This is Vanessa Joy Breathe Your Passion here on AdoramaTV, and I'm gonna show you how to make heinous looking light… look alright. You ever walk into a venue.. and it looks amazing, but then you take a picture and it looks like this! So here's the thing… sometimes you work with clients, and they think this picture spot is gorgeous because of all the chandeliers, and this and that and the other thing. Then you go to take a picture, and it's absolutely horrible… well I could look at this picture here, and then attempt to just fix it with white balance, but it's just gonna look like this, and that still doesn't look good, and then I've got a lot of post work to do, I don't want to do that. I want to get it as right IN camera as I possibly can. So what I'm gonna look for is just finding the biggest solid surface that I can, and in my case this is a pale yellow wall. I'd love a white wall but… pale yellow will do. So we're gonna point it at them – light travels in straight lines so back to geometry class kids, you're gonna have to think about the angle that the light is hitting that wall.
It's going to bounce off at an equal angle if you play pool..kind of the same thing. I don't have a modifier in this case, so I'm just firing this light on this wall and that entire wall and that becomes my light source. First shot doesn't look so great… why does it look yellow even though my white balance really isn't all that off? Because my light is reflecting off the yellow wall. So therefore everything's a little bit yellow, I have to adjust for that. So adjusting for it works okay, and now we're just gonna tweak our settings. Adjusting the white balance, adjusting the exposure to try to make it look good when I'm doing this I'm getting my exposure just like I normally would, as if I didn't have a flash, and then I'm turning on my Profoto B1 and setting it to TTL, so it does a little work for me.
I don't have to guess, I'm just gonna let it do the work for me. Mow we're okay we got it around where want it to be as far as color goes, but I see some ugly shadows on the wall. Can't really do too much about that, unless you have another light, or maybe you're reflecting a light. So I decided to just move them over a little bit, so that the angle of the light isn't so bad, because I don't have another light here in the situation, I'm using a reflector to bounce light back at them. So my shadows aren't as harsh, and it just looks a little bit more flattering on their face.
So I'm gonna scoot them over a little bit… yeah… scoot them over a little bit… that really helps! I'm gonna scoot them over a little bit, and get them in a better spot where the shadow isn't gonna show up on the wall, not just because of where the light is, but because I also move over… so I'm just not seeing as much of the shadow on the wall. It looks okay… try to get a little bit better…a cleaner background, making sure there's nothing behind their heads, and then zooming in there really allows me to just crop out the shadow. Now I've got some nice portraits of them in an area that would have been extremely ugly had it just been the light that I was working with. So you see how their skin tones are nice and soft, they're natural, that's what their skin actually looks like as opposed to if I didn't have this off camera flash. Would have looked something like this, not only are their skin tones off in color, and again I could try with the white balance, but it's not gonna do what it needs to do.
the background is brighter than they are, so it would have had to wash out the background more… the attention of viewer would not have gone to their faces. All around better photo… when I have the light off camera bouncing off the environment around me, so it's nice and big and soft and lovely. That's how you walk into a place with a really strange light, and take control. Looking for more inspiration click the link in the description below. To download my free posing guide hit the subscribe button, and the bells, make sure you're notified when new videos pop up here on AdoramaTV. Leave some comments, ask your questions there are no dumb questions, and there's no such thing as mean comments…. there is such thing as mean comments. I collect the mean comments… so I have an excuse to eat ice-cream… but seriously don't be….
