One of the best ways to learn about lighting is to look at photos and try to deconstruct how they were lit, and then understand why. So we're going to do is look at about 14 photos that we've taken at various events. The one I want to start off with is a headshot that we do and this is a pretty standard setup for us. earlier in the video, I had mentioned that we use grids on speedlights for certain things, and the main thing we use grids for is when we do a headshot, you'll notice the background has kind of a gradient behind the person's head that is brightest directly behind them and then the further away from their body and head that it gets it falls off into darkness. This is achieved by putting a speed light on the floor. pointing up toward the background in the speed lights about a foot to two feet away from the background pointing up and a little bit angled.

And we've got a grid on it a quarter inch uptake, a speed light grid, a really cheap accessory for your light. And what it's doing is it's concentrating the beam of light, so that isn't spread all over the place. And when you have it on that slight angle from the ground level, it's going to create almost a circular pattern on the backdrop. This just makes for a really nice background that's a little more interesting than a flat color. And this is definitely a number one use for grids. It can be used for other things.

But this is our go to for headshot background lighting. So I want to move on to some wedding photos. weddings are a challenging type of shoot because you're always moving fast. And you don't always have as much time as you want with the bride and groom and you're also constrained to use the environment that you're thrown into. But with that said when You have control of your lighting, you can make some things happen. So this picture here is a black and white, and the couple is in the room that the bride got ready in earlier, the room isn't too big, there wasn't a whole lot of interesting anything going on in the room.

So we picked this couch, put the couple down in what we've got is an umbrella shoot through a shooting drill out to the left, camera left, probably about two feet above the groom's head and angled down and to the right of the pointing to the right of the couch. And you can tell that by looking at the shadows, they're soft, which is a giveaway that we're using a diffused light source and a rather large light source. And the shadows are toward the right of the subjects falling on the couch a little bit. And the reason why we lit from the left rather than the right is because their faces are on the left and that is the most important part of the picture that we want to expose properly for and they kind of let everything fall off into a little bit darkness toward the right You can notice on the wall to the right, you can see the shadow of the couch.

And again, that's another good giveaway of the direction of the light source. So these are the things we look at the pictures while we're trying to deconstruct it and try to understand how to lit. Now we have the advantage that these are photos that I had taken, so I know what I did. But even if you don't know the person that took the photo, and you're just looking at things online or whatever, whatever it might be, there's usually enough clues in the shadows to let you know how the photo is lit. And most of these are going to be one light setups. So they're really simple.

And you can tell also behind them, you might want to notice that there is a window behind the curtains. And it is daytime so there's light coming through so you can see the blinds behind the curtain, which is interesting to know because what's going on is that the spotlight is lighting the subjects in the room, and it's just about balanced with the outdoor light so that that light coming through the window isn't blown out and it's not complete darkness. Now, this was probably done, almost accidentally, the subject matter behind the window isn't very interesting. But I just wanted to point that out, that's just something else to look out for. And you can kind of start to judge whether ambient is mixed in or if it's purely just the spotlight. So we're going to look at this next photo, which is kind of a classic sunset photo.

This is an engagement shoot and the sky was given us some good colors, and the sun was just around the horizon line. And this is a is a good example of if I had photographed them without a light. With this exposure, the front of them would have been completely dark, they would have been a silhouette. And if I expose to the sky, I'm starting to expose with a couple, the sky would have been completely white and blown out. And so to get both like we talked about earlier, we like the couple to bring their exposure up to many The sky. And so that's what's going on here.

And you can tell by the shadow on the ground, it's going off toward the right, so that means the light is on left of them. And this is again, a shoot through umbrella with a speed light, and we were probably about full power to match up with with the ambient. You're gonna notice a common theme with a lot of these pictures because a lot of them rely on the same technique. Now this photo, the sun is toward the left of the photograph, and you can tell by the hard shadows on the ground coming toward the camera that is a product of the sun. So the couple is in the shadows, they are shadow side toward the camera, and they would have as well been silhouetted if there was no light source on them. So what we're doing here is we want to hit them with a light source that's bright enough to bring them up, but not so much that we're going to start casting shadows the other way.

And so this is kind of a delicate balance. You want to strike, and we're essentially filling in the shadows. Once you do this, you can expose for the sky behind them and get them up and blend it all and you get a very nice clean photo with everything exposed properly. This photo here is taken obviously at night. And in the background that is the Newport bridge, we live in Rhode Island. So this is kind of an iconic bridge that we've got.

And the couple really want to have a photo with the bridge lit up in the background. This is a really difficult photograph, for one main reason and that is that the bridge lights in the night sky are not very strong light sources. And the speed light can go down to one 120 eighth power, that's the lowest that it's got. But even when you shoot at 120 eighth, and you have it relatively close to your subjects. It's a very bright light source compared to what's already out there. So what we did to bring up some of the bridge lights is slow down the shutter speed as much as we could while hand holding the camera because when we're at weddings, we're not using tripods, we just don't really have the time to, to mount a camera to a tripod and start doing things like that.

So we had to adjust the shutter speed probably shooting at about 148. Maybe that's about as slow as I can get away with my with my hands. And the couple is exposed, essentially completely with the flash. Now if we had more time, it probably would have looked a little bit better if the flash was jelled with maybe one quarter cup CTO, which is the orange shells that we talked about when you're trying to match incandescent lights because that bridge is lit up with in hand essence and there's a light on the deck toward the right of the couple. That's also kind of an orangey light and there wasn't much we could do about that being there. It's a little bit distracting, but they really wanted the bridge and that was the only way we could frame it up at this particular venue.

So this is a shoot through umbrella also camera left pointing down toward the couple. But the the trade off here is that they're a little bit bright, and we'd like them to be a little bit darker. But we didn't want to lose the exposure of the ambient, the bridge and a little bit of the sky that you can see there. And we could have put the light source further back to reduce the power on them. But the further back we get, remember our light source effectively becomes smaller. And with our smaller light source, we're going to have harder shadow transitions.

And so we kind of compromised a little bit and we get it close enough to be soft. And it might be a little bit bright but we can tone that down and post production a bit. So just some things to think about on the really low light situations. next photo was taken in the streets of Boston. This is a new year's eve wedding. And this is an interesting one.

This was a tripod shot. We did have The time we knew ahead of time we were going to do this photo. So we got things ready and set the tripod down and did a long Well, a long exposure for people it was probably about maybe a half a second to a one second exposure. And the only light we added to this scene is a speedlight directly behind the couple and if you look close enough, you can actually see the light stand between the groom's leg and the bride's dress. And this is a backlit picture. So the speedlight is bear on the stand.

And what it's doing is if you see if you look at the bride's hair that's that's draped down, you can see some light hitting the bottom of it, and it's kind of defining them against the background. So when you have some it's creating a rim light on them. And if you didn't have that, then they would kind of blend into the background a little bit more. And we're also getting some good effects of the flash hitting the white dress and bouncing around a little bit and lighting up the groom just a bit. So it's really kind of helping to make them pop the lights to the left of the frame that's actually a car taking the corner. So those are headlights, that's not one of our lights.

And we had to have the long exposure because we need to burn in the city backdrop. If we shot at one 16th or whatever it might be higher than that, then we weren't going to get any of this ambient burning because although the scene looks kind of bright in the photo, in real life, it was pretty dark. So it took a little bit to expose that. So this is just basically to get the couple to not blend in with the background. And so we backlit them