[Light music plays, screen reads 'Tripods and stands'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, photographers.

We have looked at some light sources and we've looked at shaping the light. Now we're going to look at how to keep our cameras up and our lights up, and we're going to look at various stands and sticks and grip to, to stand all our things up. So, tripods and light stands, those sorts of things, which I carry around in my old guitar bag.

This is my tripod. It's not an especially fancy tripod. It's not like the ones I'm looking at today, but it does the job, and it is, it is just a standard tripod. You get the legs unclip and you extend them out and you can build yourself a nice little pyramid shaped piece of stability.

This is my tripod, and I think this is a good height for me because it's just kind of at chin height.

It can go a little bit higher with these, centre columns, they're okay. But you know, once you get up here, you do get a little bit more shake and vibration potentially. So, the strongest part of the tripod is with the legs extended and just above sort of where the triangle meets.

Any sort of tripod you want is going to work for this and for studio photography in particular, I would kind of think you might even prefer not to use a tripod. You're going to be using flash, you're going to be using probably a reasonably fast shutter speed anyway, so the chances of you blurring the photo by holding the camera are very, very small.

But if you wanted to use a tripod, you could, if you're then going to do product photography and shoot several variations of a photo, it can be really good to keep the camera in one spot and the subject in one spot and then you've got options for compositing, and things like that.

My only sort of bias towards tripods is if you can pick a tripod plate mount that is consistent. So, there is, a format that is pretty cheap and out there everywhere called Arca Swiss, and it's basically just these little grooves along the tripod plate, that goes on your camera and then they grip into the tripod head. And if you go everything Arca Swiss, you can put them on all your cameras. They all swap and change and it's all, all good.

That's about the only bit of advice I've got with tripods.

Going into my bag of tricks here. This is a one legged tripod called a monopod, and these can be handy because they still take the weight off the photographer of the camera, but you get a little bit more movement and flex in them so you can lean in and lean out and it's not as locked down. They definitely don't stand up by themselves, but they're great for steadiness and things like that.

And having a monopod in your classroom is never a bad idea because you could put mounts and lights onto them and then you could get someone to boom them in or things like that.

Diving more into the bag of tricks is just, I've got a few different types of light stands, so these are ultra portable, nice and small. Don't take up very much room, and these are a little bit bigger.

I usually like to have a big one and then a couple of little ones, but they have screws that tighten and loosen. So, if I loosen that off, the legs will start to come out. And if I push down, squeeze it out, we can make a pretty solid base there and then we can tighten that up.

If they extend to a height, generally you want them to go pretty high. And then it's this area here, that's where you can mount your lights or add attachments to, to get your lights on there.

To go with those grippy bits. I have a box of grippy bits, and I've just grabbed these over the years, but they're kind of like two-way adapters and spigots and hot shoe mounts and all sorts of things, you know, again, really cheap. You can get like a box of these for $9 or something like that. So, all of these things will help you adapt your lights onto your tripods and your light stands.

That's kind of like mama bear. This is baby bear. This one folds, the legs fold up like this can go in a suitcase, this kind of thing, but it's a little less sturdy and it's a lot smaller. So it's got some more sections and you need to use those, loosen them off, tighten them up, loosen them off, tighten them up.

You know, you get comparable height, but this one's a lot more floppier. So, if we went back and we looked at the bigger light over there. You know, if you had a choice between which stand you'd put this light on, you know, you match your big lights with big stands if you can.

They're two medium sized stands. But if you're going to do a lot of this and you want to put your lights in lots of different positions, this light stand is a little bit more, it gives you more options. So, we can, again, open up the legs like we had before, loosen the screw, so anticlockwise and then clockwise tighten it up. And we do have some height controls too, but this one's got a boom arm that will come out.

So, this is a little bit, these controls are interesting. You kind of, you can unwind them, that loosens them, and then you've got this arm here that will spin out. And if I loosen that one there too, you can see I can put something on the end of this and drop it into a scene. And what that'll do, is it might give you more room as a photographer to shoot through this bit as opposed to having a light here and a light stand going straight down.

It's not quite a C stand, which is something you might look for, which is a stand that goes in a C shape, but it's pretty close to it. So, I find that really, really cool. And you can, again, it's got one of those grippy bits up there, you can, you can mount a light to that, which is nice.

So, I'm going to keep on working with this one. That boom arm can go way up and out too. So, lots of fun for the whole photography family there.

So, if you can imagine, as we start to hang bigger and bigger lights on here, the weight starts to, the centre of gravity is moving from the light stand where we want it, and it's pulling out here. And on occasions, you know, you can pull over.

I think it's good practice to at the very least put the weight of whatever you're lifting usually a light over the camera leg. So, if it, it's a little bit harder for it to pull against that camera leg, but you can also get a whole bunch of counterweights and hang them off the back of your boom pole here.

This one's a four-kilo weight. It'll clip on there, which is cool, but if you don't have them, you could use a big old bag of rice or, you know, you can get specific lighting bags full of like little balls of lead or all sorts of things to weigh your stuff down.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Building a light'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, so we've built a light stand here.

I've put my counterweight on and I'm going to add a light to it. I just need one more bit of equipment to it, but for me at least, I find the lower your light stand is when you put your light on the better. Because you know, things are going to fall less. All of that stuff is a, is a good thing.

So that's pretty low. You could go lower, but that'll work for me.

I have lights with certain threads and mounts on them, and I need to adapt that to this light stand. And one of my favourite ways to do that is to get these, they call these like an S bracket, and they come in different varieties. But the S bracket here, basically this end, talks to the light stand like that, which is really nice, and you tighten that off.

We'll do that in a second, and then your speed light, or whatever light you want, you can use that little clamp in there that loosens it out, and that slowly tightens it in so you can clamp your light in there.

Now, on the front of this is where you click in your modifier. So, we did a lot of stuff with the umbrellas before. So, there is a hole here for the arm of the umbrella and you just slide that in there, open up the umbrella, the light shines into that. Really nice.

This particular S Mount, has the Bowens mount adapter on it, and Bowens mount is very common, generic. Lots of lighting modifiers now have a Bowens mount for them.

So, my big light from before that's Bowens mount, most of my soft boxes are Bowens mount, which means I can swap and change my modifiers, and they just click in really nicely. So, Bowens mount isn't a, it used to be a brand, but now it's a convention, so it's a bit like millimetres. It's, it's just, a unit of grip.

So anyway, I'm going to put my bracket on there. Ta-da. That's looking good. And then I can grab one of my speedlights here. And I can pop that, loosen that up a bit and pop that in there. Tighten that down a bit. You don't have to tighten it too tight because it is metal and plastic. You just want to be grippy, but not too grippy.

From there, I've got a speedlight mounted and we can, we can do some photography fun with this, but this is the one you push in the middle like that. This is what Bowens mount looks like on the back of a light.

So, it's, it's a ring with three teeth, and then those three teeth will line up in here, make that clicky noise. You hear the click? Very satisfying. And now that's all locked in.

And now I can, you can see through there, there's the speedlight. There's my reflective material. I can then put my diffusion fabric on there, chuck that on there.

And there we go. We've built a light.

Now we're going to Mount an umbrella. And these are, these are a really good way to get started and just have a lot of really good quality of light. So, I'm looking for my little Mounting hole in there, and then I will just slide it in and through.

There we go. Just like that. Now let me spin that around so you can actually see it. It's gone through the hole, out the back. There's a little screw here that we can apply pressure to the arm of the umbrella.

And then depending on how big your umbrella is and how high up it is, you might want to, because that's sharp and pointy a little bit. You might, sometimes I'll just hang a bit of red fabric or something off the end of it, or just to make that area safe there.

And that's it. There the two main modifiers you'll probably ever use, couple of soft boxes, a couple of umbrellas. You are going to make some really pretty pictures.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Setting up flash triggers'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, photographers. We're going to talk about gear for a minute. We're going to talk about the speedlight. We're going to talk about triggers and receivers if you need them. And what they do is they send the signal from the hot shoe of the camera, so that's that little metal port on the top, they transport that signal wirelessly to the bottom of the flash.

All my setup here is, is it works in a very simplistic mode. All of my kit has a single pin in the middle. Which means when I trigger the camera, which triggers the transmitter and then the receiver, then the flash fires altogether.

You can get really nice setups with these where they will have more pins on the bottom of the flash and they will convey more information to the camera and the flash. Mine just says Go or Don't Go. That's it. You can buy kits where you can sit the transmitter on top of the camera and dial the power up and down. We are going to be doing that with the good old-fashioned buttons today.

Just a quick note on batteries. Most of my stuff runs on double As or triple As, so if you have lots of them, that's good.

This is a regular battery you might get from a service station. It goes okay. You can get higher capacity batteries, which are good. So, I'm going to go load a bunch of these into my flash now.

Alright, so I'm going to open up the door to my flash. Every flash will be a little bit different.

Make sure the plus side is going to the, to the plus side of the battery and the negative side is going to the negative side of the battery. Let's close it up. Let's find the on button and let's turn it on. Lovely.

So that will charge up. And when my light's ready to go, that's my test button. If I fire that, you'll get a little bit of light coming out. That's good. That's really good.

So that's step one. Now we're going to put a receiver on this flash and I'll just talk a little bit about the transmitters and receivers I've got. Mine are really old and reliable. These are the kinds of things you buy once and you'll probably keep forever. The reason mine have a lot of tape on them is once I put the setting on that I like, I tape it off and leave it there, and that helps it stay.

So, a couple of things to look out for on your transmitters and receivers. They've all got different variations of this, but they, that's quite small. Little channels and numbers, like one through to 12. So you can pick one of those. And that means if a set of these are on channel one, they're not going to interfere with people that are on channel two, for example.

So, I've got mine set to channel one here. I'll take that off and on here, which is even smaller there is a TX, an OFF position and an RX. If I'm on T for transmit, that means this is going to be the one that sends the signal from my camera, and I'm happy with that.

So, I'm going to tape that off, and then I set my receiver to the opposite, so I want to make sure it's on channel one. It is, it's on RX, which is good. Everything's turned on.

If I press the test button there, we should see a light come on the receiver. That's good. If I press it harder, the light's going to go green, which means it's really good, means it's actually working. So, on the camera, I need to mount this to my hot shoe.

Now if you have a little bit of plastic or something, like it's often black, mine goes 3D printed by a student. So, I kept it, you pull that off and there's your hot shoe there. Nearly all cameras have the same hot shoe to my knowledge there's a couple of Sony’s out there that have a different shaped hot shoe.

If that happens to you, it's, it's not the end of the world. We can, we can figure it out. There is another port on your camera that you can put a different type of cable into. It's got a little picture of a flash on it, and if need be, there is an optical triggering mode, which you can fire a flash on your camera and other flashes in the room will see that flash and they will fire at the same time.

So, you've got lots of options.

All right, so I'm going to slide that into the hot shoe there, and with a bit of luck, we'll take a photo and those two will talk to each other. So here we go. I'm going to put the receiver on the flash.

It's working. Now let's take a photo and see if it's working. It is working. Look at that. So, what's happening there is I'm telling the camera to take a photo by firing the shutter and the hot shoe signal is going up into the transmitter. It's sending the signal to the receiver light's coming out. It's a beautiful thing.

On the back of my flash here, there's really a couple of things we're worried about here because I've got these receivers on, I don't have to worry about the channels. I'm just popping the flash in manual mode. And if you see up here, there's a fraction and it's saying one over four. That means every time I am firing the flash, I'm firing a quarter of its total power. So, I could go all the way up to full power by pressing the plus button, and this will be a full dump of power.

And you'll see how long a full dump takes to recharge. That all depends on how full your batteries are and what type of batteries you've got as to how fast they recycle. But a lot of flashes will have that audible thing saying you're ready to fire again.

I'm going to guess a power. I like to set them on about a quarter power and then put that up into my light. So, I'll put that up in there like that.

Sometimes if I can, I'll see if I can at least make the buttons accessible so I can just touch the buttons there. That's good.

Other than that, we've built a light ready to shoot.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Lighting techniques – single and 2 light set-ups'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, photographers, we are going to have our first photo shoot now.

We've got an amazing model, Adele. I believe there was a musician named after you at some point.

What we are going to do is we've got Adele in front of a window. This is my camera over here. You'll see all of that in a minute. And we're going to, sort of fight with the light and exposure to get something that looks really good.

We're then going to bring in a light and play around with things too. So, you get to see what a natural light exposure looks like, and then one where we've added in the, the studio flash as well. Hopefully that sounds like fun.

So, I'm going to walk over to my camera now and we are going to shoot Adele. Now there's a great amount of distance between the camera and Adele. That's good. And there's even more distance between Adele and the background.

Now, if you can afford to do that, that's amazing. Zooming in and using longer focal lengths to fill the frame. I mean, my frames not totally filled here, but shooting at longer focal lengths, more zoomed in very generally means more flattering effects on your model.

Wider angle lenses you can see I'm probably being filmed on a wider angle here. We get to distort a bit of the scene and sometimes it looks really cool, but at the moment there's probably a bit of a size difference between me and Adele. And if you imagine getting in with a wide-angle lens really close to someone's face, all of a sudden, their forehead might be bigger than, it appears bigger than it actually is in real life. So, if you can get back, zoom in, and if you can get any distance between the subject and the background as much of that, that's always a good thing. You can insert some light in there; you could get some separation. You can blur a background easier if there's some distance there. It's all good stuff.

Let's have a look here. Now my camera settings here, I'm on manual mode. If I explain this really simply, ISO is how sensitive your camera is to light your shutter speed is all about freezing the action. In a studio it actually doesn't do much of that. There's a thing called a sync speed. We'll get to that, and my aperture is my depth of field, but it's also controls how much light comes in and out of the lens too.

So, let's do a quick little natural light photo here. Now, if I take this photo, I'll focus in on Adele there, don't have to do anything too much yet, mate, we'll just take a picture.

We can see there on the screen that the stuff outside the window actually looks pretty good. It's reasonably well exposed. We could actually probably speed the shutter speed up a bit and get an even nicer exposure. Wait for that bus to go past you and take that photo.

So outside looks great. The window's a bit dark and Adele's very dark. So, we need more light on Adele.

Let's try and do this without bringing any lights in. So, I'm just going to open up my shutter, slowing it down, slowing it down. I'm now at 1/80 of a second, and if we have a look on my screen there. That's probably looking pretty good. I'll take that photo.

That's a good exposure on Adele. What's happened to the window though? It's gotten a bit bright and overexposed, so, we're going to try and bring these two things together by bringing a light in.

Now, one of the limitations with flash is that there's usually a sync speed involved with your camera, which means there's a speed at which the camera can catch a burst of flash without causing problems effectively. If you can find out the name of your camera by looking at it, so if it's a Cannon 650D or whatever, Google the sync speed, know that number, plug it into your shutter speed. You're going to have a nice time.

I know on my camera I can't go past 1/250 of a second. I'll show you in a minute what it looks like when I get my sync speed wrong, but that's, that's where my shutter speed's going to sit there.

Now my aperture is what and my ISO now is what'll take control of the exposure. So, I might drop my ISO little bit. We might get down to 100. That's my lowest ISO. And then if I wanted to, I could increase my aperture to darken off that background or open it up a little bit and we'll play with all of this stuff in a minute. But if we take that photo, we're getting a nice silhouette.

I think it's time to bring a light in. Let's bring a light in.

But this is going to be your main light just for a minute. It's just an umbrella. The speed-light is in it, like we put in it before, and I am going to turn on my trigger. So hopefully now when we take a photo, we'll get something, I don't know what it will be, but we can adjust from there.

Oh, okay. Adele, if you want to have a squiz, that's what you're kind of looking like at the moment.

So, the flash is lighting Adele, it's probably a little bit bright, and the angle of it's not great. But we'll get the exposure and then we'll work on placement and then we'll work on the, the work it baby, the, you know, all that kind, the funny stuff. We'll try and build rapport, ask some questions, get a cool shot.

Flash is a little bit bright. I could go over to the flash, turn the power down. I'm out a quarter power there. If I increase the aperture though, I'm going to go from F4 to 5.6. Let's take another photo and we've dulled the flash power down.

So, we had the previous photo that was a little bit bright. Now we've got that one on the screen. Notice how my live view on the camera, which is on the, the right-hand side of the screen there, it's still in silhouette mode. Yeah. It can't see the flash.

If we think about the light and we look at it, it's kind of hitting the side of you, and I think you probably want to see a little bit more of the, the front of you there. So, I'm just going to wiggle that light. Take a test shot.

It's kind of wrapping around a bit more. That's good. Let's move it again.

So now we're in this space where we're just doing little tweaks. I'm going to walk from the camera to the light and just tweak things around. So, I've moved my light source, it's getting more in front of Adele, which is good because we want to light Adele's face, which is a good thing.

I think. I'm just going to raise it up a little bit too. So, the light's kind of coming in at 45 degrees and down, which means, because obviously, eyebrows and noses, they make shadows, and those shadows, if they sort of go down at 45-degree angles, they look better.

All right, Adele, you're having fun, aren't you, mate?

Woo. Cool. So, I really like this. We've got just a little bit of sparkle in the eyes. That's good. Which is good. The light's lighting them up, everything's a little bit dark and we might even fill that with another light, or we could go in there with a reflector or something like that.

But now we are getting pretty close to, yeah, cool. I might even just open up my aperture just a tiny bit somewhere there. I reckon that's good. Because I like my shadows to be shadows. Don't necessarily want them to be yet a dark abyss. Sometimes I do. If we're telling a really moody story about Adele, we could. I just want nice, happy portrait kind of thing here.

That's pretty good. As far as direction goes, I'm pretty basic. I usually tend to say, put your back to the light a little bit, or bring this shoulder towards me. That's good. And then if you kind of look towards the light. That's kind of a pretty good sort of flattering start.

By far and away though, if you don't feel confident with directing people, they're not feeling directing, just get them doing stuff.

So, if you need to take portraits of the art teacher, get them in the art classroom, doing a thing, all of that stuff, getting people in the environment, talking to them. Holding an orange. Believe it or not, it's going to help make this much more fun.

All right, Adele, I might get you just to tilt back around a bit, just somewhere there, because I've just, I just want to get that light around a little bit more, so we've walked that around a little bit.

Yes. Good. I've got shadow, but I've got light in both the eyes and the catch lights, so that's cool. What we can do to add a little bit of sparkle, and a little bit of extra light is, I'm just looking in at this shot here, and I'm going to add a little bit of light coming in from the background. And what it'll hopefully do is lighten up a shoulder, lighten up a bit of hair, and carve out your subject too.

So, this is just a two-light set up.

All right, photographers, so I'm just showing you my hair light here. It's another one of those s-mount adapters on a regular light stand, and it's a speedlight. This one, is a, is an old speedlight of mine, but it's kind of my favourite. So that's what we're going with today.

It's at an eighth power, so 1/8. And with these lights, you can actually, there's a little lens in them that you can zoom. It may have an impact on the throw of light. So, at 24, it's quite wide. It's like a lens. I've zoomed mine into about 105, and it still will spread, but it should help me just pinpoint the back of Adele's head there and because we just want this to be a hair light that just is going to hopefully Adele lift you off the background a little bit.

So, I'm going to come over here to this direction and it's not precisely from the direction of the window. It'll, it'll kind of work. And Adele, could you, you are going to be the best judge of this for me, if you could look at that and tell me, is it looking at you, if it's doing this, if it's doing that, looking at you.

Adele

No. It needs to come this way a bit.

Ben Eyles

Love it. Awesome. Thank you mate. Now what I might do is we'll just, I'll just turn this light off for a second and we'll just get a shot of just the hair light.

All right. There we go. So, we've lost our main light and it's kind of just hitting Adele's shoulder and hair, and it's pretty strong. It's up there. It's kicking pretty hard, so we'll leave it there for a minute. But what we might do if we want it to be a bit more subtle, just turn the power down.

We're at 1/8. We could go down 1/16, 1/32. Lots of options. So, I'll walk back over here, turn this one back on, and now we'll see the hole ensemble.

All right, Adele looking suave. Nice. Okay, so there's our shot there. We've got hair light coming in from camera, right? It is pretty hardcore. It is pretty heavy. I think I will turn that down and then we've got the kind of soft fill light coming in from the left.

If I come over here, I can turn that down. We are at 1/8. I've dropped that down to 1/64. So, we've halved the light quite a few times. All right, now if we take a photo here, what I'm hoping for is a much subtler hair light. So, it's there, you just see it on the, on the shoulder, but it's, it's not like screaming hair light. It's subtle. That's good.

Alright Adele, so let's do a nice photo. Yeah. There was a really nice moment where you were kind of just kind of fiddling with your jewellery there. And if you kind of like if you are looking, if you're thinking thoughtful thoughts up towards the light, that should look really flattering.

So, something like that, I'll shoot a couple of these and I'm just kind of wiggling my composition around and you're getting bored. Shake your hands out. Cool. And even if you did something like, yeah, just like that was kind of cool and you just kind of like washing your hands, that kind of. Using the soap.

That's it. It feels weird, but it looks awesome. Cool. And then if you look at me like you're kind of bored with me, but yeah, I've got like 10 more seconds. That's the kind of thing.

Cool. I think we'll have a sequence in those photos there that we'll be pretty happy to use with and we can look through later.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Rembrandt-like lighting set-up'.]

Ben Eyles

So, we're going to attempt something close to Rembrandt lighting here.

There's a few things at play. I've swapped my lens to a 50-millimetre lens. It's just a 50-millimetre 1.8. Most camera brands have a version of this that's really cheap and cheerful and does some really awesome things.

Nifty 50, plastic, fantastic. If you go into a camera store and ask for any of those things, they're going to be able to help you out with that, and what this will do is it'll let you control your background blur really well, and it will also let you soak up as much light as you need, and it's a nice focal length to photograph people's faces. You can get close, you can build rapport, but it's not too wide. It's not too intimate.

The other thing we're doing here is I've got a constant light on to try and show you what we're doing as we sculpt these shadows. It's a big light coming through an umbrella. Now mine’s just an LED light, it is a photo light, but you can also get something very similarly powered and similar look from Bunnings and things like that. These lights are everywhere.

So, I'm going to take a photo of you with this umbrella above you, and we'll get it up on the screen to see what it looks like. It's a little bit underexposed, but other than that, it's good-looking light. So just going to slow my shutter speed down and take another photo.

All right, so you're well lit, but because it's an umbrella, umbrellas just woo-flow the light everywhere, they just, the light comes out, hits the umbrella and disperses. So, they're really good light for lighting everything.

But I think what I want to do is go to a soft box, which is a, like a, a more of a, it's a flat surface. This is a curved surface. It might give us some more control. And with control, I'm hoping we get some shadows.

Put my Bowens mount, these teeth, up in the light where they match. We're mounted. Let's turn that back on. You ready? Cool.

We're going from umbrella to soft box, little bit more shape to those shadows, particularly on the left-hand side of Adele. Now I'm going to hopefully enhance those shadows a little bit, make them deeper by pulling the light more off to one side and maybe pushing it back behind Adele.

All right, now we're getting a bit more shadow on this side. A bit more light on this side. That's good.

I'm going to start to walk my shutter speed back up now to take the light out of the scene. So, we're at 100, 1/60th. Somewhere about there 1/200th. Oh, maybe 200. Yep.

Ooh, now we're starting to get Rembrandt-y. Yeah, we got a little bit of shadow on one side. A little bit of light creeping in. We've still got a little bit of spill. So, I'm going to try one more trick. Which is my grid, which is the little tunnels of light to, and by forcing this light through these tunnels, by the time they get to the other end of the tunnel, they're going to be less inclined to, the light's going to be less inclined to go off into all sorts of different directions, and it's taken a lot of light out of the scene yeah.

So, we could probably even nearly bring the light back over a little bit, and maybe even slow the shutter speed down a bit. Ooh, I think I'm going to bring it back just a bit too. It's very directional now.

Alright, Adele, cool. Nice. Now I'm just, can I get you, tilt your head that way a little bit. Nice. I'll just drive up the Shutter Speed again and maybe even just look up a little bit. There we go. Thank you.

We're kind of getting a little bit Rembrandt-y. Give us one. Oh oh. That's kind of cool. That looks really cool.

So, look, we are getting definitely dark background there. Definitely almost enough shadow.

And it's just all I know. It's, it's frustrating. You're going, oh, he's up again. He's off his chair again. But it's like all these little tweaks are kind of, oh, that's cool. It's not Rembrandt-y, but I needs to, I like it.

Let's do a couple there and if you were to just look down and a little bit to that side and then but bring your eyes back to me. Cool. I'll just walk down with that light back in a little bit, but that, remember that spot. Yeah, I don't know, I kind of like them.

They're a little bit, they're not like, I wouldn't say they’re Rembrandt-y,  Rembrandt-y, but the nose shadow's heading off in the right direction.

Alright, photographers, we're going to edit some of the photos we created today as often as possible. I'm going to use terms that you can find in everyday image editors.

I'm going to be using a mixture of Bridge, Photoshop for me. But if you use Lightroom, that's all good. If you use any other version of software too, you'll find a lot of these tools and tips will apply.

All right, let's do this dark and moody photo down here. That's kind of interesting, isn't it?

I think we will crop it down. For starters, and we'll just try, and we'll lean into the sort of artsy dark and very moody vibe we were going for in, in this shot here.

Probably want to see if I can get a little bit more light on Adele's eyes and I probably just want to see what happens if we open up these shadows just a tiny bit.

I don't want to go too much. Although that doesn't look too bad, opening them up a little bit helps the printer when it's putting ink on the page, you know it's just going to put a bit down. It's not going to just be soaking the page in black ink.

All right, that looks good. We'll move over to the selective adjustments. It's going to find the person. That's awesome. This is really good at that. And we might just pull out the eyes and the pupils. Maybe we can come down to the zoom and we could zoom in to a 100% here. Let's turn off the overlay. That's another look all to itself there. And we might just boost a little bit of light, put a bit more exposure into those eyes, open up the whites a little bit, boost the highlights a little bit.

Let's go just before and after. Yeah, that might look all right. So, let's go back out here to the big view. Fit the photo to screen. And then we'll do a little before down the bottom and after, not a bad little improvement.

If you've gone, woo, I think I've done a bit too much, you can go back to that adjustment. And if I think I've done too much of those eyes, we could come here to this amount slider and we could just woo, just bring that down a little bit there too. Because that was a little bit hectic.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Still life photography'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, photographers. Welcome to this little setup. It is a bowl of fruit.

Now we've got a bowl of fruit, and we've lit it a couple of different ways. We have down this way a little speedlight flash, pointing to the side of the fruit, and that's it at 1/64th power. I might turn that up to about 1/16.

So, what I'm trying to do is going to sandwich the fruit with light. I know it's a lot of food references, but it's just light on either side. That's similar power. Now again, this is another flash, similar distance, similar height. Going to light this side.

Over here I've got my camera on the tripod. It's framed up and this is, this is what it's looking at here, and that's the available light exposure at the moment, and I'm going to try and control my camera here. So, my camera's plugged into my laptop. It's tethering in its software, and my laptops just plugged into the screen, so that's what's making the screen, my laptop a touch screen. That's all that's going on there.

If we take a photo, everything's going to go off, and the photo is going to look disgusting. It is a little bit too bright and if you think about it, it looks pretty good there. And then we've got the two flashes powering in with the light.

Let's have a look at our camera settings here.

We're at 1/50th of a shutter speed, so we can increase that. And our aperture on this lens is F 2.8, so it's quite a big aperture. We can close that aperture down as well. Now our ISO is down at 100, so we are as low as we can go there, so ISO as low as we can go. We don't have to touch that.

Alright, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to take my camera straight up to the sync speed, which is 1/250th of a second.

I've made that single change. I'll take the photo. And not much is happening exposure wise. So, what does that tell you? It tells you that most of the brightness here is coming from the flashes. Yeah. So, I'm at 1/250th of a second, which is my camera's sync speed. If I go to something like 1/1000th of a second with regular flashes doing regular things and take that photo, it's too, it's black.

Okay, so even though all the power is coming out, what's happening is the shutter of the camera is actually getting in the way of the flash and it's casting a shadow on the sensor. So, if I slow that down to something a little bit faster, 1/400th, there we go. You can see there, see how it's lit? And then you've got this dark shadow that is actually the shutter getting in the way of the light. So, it's casting a shadow on it.

That's why if you remember your sync speed, leave it at that, take the photo. You're going to have a nice time when you're doing flash photography.

Alright, so we are going to try and get this exposure under control, and I can go around and manipulate the flashes and turn them down.

But I can also control the flash by decreasing the aperture. So, shrinking the aperture down. So, the smaller the F number, the bigger, the bigger the tunnel of light in the lens.

Let's go down one stop to f4 and then two stops to f/5.6. So, we've halved the light once, we've halved it again. And let's take a photo.

Ooh, it's getting darker. Yeah, so we're getting this light under control. And then we might go another two stops to f/11. Let's take that photo. All of a sudden, we're in a really good spot, aren't we? Yeah, we've got this kind of cool look of the light coming in from the left, coming in from the right and then, because it's a sandwich, it's kind of got this nice dramatic core in the middle.

Now we might want to wiggle these lights around just a little bit. I'm thinking maybe I just want a little bit of light to get into the fruit in this kind of area in here and up into the grapes. So, let's take another photo. We are making magic here yeah? It's kind of not too bad, is it?

We are getting there and that's looking good. If we wanted to spread the light more in there, we could potentially go out to a reflector or an umbrella or something like that, that would just spread the light, and it might fill in the shadows.

What I'm kind of interested doing now is to see if we can capture a little bit of motion and movement and things like that. Yeah. Sound good?

What I've got here is some flour from home, food allergies and all that kinda stuff, check that out. But you know, we're just looking for something small that the light's going to hit and hopefully look cool.

We are trying to work on a bit of a timing thing, so I kind of want you just to like, that's it kind of thing.

And it will get a bit messy, but that's all right. And with these, that light in particular, I might just bring it around a bit so it, it back lights it a bit. So, you are in charge.

Adele

Thank you.

Ben Eyles

And I'm going to try and time taking the photo at the same time.

Adele

3, 2, 1.

Ben Eyles

Oh, see we get a little bit of sparkle in there. Yeah. Kind of. Cool.

Let's do another one. 3, 2, 1.

We are good Adele? Yeah. Nice. Go a bit more. Yeah.

Adele

3, 2, 1.

Ben Eyles

Oh, bit of chunky going on. Good. Let's, I'm just going to bring this light back and back light it for a sec. So, we'll make this one a bit more of a front light, that one a little bit more like a, dare I say a hair light.

So that's a very similar setup to what we were doing before. I'm keeping the distance to the light similar, so we don't have to worry about playing with power too much.

Let's go again and just like, do you reckon you could do a little sprinkle and just keep it going and I'll shoot through it?

Adele

Okay? Yep.

Ben Eyles

Yeah. Yep.

All right. Thank you. Adele. Couldn't have done it without you.

What I like about this is we've got our light sorted, we've got our scene sorted, we've got a nice photo, and then we've started to experiment.

So little bit of flour, you know, it adds an element of movement and excitement, and it doesn't have to be flour, it could be water, it could be ice, it could be all sorts of things, just to add a bit of extra life to your photo.

Ooh, that was a lot covered in that series of videos. Thank you for joining me on them. Hopefully, I've given you enough ideas to get you excited about teaching photography and learning photography, and you're going to go off and research a whole bunch of other ideas.

The options are endless. Don't get bogged down in the camera settings. There's always plenty of people to help you with that. You can go to your camera shop, or you can get on YouTube. You can get in touch with someone. That's the easiest part to make work.

One of the most important sayings you learn as a photographer is just shoot it f/8 and be there.

And if you forget about the f/8 part, that's all right. Just be there and take the photos and have fun.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'File management and minor post edits'.]

Ben Eyles

All right photographers. We're going to edit some of the photos we created today.

As often as possible. I'm going to use terms that you can find in everyday image editors. I'm going to be using a mixture of bridge Photoshop, for me. But if you use Lightroom, that's all good, if you use any other version of software too, you'll find a lot of these, tools and tips will apply.

Now, the first thing I wanted to show you is how I organise my life, because once you do a lot of shoots and have a lot of photos, you have a lot of folders. So, this works for me. I put my photos in a folder on my computer.

Currently it's my downloads folder and this is my little naming convention here. So, it goes the year, the month, the date. So, they call that the reverse date. And then I'll put in some keywords. So, I did this shot for MAMA, it's the DoE New South Wales studio shoot. So that way in 10 years’ time when, I don't remember what year I did it for, but I knew it was somewhere in the 2020s, I can search those keywords, and it'll bring me back to this folder.

Let's go into Bridge and let's open up this folder here. So here I've got a couple of photos. So, we started off, I'm going to press space bar, so they come up big on the screen. We've got a couple of shots here of Adele. Got some of our fruit with the flour sprinkling in the background there. And a couple of, of the trickier lighting shots there, so a bit moody and dark.

We'll have a play around with those, so I'll grab this one. And then I'll control click and I'll take, I think I'll take this one and a couple of, I'm going to take a few of these in the Photoshop just so I can have a good look at them.

Now, the other thing I've done today is I've shot my cameras in a RAW format so you can shoot them in JPEG, they generally come out of the camera better, and more finished. But RAW, once you work on them and edit them, can look really, really polished up and nice. And they have a lot of flexibility in the edit.

So, I'm going to select them and I'm going to take these guys into Camera Raw. So, for that, I'll tap on my open in Camera Raw button.

And this is Camera Raw here. Now, if you have never been in Camera Raw before it does feel a lot like other image editors. Like if I was to take you over to Lightroom here, you'll see here we've got editing stuff over on the right, we've got a film strip on along the bottom, you know, and contrast that to Camera Raw. We've got a film strip down the side. We've got editing stuff over the side. Very similar. So, all of this stuff is going to apply.

For this shot here with Adele. I kind of liked it. There's a bit of laughter in her eyes, which is really cool. And what I'm looking for here is, is just prepping this file to print at the first level. Then we can get creative if we want to add more mood and tone or give it a colour grade, sure.

But at this moment, I'm looking at this histogram up the top here on the top right-hand corner, and the right of the histogram represents black through the shadows. And in the middle, we get to the mid tones, to the lighter tones, all the way to the highlights.

So, the thing is where we have really, really bright highlights, we may not have detail, so we might want to bring them down a bit. And sometimes when we have really, really dark shadows, we want to push them out and open them up. So, let's do a little bit of that.

So, I'm going to open up the light panel here and we can work through these sliders.

I'm looking at these highlights and I'm thinking I want to bring them to the left and just tone them down a little bit. So, something like that. Now you mightn't even see that on paper, or a screen, but it is worth doing.

And with the shadows over here, we can see they're really, really sort of a little bit condensed up. Let's just open them up a tiny bit there too. And then that'll give a bit more body to the photo.

Once we do that, we know we've got a good foundation, we could look at the whites and the blacks. They're very specialist sliders. But effectively, if you've got a good black and you've got a good white and you don't have heaps of both, they're going to print okay, and they're going to display okay.

So, I'm actually not going to mess with those sliders because we've got a bit of both. I'm happy. Let's play a bit. So, we might increase a bit of contrast. That looks kind of cool. We might even just do a little bit of work bringing a bit more light to Adele's face there. And to do that, I'm going to come over here.

I might go to my masking selective edits, and we can say subject sky or background, we could select any of those. I'm actually really glad that this time around it's found the person. So, I'll tap on the person and this time I just want to work on the face. I'm going to grab the eyes, the eyebrows, the iris lips, teeth, and hair, and create a mask just in that area there.

Now again, I'm just going to boost those shadows a little bit in that area there. And then that gives a little bit more sparkle to the eyes. Maybe pull down the highlights. Maybe just there. Yeah. Cool. And if we do a little before and after and if, let's hide those little overlays. There we go. Hop out of there so we can see the photo before and after.

I think we've sort of made some subtle but good adjustments to that.

The other thing with this photo is Adele is really the hero. So, we could come over here to the crop button and we could make some decisions about do we need all the bookshelf, do we need all the window out there? I'm currently cropping to a locked aspect ratio, so the width and the height move together.

But you, if you're just posting this online and you don't need it to ever fit a piece of paper, you could, you could do whatever you'd like there and do a loose crop. I'll keep it to ratio there. Double click that. That looks good.

And then I really like to come back down to the global editing panel, come down to effects. And then I'm a big fan of these things called vignettes. If you do a positive vignette, it's a very much, very hazy. We're going into a dream. I don't know if anyone have seen Days of our Lives. That's that kind of vibe, isn't it?

But a negative vignette, just darkens the corners off a little bit and helps guide your eye into the subject. So that's what we're going for there.

Before and after. If you're doing this yourself, you're going to really whiz through these edits really quickly.

Last one, I'm going to have a look at these couple of photos here. So, we've got, I'm not really sure which one I like, because I like the whole tapestry of it falling down.

So, what we might do is we'll just edit up one, we'll bring the highlights down a bit in that one, we might open up the shadows just a tiny bit. That's kind of cool. Going to colour, we might boost the vibrance, which is just going to give a bit more colour to all the areas that don't have any colour. That's looking pretty good.

I'm all about saving time. So, we've done one edit, and all these other photos are pretty similar, yeah. Particularly these two. So, if I grab this photo. Click on these little dots and go copy the edit settings. We can then select one command or control, click the other one, hit those dots again and say, paste the editing settings down.

So, we've done the work on one. Why not apply it to the others?

So, we've done that. We'll grab those three. That's looking pretty good. There's some stuff here I'd like to fix and I'm going to need to do it in Photoshop. So, let's go open, take those three photos over into Photoshop.

One of the things that's irking me a little bit is I've missed this little section in the background here. Yeah. So, it, there's a little corner of like a darker triangle and I'd like to see if I can, I can patch that up a little bit.

Now, one of the coolest things we can do, just to finish, just to have a little bit of fun with is we can make a selection. Let's get our lasso around what you want. You make that selection, and then if your laptop's connected to the internet, you can come here and you can say, let's do some generative fill. You could give it a prompt. You could say, if I want to fill this area with rainbows or something like that.

Generally, if you leave it blank, you're saying, let's just fix an area. So, let's go generate here, and it will hopefully give me an option where it's going to fix that area there without me having to do heaps of work, like with clone stamping and things like that, which means I can get out and shoot more as opposed to edit more.

But let's see what it gives us. And there it is. Look at that. If I grab my hand tool and look in there, it has done a pretty great job at filling in that section.

Why I was hoping to do it that way first is because we had all that unpredictable flour. Doing that there has really saved us. And you know, if we turn that layer off, we turn it on.

If we wanted to make more changes, we've got a whole bunch of Photoshop stuff. If you were looking at the stuff I was doing in Camera Raw and thinking, I like that, but man, I've only got Photoshop on my computer. I don't have Bridge, I don't have Lightroom. That's okay.

Because if you go into, firstly, I'll just combine these layers here, just so this works. We're just going to merge them together. We're happy with that. But if you're thinking, gee, I liked how he was using all those sliders to edit, Photoshop's usually more complicated than that.

You can come into the filter menu. You can go to the Camera Raw filter, which is like having Camera Raw and Lightroom in a filter on Photoshop and what it does, is you go in there and look at that, you're in Photoshop, but you are using the Camera Raw filter with all your sliders.

So, say if we wanted to make this photo really quickly, we wanted to take it into black and white. We could, and we could come in here to the mixer and we could manipulate the yellows of the banana, the oranges of the mandarins.

And what was the apples? Did we have any green stuff in there? Bit of grapes, not much blue.

Making food photos black and white is kind of tricky, but we're going for it.

Yeah, we can do that. We hit done. It applies the changes to the layer, and then you, you're back in Photoshop where you're familiar.

There is a lot more editing options out there. I've just literally scratched the surface of the surface.

Take one of these things and put it into a search engine and enjoy all the videos that come back and really enjoy the editing and the post-production side of your photos, because there's a lot of storytelling potential there.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Editing colour saturation'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, so we're in Photoshop and we're going to have a look at this food still life photo with the flour sprinkled in.

I've done a couple of things to save time. Like one, I, did one little AI edit and filled in that corner top right-hand corner of the screen. That was cool. And we might even throw in, we'll do a little selection down the bottom here and we'll say more dusting of flour. And hopefully that'll create some sprinkles down there.

Now, whilst that's cooking, I'm going to tell you that I'm going to use some other sliders to edit this photo. Things like exposure, contrast, vibrance saturation, a colour mixer. All of those things you can find in just about any photo editor.

So, I'm using Photoshop. You might find them in others too.

Now, I'm going to jump in and edit with some sliders. You'll find these sliders in many other editing applications. So just remember the name of the slider and apply it to whatever software you can get your hands on.

All right, so first things first. I'm going to take a picture of all my photo layers and stick it on top there, just I've merged my layers. That's a right click and merge. That's good.

Now, if I go into my filter menu, we're going to go to this thing called Camera Raw filter. Alright, so this is where you find all the things you can find in an image editor. So, for example, there's some really bright areas here in my photo. If I bring the highlights down, we are bringing back some detail to those areas.

We've also got some areas that are really, really deep in the shadows, so let's lift them up too so we can bring some light to those areas. That's looking pretty good.

Now if I go into the colour tab, we can do some fun stuff here. So, we could lift the vibrance of the duller areas and boost their saturation. That's looking pretty bright, and we can also do some other things here.

So, for example, we could go into the colour mixer here. And we could work on changing the hue and the saturation and the luminance of each of our different, families of colours.

So, for example, if I wanted to dull down the reds in a photo or change the reds, I could select them, by clicking on them. Turn on my little target adjustment here, click on them and then move them over to the orange or move them around to the red.

Same with the yellows. We could give them a little bit more of an orange. Those green grapes we could probably move around with a little bit too.

And maybe we don't want to shift the colours, maybe we want to brighten them up. So maybe we could look at this colour here and see if we could add a bit of light to that too.

We can do a whole bunch of things here and once we get through that and we look at that, we could, we could decide, hey, maybe we could take this photo into black and white and re-edit it from there.

We've got a whole lot of options here, what if we made this like a really, really crunchy looking black and white with lots of contrast, and then we go into the effects and we add lots of texture. So, it looks like it was kind of shot a long time ago on a, on a really old piece of film. Oh yeah, it looks pretty good.

Let's, okay, that, that's looking pretty good. Let's finish this photo off. Let's crop it. Let's zoom out a tiny little bit, and let's pull it up from the bottom. And we might find; I'll just tuck this one in a little bit here.

Double click on that to crop it and go full screen. Yeah, got a little black and white timeless food photo there.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Exporting your image '.]

Ben Eyles

Once we've got our photo looking how we want, we need to get it ready to share.

Great place to go is up to the file menu, go down to export, and then you can go to export as.

In here you can set all the things you need. Anything from the width and the height of your image, the format. JPEGs going to be great for us at high quality, but if you need it at a specific size, you can type all of that into these boxes here and hit export.

Photoshop's going to do its thing. You're going to have to remember where you want to put it. I'm going to put this photo on my desktop, and once you hit save, that photo is out there, ready to be published and printed.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]

[Light music plays, screen reads 'Studio photography series summary'.]

Ben Eyles

All right, photographers, we have just scratched the surface on many, many aspects of editing there. You can spend all day on any of those little things I've shown you.

Please get excited about editing. Please dive in and research all those aspects from there and more, and just enjoy manipulating the pixels of your photos and adding that extra element of storytelling to your photography.

[NSW government logo.]

[End of transcript]