with what you've got, and inside of the studio it's basically the same. Yes you can move the LED lights around, but what you see is what you get, and all of the skills you've got from your outdoor photography you can bring indoors and use in here. Now if you've enjoyed this video don't forget to go down to the comments and give it a thumbs up, and leave a comment or a question. We always appreciate those, and of course if you haven't already done so you should definitely click on that subscribe button. I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.