Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Still life photography
is my favorite kind of photography and if you've taken several of my classes already, you can tell that I truly enjoy pulling together a
story, by a window, here in my studio and really
telling the story with the props and the fun elements that I can dream up
to pull together. In this workshop, I'm going to take that
inspiration from a book, so we're going to
be illustrating a passage in a book if you
want to say it that way. [LAUGHTER] I'm
Denise love and I am a studio photographer based
out of Atlanta, Georgia. This idea of pulling together stories from passages
that I read in books came about
when I was reading The Starless Sea, by
Erin Morgenstern. That book is so beautifully
descriptive that I could instantly imagine every setting that the characters were in. I thought, what if I could pull that together in a
still life here in my studio and actually visually
pull that story together. A friend of mine was reading The Starless Sea
as I was randomly posting some of the stories that I was creating
here in my studio. She's like, wow, that made that story so much
more interesting to read, watching you post some of these illustrations for
passages that I just read and that really made me excited to continue
along in this. Some books are easier
to do than others. Some are very descriptive
and you can immediately imagine the props and the setup that you
wanted to create. Some are a little more
obscure and maybe there's less information and
the character dialogue is what's driving that story. But this book that I'm using today, it's very descriptive, very exact, in the items that you could then search
out and pull together. That's what I'm going to show
you that I've done today, we're going to
illustrate a passage, I'm going to show you the
props that I've come up with, talk about the settings
that I create and then edit some in
Lightroom so you can see what we've got
when I'm done. I hope after you
watch this class, you'll be inspired to then be inspired by some of the things that you're
reading and say, now I can truly come up
with a setup that has a story behind it and let's
see what I can create, so I'm pretty excited
to share this with you. I can't wait to see
what you come up with, so let's get started. [MUSIC]
2. Class Project: Your class project is
to pick a passage, whether it'd be the one that I'm demonstrating here in class or a passage from your favorite book that
you want to illustrate. Pick a passage and come
back and share with me two photos that you've come up with from your
still-life setup. Two photos any way
you want to do it, you can do a pullback
or a detail, you can do two pullbacks. I want you to come back, tell me the book that you
have decided to illustrate. Maybe pick a passage out of
the book that inspired you, and then come back and share
two photos of that setup. All right, see you in class.
3. Book Inspiration - The Starless Sea: Let's talk about
the inspiration for the setup that I'm
going to do today. It was inspired
by a passage here in the Starless Sea
by Erin Morgenstern. I love this book. It's
my favorite book to pull passages from,
it's very descriptive. I can really picture
exactly in my mind the scene that's being
described and how I can relate that to a still
life here in my house. The other book that she's
written is the Night Circus. It's another one that I have taken great inspiration from. Man, I hope this lady writes another book because
they have been my very favorite for still-life
inspiration here in my studio. The passage that I'm
inspired by today. This is on about page
133 here in the book. It is a story about
a star merchant. It says, "Once there
was a merchant who traveled far and
wide selling stars, this merchant sold
all manner of stars, fallen stars and lost all the stars and
vials of Stardust." I've got some of that ready. [LAUGHTER] "Delicate pieces of stars strung on fine chains to be worn around necks and
spectacular specimens to fit, to display under glass. Fragments of stars were procured to be given
as gifts for lovers. Stardust was purchased
to sprinkle at sacred sites or to bake
in the cakes for spells. The stars in the star
merchants inventory were carried from place to
place in a large sac. The pieces, everyone
wants the stars, everyone wishes to grasp that
which is out of reach to hold the extraordinary
in their hands and keep the remarkable
in their pockets." The star merchant
has a bag of stars, and he's got whole
stars and stars on chains and star
pieces and stardust. That immediately made me think, I need a star setup. [LAUGHTER] I had been reading
this book somewhere around the Christmas holidays
or at least sometime when all of the decorations
were out in stores. Really, it could have been
October [LAUGHTER] since the Christmas stuff gets out earlier and earlier it seems. I happened upon just
some Star Garland. If you're out looking
and you're like, I simply cannot find Star
Garland, it's not a big deal. These are pieces of cardboard
covered in glitter. You could definitely get
creative and cut some cardboard and get the glitter out
and the glue out and make your own version of the stars. I am going to use
the Star Garland and some biles of glitter
to represent stardust. I'm going to take some
photos here at my table. This type of setup
is a little simpler because our main focus
could be the stars. I could leave anything
set up around my table and just take pictures of
the stars and the stardust, which is my plan. I was inspired by this passage. Let's see what we can
come up with. [MUSIC]
4. Props I'm Using In This Setup: [MUSIC] Let's just
take a look at the props that I
have pulled together for our Starless Sea
star merchant setup. In the passage that
I was reading, the star merchant is sitting in a little lounge area talking to a fellow traveler and
so in my mind I thought, I could have a little setup like there's maybe a
bookcase beside them, more on my table. I'm just going to use the crate that I like to shoot in as my full bookcase and I've
got some old books lined up and a little piece of
architectural element there. Those pieces aren't really
the focus of this setup, so it's not really important
what I have in there, but I could make it important and it could be
part of the focus, it could be some of the
photos that I'm taking, they could be very important. But it's a backdrop
for other sets that I've done and I can
use it for this too, so why take it down? I do like when I have an idea, especially for a
background prop and then as I'm thinking of
other ideas I can think, oh, I can leave that
there and continue on with my next set of photos. This piece is going to be that, I had it on the table already for some
other things I've done. What I'm going to
do is I have put some little thumb tacks in the top of the crate so I
can string the garland. I have some star garland, this is just star strung on wire and if you can't
find a star garland, because the wrong time
of year or whatever, this is the kind of thing
you find it Christmas, that's okay, these are
just cardboard stars, so you could use some card
stock and glitter and make your own stars and
you could string it on a little bit
of twine and make your own star garland
and cut some of them in half to be star pieces and cover them with glitter and then we've got our
pieces and our garland, which I'm going to be having
for these sets of photos. Then I got a container
of gold glitter, which after I got
it I realized that the gold glitter and
the silver stars weren't quite the same, I should have got silver
[LAUGHTER] glitter, but the silver glitter had
been out of stock and I was in the mood to shoot photos with glitter and
the gold was fine. This is going to be my star
dust and I got some of these wonderfully beautiful
little vials off of Amazon. These are just
little glass vials, this is the five
milliliter size. There's a ten milliliter size, it's about double the height, but I like this size, so some little glass bottles, you could probably find
these at the craft store also if you were looking
for something like that. If not, I got a little set of them off Amazon and they
were not very expensive. I'm going to have them maybe
positioned on the table, maybe one of them open, maybe some glitter
out on the table. The basics of stuff
that I needed to have with stars and glitter. The other parts of it is
probably going to be in blur or just be background elements
to enhance my story. [MUSIC]
5. Styling Our Setup: [MUSIC] All right,
so let's go ahead and do our little prop styling. I've already got my
little bookcase here. I've got a couple of
little thumbtacks just sitting in the
top of my crate. I just lightly push them
in and I'm going to simply run the garland up
and down my little tacks. That way I can take
some photos of the hanging stars and then some photos of the
stars on the table. This garland is wide enough
for me to do that like that. Then I can cut some of
these stars up here. I'm going to have a couple of
stars on the table itself. We can just do that with some
regular kitchen scissors. I'll probably just cut a
few of these off of the end and cut them in half and
let them be star pieces. Then I'm also going
to have out here on the table vowels of glitter, maybe one that's opened. I have a little
extra glitter here. Can only tell you
when you do this. Glitter gets
everywhere [LAUGHTER]. Then take some photos
of the glitter, the pieces, the garland. If you've got other
architectural pieces that you've collected, you could include those bits say just pieces of the building
and the area that you're in just to imply place or time or theme
or anything like that. I think I do like
this piece too, I could take a picture of maybe
some stars hanging on it. It's another architectural, it's the capital of
a column, I think. Fun little piece there. That's basically my setup that I'm going to
be shooting today. I'm going to shoot some photos of the stars towards the books. Then I'm going to shoot
some of the glitter and maybe sprinkle several
more cut pieces around. Take pictures of those, and just see what I
can come up with.
6. Lighting and Camera Settings: [MUSIC] I'll pull
back a little bit. Let's talk about the lighting. I'm set up in my studio
by my east-facing window. If you've taken some of the other still life
classes that I've done, you'll know that an east-facing
window you have the sun shining into the
window in the morning. That's the side of the house
that the sun is rising on. Then as the day goes on, the sun gets to the top of
the building and starts to get to the other side of
the building after lunchtime. Then on that side of the house, we have west-facing windows, and those would be
great windows to be shooting at in the afternoon. Then if you've got a
north-south window or you really don't have direct sunlight shining in the window at any
time of the day, that should be good diffused
lighting all day long, so you just need to try to
shoot in those windows just at different times of
the day and then see what times of the day
you prefer to shoot in. A lot of times when I'm doing sets or a workshop
or things like that, I like to work in the morning. I get up, I take care of the
puppies, I eat breakfast, and then maybe I get up
to here to my studio at nine o'clock when the sun is really shining right
in that window. [LAUGHTER] Then I need
to diffuse the light because I don't want really
harsh sun on my set. I want pretty diffused lighting. In the window, I always have this round photography diffuser. It's the center portion
of your reflector. You just take the outside
cover of the reflector off, and that center portion
is that pretty round, translucent white
fabric on it that diffuses the light and makes
it beautifully perfect. But you'll notice
today that I've got that diffuser sitting on the floor and a little
bit out of the way. It's not completely in the
window blocking the light. We still have pretty
diffused light and that's because I'm up here in
my studio after lunch. It's about one o'clock. It's going to be too
dark to photograph if I stay up here too long, but I could stay up here
for a while and shoot this. Because the sun is now
on top of the building. It's no longer
shining directly in that window and I can take the diffusers out the
window and just use as much light coming in
the window as I can get. That's what we're
going to do today, is shoot in the
diffused light with the sun on top of the building instead of
coming in the building. We'll just see what we can get. You just have to judge what
time of the day is best? When do you get enough light? Do you need to
diffuse that light? If you're in a window
that you don't normally shoot in at a
certain time of day, are you going to
have enough light to handhold if you're
trying to handhold? Can you get that aperture and shutter speed and ISO at a setting that you
can be happy with? Or do you need to
set up on tripod because the lower the
light gets in the room, the more likely I'm
to have to set up on a tripod because I normally
like to shoot on an F4, so I like a lot of
blur and I figure that out by taking a
set of aperture photos. I took a photo at F2.8, F3.5, F4, F4.5, F5, F5.5 because the
lens that I like to shoot on has all
those aperture choices. Then I looked at them on the
computer and I'm like, okay, I love F4 for most
of the stuff I'm doing here on a
still-life table setup. If you're doing macro, that might have to be an F8 to give you the same number of blur because macro photography, the planes of focus are
a lot closer together. In still life tabletop setup, maybe the planes of
focus are a little bit far away so I
can shoot on F4. When I talk about shooting and
liking to shoot wide-open, that doesn't necessarily mean
that I'm shooting at the widest open my aperture
will go because say, on my Lensbaby Velvet lens that I like to
shoot on my camera, the widest it'll go is a 2.8. But with that lens, at 2.8, you don't have enough in
focus and it's really glowy. That lens makes an odd
glow to the photo, which is a purposeful
effect of that lens. But I love the Velvet
because it gives a really pretty velvety look to the whole photo and the
blur is real pretty, almost as if you
were in Photoshop and you had put a real
soft Gaussian blur on top of your photo
and you just got that almost just that
dreamy look to it. Well, the Velvet creates that look coming out
of the lens and I love being as creative as I possibly can coming out of the lens. [LAUGHTER] I know that F4 gives me that
pretty creaminess. If I go up to F8 or F11, it's more like a standard lens. I know when I'm shooting
my camera settings need to be at F4 for the amount
of blur that I like. Then the ISO, which is how sensitive the camera sensor is, needs to be at 100, 200, or 400 because I don't want
to add a lot of extra grain, and the higher you
go with the ISO, the more grain you get unless you have a camera
that's a little higher up on your camera line that
is made to be able to push that ISO for low-light settings and not
give you lots of grain. That's a real advantage to pro cameras versus
consumer-grade cameras, is they have that better
low-light capability. If I know the setting of 2, the ISO, say 400 is what
I'm going to use today, and then I know that I'm
going to be shooting in F4, then I just need to decide how much shutter speed to
get the proper exposure, how faster the shutter
need to go to let enough light in so that
it's properly exposed. It's not blown out
and overexposed, it's not real dark
and underexposed. Because when you
shoot overexposed and underexposed because
you haven't figured out exposure like I
did early on and you think I can fix this
in Photoshop or I can pull those details back, sometimes you can't pull
those details back. Those details aren't there. When you take that
picture, you might not get those details back. Even though you can adjust
exposure in Photoshop, and I always slightly
adjust exposure even though I'm shooting
for correct exposure, if you have it too
dark or too light, you just lost that information. It's just no longer
in the pixels. It's either black pixels or white pixels and there's
no coming back from that. The goal for me is to get the most creative, the
best composition, the good exposure
as much as I can do up front so when I get to Photoshop I'm just
tweaking a little bit. You can watch me do a whole
edit in just a couple of minutes and get the
most beautiful photo. I'm not wanting to spend
hours on the computer trying to fix things I
did or make it better, figure out the composition and cropping out half of my pixels. I'm just not that
computer sitting person. I want to get all the fun done
on the front end and then take 1,000 photos that are amazing and then go to
editing and be like boop, boop, and we're done. I don't want to spend
all day on the computer. That's just not
my thing anymore. If you're not used to
shooting on your camera on manual mode, then figure out what
aperture you like, how much blur do you want. If you don't want any blur, then start at F8. If you want a good
amount of blur, F4 may be a good choice, or F2.8, or F2.5. Just figure out how
much blur do you need, how much in-focus do you
need your subject to be. Because I do like my
subject to be in focus and the blur around and pretty
blur in the background. That's how I decided about
F4 was what I liked. Put it on AV mode on your
camera aperture mode and set your aperture at F4
and then you can let your camera figure out
the other settings for you. The only thing I don't
like about letting the camera figure it out for me is then it's likely to push the ISO higher than I intended. But early on, start in aperture
mode and then advance towards manual
when you know what settings that you feel need
to be set in stone and then the only setting that is variable is the shutter speed. If you're shooting at least
1/60 of a second or faster, preferably more than
1/100 of a second, you could probably handhold
and get a tack-sharp subject. But if you're slower than
1/60 of a second because it's low light and you just
can't get more light in, then you need to
set up on a tripod and let the shutter be slower. Because if you're shooting at, say, 1/50 of a second, 1/40 of a second, there's just no way
that you're going to get a tack-sharp subject. The camera moves slightly and the shutter is not
going fast enough to compensate for that extra little camera
shake that you got going on and your photo is going to be blurry and
not in a good way. That's not something you
can fix in Photoshop. [LAUGHTER] We're set up here in the afternoon just
because I wanted to get a little different
light setup for today. Then if I don't
have enough light and I'm shooting long enough, I will be compensating
the light with my photography ring light. I have a ring light
and it's lighting our set right now
so we can see it. But I like the 18-inch
LED ring light with a flexible head
because then I can get that light right
where I want it. I like to supplement
the daylight. I don't like to just shoot
with studio lights in a dark corner of my room
because the studio light, even though it's
a daylight color, it's not as all infusing
as the daylight is, and I feel it's very directional and it's very cut and
dry where the light is, where the light's not and
I just don't love it. But there are occasions
where you need extra light. This is the way I have decided
to supplement that light. I like this one
with the bendy head because I can then bend it into my set right in front of
the window and it doesn't take up nearly as much room
as a photography softbox. I have softbox
lights also because I'm the kind of
person where I had to try them all before
I figured out, okay, this is the one
that works for me. [LAUGHTER] The softboxes
take up a couple of feet. They're huge. When
they're set up here in my little tiny studio they're
in the way everywhere I go. I either need to put
them together every time I want to use them and take them down when I'm not using
them or this room is just not usable with
the two of them set up. I figured out that the ring
lights work for everything. I can light video. I can light myself when
I'm talking on video. I can light my art table
when I'm making art. I can light my art table when
I'm filming art workshops. I can supplement the light from my photography
setups and I can put the ring light right there
in front of the window. It's so thin. It's only 2 inches or so thick that I can leave my
setup right where it is, and then I can fully adjust the light to where I
need the extra lighting. The reason why I like the
LED over the fluorescent, and really it doesn't
matter what kind you buy, but I'm going to tell you
why I prefer the LED. Because I had a fluorescent
ring light and it had a fluorescent bulb
in it and I was moving around the
room and I knocked it over and it hit the floor
and the bulb busted. The LEDs don't have
a bulb like that. It's a flat piece of metal [NOISE] with
little tiny lights that are attached to the metal. If I knock that over, I'm not breaking my whole
light bulb that is then, if you can find them
they're over $100 a bulb, the one or two places that
I had found a price for it, and they didn't have stock. I'm like, it's 100 bucks
and it's not even in stock, so I might not be
able to replace it. I got this whole setup, the whole thing with the
bendy head was only $100. I'm like, well, I guess
I'm getting the LED one. I have two of those now. The LED and the fluorescent put out the same color of light. But I just prefer this one
because if I knock it over, I don't break the bulb. [LAUGHTER] Get
whatever you can find. If you don't get the bendy head, it's not a big deal. It just means the
light sits straight up instead of being able
to bend where you need it, but it's still very handy. That's how I'm going to
supplement the light today. The fluorescent one
does not fully dim, whereas this one goes from
fully dim to fully bright, so it is much more
versatile with the deamability of the LED. I love that one. Now
we've got our setup, we've talked about our lighting, I'm going to start shooting some photos here before
I'm just completely out of light because the sun is dipping down on
the backside of this house today and we'll
just see what I get. [MUSIC]
7. Shoot Recap & Editing In Lightroom: I was very inspired
by the glitter and the stars and I just
moved around this set. There's that little
architectural piece I was showing you. I just moved around
the set and took different photos to see in the end which ones
were my favorite. I'll show you some
of the favorite, but I'm just shooting through
some of the photos to show you just what I was thinking of and
what I ended up taking. Then I'm not sure that I love the wire
that these were on. But I still love all the photos, so I almost don't care. Some of these are really fun and at least the wire allowed
me to move stuff around and reposition stuff so
that there weren't stars behind stars
getting lost and things. I do love this garland and
it's definitely a theme that I'll revisit some more
because I love it. I'm glad I have the garland
so that I can revisit for things like this
little mini workshop. Because I've shot these
a couple of times now for different things
I've had in my mind. But the stars and the glitter is one of my favorite and yes, there is now glitter all
over my house and me and my hands and I
don't even hate it. Funny stuff. Let's just take a look now that I've
just scrolled through and giving you an idea of some of the photos that I took and I was focusing on the stars, the details, the glitter and then let's just hit
these that I've flagged. Some of these are edited. I played around with them, but I liked when the stars were in a direction and
something was in focus and we had to look around to see the details and this is why I like the books
in the background. Look how pretty those are
just sitting back there. I liked the glitter and
the stars on the table. That was one of my
favorite and just as I was taking portrait
orientation and I was taking landscape
orientation, and I was just trying to get as many glitter ideas as I might have been
thinking about, as many star ideas
as I could and then come back and
edit a few and see what's going to end
up being our favorite. Let me edit this one. This one's not edited. I was playing around with
some of these others because I just
loved them so much. I'm going to tweak the exposure and let's just see what
the Auto button says. The Auto button is
too bright for me. We'll pull that back down. I'm going to leave some of
these other settings where they're at and just tweak them. Then I'll continue
to go on down. I'm going to put
some points down in our point curve and start playing with that
because that's how I add extra contrast, extra moodiness. It's how I make them look a little more film-like when
I pull that dark point up. But if you don't like that matte look don't pull that point up. Sometimes I'll pull
the light point down, up here and that just adds to the overall vintagy film
look that I'm going for. Or maybe I just like
the matte look. I just do, I just love it. Sometimes I'll come over here
and pull in a little bit of blue and my shadows
with my color grading. I'm not really
feeling that today, so I'll put that
back on at zero. Then I'm definitely
going to sharpen. I'm going to take my
little piece here and just see what is
Sharpen here that I can judge this by and I'll
up the sharpening and then hold down my
Option Alt key so that I can then mask the sharpen and you can decide how much
of that detail that you want. You can change the
radius and I'm holding down the masked key
so I can see those details. You can see it in that
light gray there. Some of that is just
your own judgment and what it is that you're
wanting for your sharpening. But for the basic, what
I do is I'll just up the sharpening and I will mask just the details that I
want sharpened because I don't want to sharpen every
pixel in the picture. That really adds a lot of grain to your photo
and I'm just not interested in adding
all that extra grain. I'm going to come down
and add some vignetting. I like the midpoint to be large. I like it to be fairly
round and I like it to be feathered so that it's not
a sharp, harsh vignette. I'll push that up pretty high until I get it where I want. Then I will go back up
and start adjusting my exposure a little bit more and the other elements
here in that top box, I like to get a
starting point and then come back and
start tweaking stuff. Then if I absolutely
love what I've done, I will save that as a preset, and I will call it
Denise's preset, so let's create a preset here, and we'll call this one Denise Favorites 4
and I'm putting it into the Denise
Favorites folder that I created and if you create your own preset or you're
creating any to sell, or you just want them to
be really versatile for yourself to use these
on other photos, then the things
that I have checked in blue are the
things that I save. I don't save white balance. I don't save the auto settings, I don't save the exposure and now these presets are going
to be very versatile, more versatile
towards your type of photography than if I saved
things like exposure. Because if you save exposure and your
photo is underexposed, applying the preset is going to reset the exposure that
maybe you've already adjusted and fixed and it's
going to look terrible until you go back and
fix the exposure again. Or is if you leave that
setting unchecked, you can fix the exposure
to where you want it, apply the preset
or scroll through your presets and it won't
reset that setting for you. Take note of those. This is the settings
that I like to have a more versatile
preset that I've created and then you'll see that's fallen right down
here into my favorites, that's number 4 and you
can see I've created some others and as I
go through them, now, I have a starting place of completely different presets
for other photos that I've edited that I can scroll
through and I love having presets because it's a
nice starting point. Like, how did I get
this color on this one? I don't know. It's a
little bit richer. The curve is a little
bit different. Now I can go through and tweak this preset to make it
perfect for this photo. Or that one-click
might've been perfect. Or I can go back to what
I just created with less contrast and then that
one might have been perfect. I do love saving the
edits that I'll do on photos and you can call them your favorites or
however you want to do that. Then you have your
own custom set of presets to then play
in. I love doing that. All right, so I hope you really enjoy this type of setup. Illustrating a passage from a book or playing in something as whimsical and fun that I've created here with the
glitter and the stars. If you don't want to come
up with your own set, do a glitter star layout. I mean, who doesn't
love glitter and stars? I can't wait to see what you create and I'll see
you back in class.
8. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] What do you think? I hope that you are as
inspired by this concept as I was when it came to me
like a lightning flash. You see different
illustrations in book as little drawings and
things that maybe an illustrator has illustrated
passages out of books that lean themselves to the story and help your imagination along. I thought, why can't we
do this with photography? If we're doing a book
that's not as descriptive, maybe we can pull from
the time period that we know the book was set in and fill in some of the
missing details, or if we pick a really
descriptive book, we can take exact
passages and say, here's the passage that
inspired this set. Then we truly have
a deeper story behind the story
that we've created. We've created some
conversational points for people that didn't
look at that and say, wow, yes, I see it
and talk to us about. I hope this concept
really excites you. I'm all about telling
stories with my photos, creating stories
with my still life. This just takes that
concept one step forward and creating a story off of something
that we've read. An existing story that's
out there that we can now talk about and illustrate
in our photography. I'm really excited to start reading books
now and then be like, oh, I love this passage. Let me underline it. Let
me make a note about it. I want to come back to this. It really gave me a vision of something
I could photograph. It just upped my level beyond
creating random still lives, coming up with random stories
behind the still lives, or coming up with a
story and then pulling all my props together
to make that story. Took that whole concept
one step forward. Now I have the story, what can I do to illustrate
these passages in the story? It really made still life
exciting for me again. I hope you enjoyed watching
how that I do this and then going forward keep in mind the different
things that you read. Did it inspire you? If it did, make a note
of it and then come back and do a still
life setup about it. I can't wait to see
what you've created. Definitely go back to the
class project and say, okay, two photos. Here's what I created. Here's what inspired me. Can't wait to see
what you create. [MUSIC]
DENISE LOVE, Artist & Photographer
