Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Tabitha. In this photography class, I'm going to walk you through the process for creating this cold brew coffee swirl photo. I have been enchanted by the style of shop for so long, but I've been really scared of taking it because I just had too many questions. What coffee do I use? What cream do I use? What should my settings be? How do I pour and take pictures of the same time and get a good shot? I was just so afraid that it wasn't going to work out, that I just never really took the time to take the picture. This past month I have just dedicated all my spare time to really nailing down what is going to make the most effective coffee swirl photo, and I'm going to share all my findings with you. I tried a ton of different liquids, different glassware, different setups. I figured out the settings on my camera for using my infrared remote, and I designed this class with beginner to intermediate level photographers in mind. Hopefully you have a really good understanding of how to capture a perfectly exposed photo. I'll be using a DSLR, and I highly recommend a tripod unless you have a friend or sibling, parent, spouse, whoever nearby who can pour your cream while you're shooting. But for me, I usually work alone, and so I have a tripod. I will also be using an infrared remote. If you've never seen one of these, it's going to blow your mind because it makes photo shoots so much easier. I can be pouring and snapping pictures without reaching over to touch my camera. I don't have to trust myself, timer mode's going to get the shot. I'm getting the shot with my remote. I'm really excited to share all my tips and tricks with you and to photograph beautiful coffee swirl photos. That's the class project. I'm really excited to see what you create. My name's Tabitha. I am a lifestyle photographer, a content creator, and a teacher here on Skillshare. I can't wait to dive into this project with you. Let's get started.
2. What You Will Need: Thanks so much for joining me. Aside from your camera and a tripod, you will only need three things for this shot. Cold brew coffee, some form of cream, and a glass to pour them in. I highly recommend cold brew because then you don't have temperatures fighting with each other. You don't have condensation on the glass. It's just a very easy solution. You can buy cold brew pre-made from the grocery store or in the next section, I'm going to show you how to make your own cold brew from home. As far as creams go, you can use whole milk, half-and-half, heavy cream, coffee creamer, alternative nut milk creamers, just anything that is thicker than your coffee. You don't want it to be too thick like getting toward whipped cream, because it will just sit on top of the coffee and it won't mix. As long as you've got something thicker than milk but thinner than whipped cream, you should be good to go. It might take a couple of tries and finessing your technique to get it just right. But I've had the best success with half-and-half, and that is what I'm going to be using in my demonstration. One super important note about cream is making sure that you're using the freshest that you can. If you have cream that's been in the fridge for a week or so, even if it's still within its expiration date, the older it is, the more likely it is to curdle. Basically the acids in the coffee affect the proteins in the milk, and it just creates this curdling effect. It's not necessarily unsafe to drink if it's still within the expiration date and smells fine and looks fine, but it is a little bit less appetizing in this particular shot. To avoid your milk or cream getting curdled, just make sure you are using the freshest possible stuff that you can. For my glassware, I'm actually going to be using a Collin's glass. I know this isn't typical for cold brew iced coffee or anything like that, but I like how big and smooth this glass is and I feel like it's going to put on a really good show for us. Some alternative glassware you might want to consider, this is a glass coffee mug I got from Ikea for less than a $1. It is an excellent solution because it's very smooth and clear. You could use a smooth mason jar. I don't recommend something faceted like this one, that would be way too much going on. You wouldn't really be able to see the coffee swirl or you can use just a simple tumbler. Aside from these things, if you wanted to go a step further and you didn't like the aesthetic of your cream container, I don't know if that's in the shot, it might not really look how you want. You can transfer your cream into a pouring vessel. Let me show you a couple pouring options that I have. This is just a plain measuring cup. Here is a cute little creamer cup, and then here's another measuring cup. I bought this creamer cup specifically for this class and I was so excited to use it, I did not test it before I started shooting. I highly recommend you test your pouring device because I didn't know it was going to do this. That is not what I want. I have this measuring cup, it's a little better. But it's still wants to creep down the glass. Then I have this guy. This one pours the straightest and the cleanest stream. We pour really slowly in this class. You need to make sure that your pouring vessel is going to do what you want it to do. Then lastly, if you wanted to spice it up with some ice cubes, that is another good option. The good thing about ice is it provides lots of levels in your glass for mixing and swirling, so it can add a fun element and it also takes up a lot of space. You don't end up using as much cold brew and cream and so If you want to attempt the shot a couple times, you're not going to have to worry about running out of your liquids as fast. Now that we have considered all of our glassware options and liquids, let me show you how to make your own cold brew and then we can put together the shot.
3. DIY Cold Brew Coffee: For our cold brew, we are going to make a concentrate. It takes about 12 to 18 hours, make sure you prep this before you want to shoot. We will need one cup of coarsely ground coffee beans to four cups of cold filtered water. If you don't have a coffee grinder at home, you can go to your bulk coffee section at the grocery store. A lot of grocery stores have a coffee grinder there for you to use. You can just set it to the course setting if that is not available where you live, check out a local coffee shop. A lot of times they'll sell their beans and they can grain them for you. Combine your beans and your water in a quart size mason jar or something similar with a lead. Hopefully it is stain proof and fridge safe. If you can't fit all four cups of your water in your jar, that's okay. You're concentrates just going to be a little bit stronger and you can water it down once it has finished steeping. Once combined, make sure to give it a good shake and store it in your fridge for 12 to 18 hours. This is going to give the beans time to steep and get out that beautiful rosti flavor without the acidity and bitterness that comes when you heat up the beans. Once your brew has finished seeping, strain it through a coffee filter lined mesh sieve and store in the fridge and use for up to a week. If you want to get serious, you can buy a cold brew coffee system. It's a pitcher with an [inaudible]. You can put the coffee beans right in the center [inaudible]. It helps you strain out the beans so that you don't have to do as much work on that end. We love our tea clear cold brew coffee pitcher. I will note that however, once you get to the end, there is still a little bit of grit that we like to filter out just to improve the taste and texture of our coffee overall. It's not a perfect solution, especially if you're grinding your beans from home and you don't get that perfect, of course ground, but it definitely works. This cold brew concentrate recipe will need to be watered down for drinking. It's just going to be really strong. Typically, we will mix half concentrate and half water, but definitely taste it and make sure it is to your liking. If you're not into coffee feel free to try this shot with a black tea, Thai tea, Earl Grey tea, something similar, where you will mix a dark stained liquid with a cream of your liking. In the next section, we are going to set up and shoot.
4. Setup and Shoot: All right, so here is our setup. It's pretty simple, I'm shooting with the light from my back door window. We've got a weird scattered sunshine day. The clouds come and go but I have my backdrops here. I've got my painted backdrop and my chalkboard backdrop, and they're being held up by brackets and clamps. I have accented pretty simply, I have this wood slab cutting board, a metal straw which will probably just sit here, but I might try and throw it in toward the end, my glass and then this pot of those vine which will add a little bit of an accent but not demand too much attention. So just a little touch of life there. I've got my cameras set up, I'm shooting with my Nikon D750 DSLR. I have the Nikon 24-120 zoom lens. I highly recommend a zoom lens for this because you won't have to move your camera around as much to get your shot framed. If you don't have a tripod, you're going to have to find a friend who can pour while you shoot but I highly recommend a tripod it just simplifies everything and you don't have to stress about whether or not your cameras are in the right place. You get it set up perfectly once and you're good to go. We are going to be shooting with an infrared remote today. Typically, for poor shots, I just use self-timer mode on my camera, but self-timer mode is a lot more limited. It'll just take a series of shots pretty slowly. I might miss it because what we're shooting is so fast-paced, and so I'm going to use this infrared remote. It points infrared signals toward the front receiver on the camera. So if I pointed toward the back of the camera, oh, apparently it works. I didn't think it was going to work. You could just point this wherever. I wonder there's probably a receiver on both sides. Oh my gosh, okay. Well, I just learned something new. Traditionally, my cameras have all had receiver's only on the front, and so I've had to make sure that I'm always pointing toward the front. This camera has the receiver on the back as well, which means if I point my remote back here, it'll trigger that or here so that's actually really nice but traditionally or if you have an older camera, it might only have a receiver on the front. Make sure you figure out where your receiver is and make sure your infrared remote points to it. To use your infrared remote, you need to tell your camera that's what you want to do. You want to go into your menu, navigate to the photo shooting, and then make sure you turn it on to quick response remote. That means when you push the button, it takes the picture there's no pause, there's no delay it just takes it right when you shoot. When I go to take a picture, I press the button and then my lens focuses, and then my camera takes the picture. I don't want that. I don't want my lens to focus, I want it to just stay focused. I'm going to make sure that I focus right on the front of my glass. The front half, we want to make sure either focus on that glass or slightly in. It's a little tricky but, you know, just mess with it, make sure you have it right on. Zoom in really close on your camera, make sure your focus is just right because nothing sucks more than looking at your perfect swirl, slightly out of focus. Make sure you're focusing right on the front of the glass and once you have your focus right where you want it, lock it in. Turn on manual focus on your lens so it doesn't refocus. If I half-press, nothing happens, I have to actually touch the focus ring. Now when I take a picture, it just takes a picture instantly because it doesn't have to focus first. This is what we want. Let's talk briefly about glare. Right now I have a dark setup, I chose a dark setup because I'm drawn to dark and moody photos and because I won't get a lot of front reflections in the glass, like I would if I was using like a white marble background. That doesn't mean that you can't shoot a bright photo. You totally can. If you are having issues where you're getting that reflected glare in the front of the less, you can use a piece of black foam core to help reduce it. Basically, any light that hits this will bounce into that area and it'll reduce that glare on the front. There you can kind of play with it, it helps to get a little closer so that your board can get closer, feel free to mess with it a little bit. With my shot right now I have, according to my live view, glare on both sides of the glass, but when I take a picture, it's reduced quite a bit. I also plan on standing right here when I pour and my body is going to block some of this light and reduce my glare even further. If you feel like you have a lot of glare going on and you can't reduce it, don't stress too much because once your coffee's in there, you'll be surprised how much that glare is managed. Once we get coffee in here, we'll take another test shot and then get it all ready to go. Before we start shooting, let's get all of our ingredients on the table ready to go, I'm going to bring you a little closer so we can see a little better, and we will get the show on the road. I'm going to go ahead and pour my coffee in here. It's a little bit lighter, I watered it down a little bit because we'll be able to get more dimension through it because it won't be so dark that you won't be able to see all of the swirls if that makes sense. Feel free to water your coffee down a little bit, I would go ahead and take another test shot just to make sure of your focus and make sure your lighting is all good. We really just have so much bright sun coming in here, I'm going to close these hopefully that'll reduce a lot of that. Let's try that again. We have different highlights, but I'm okay with them. If my body is here, how do my highlights look? Okay, perfect. I do actually block like a third of my highlights standing right there. It's also a little darker, so I'm going to kick up my ISO to 1250 and I'm going to drop my shutter speed down to 250. So here's what's going to happen. I need to hold this in the shot, if I don't want my hand and the shot, I need to hold it really high. If I don't want to stream, I need to pour quickly and then move out of the way so that I can get it. I actually do want to stream in my shot, so I'm going to just go for it. I'm going to pour toward the front half of the glass, but try not to pour on the glass or over the edge of the glass and then I'm just going to rapid fire shoot as we go and hope it works out. I have a little bit of extra coffee over here, I'm just going to pour coffee in here now and see what happens. Okay, not much. That is a very blonde drink. Not very sweet. Well, okay. Let's see if we got the shot. Oh my gosh, yes. Okay, perfect. Feeling really good about this. I'm going to swap this out for another glass that I'm going to fill with ice because I think I really want to show you the cool things that ice does. We're going to set that one aside and get a little more cold brew. We are going to shoot in a mason jar. Super cute, and I'm going to get closer and lower, great. I'm going to swap out a few things just to mix it up. I think I'm happy with that. I just set the scene up, I'm using a mason jar this time and I filled it with ice. You don't have to have fancy-shaped ice but I do recommend if your ice maker at home doesn't make clear ice, if you buy the bag of ice at the grocery store, it is a lot more clear. There's less impurities and air packed in it, so I highly recommend getting that, that's what I have in here. I just piled a bunch of stuff from my house here in this shot just to get something different, mix it up. I'm going to pour the coffee and the cream in here but first we're just going to triple check my focus. I'm focusing right on these band here, but you could focus on some of the ice in there. The nice thing about shooting with ice is you have something to actually focus on rather than just hoping you focused on the right part of the glass. I'm happy with that, I have my focus I set it to manual. I'm going to double-check if my remote works. Perfect and I'm good with my exposure. Currently, my exposure is F4 at 1/400 per second, shooting at ISO 1000. The sun is pretty bright right now, I closed my curtains to diffuse it and let's do this. Double-check, let's do the crane. I spilled, I wanted to. It's going to be cool, but you can see the ice made a really cool effect there and I'm super excited to see how these images came together. I'll clean up and then I'll meet you at my computer, and we'll edit.
5. Lightroom Edit: All right. Here we are in Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. I have already imported my photos and chosen my top 12 favorites. I have six from our first shot and six from our second. I haven't edited any of these yet, but I've pulled them aside so that I know which ones I'm working on. What I'm going to do, since I'm not exactly sure which images are my favorite yet, I'm going to edit the first one and then copy those edits and paste them across the board, doing minor tweaks as we go. One thing I want to point out before I begin is this little corner up here. You can see that I did not get my background all the way fit. This is just what's behind my background. I didn't notice it when I was shooting because this plant is covering up where my clamp is. You can see I have a little bracket right there. There's a couple ways I can fix this. The easiest way is just to adjust my crop. I can bring this in a little bit like that and then it also brings the focus more in on this drink rather than the plant. It does limit what I'm able to do with this shot, so if I were to want to do a 16 by 9 crop, it's going to bring me in a lot closer than if I were to include that little corner. If I wanted to train told this out, there's a couple different things I can do. I can come over here to these special adjustment tools. I can click on the graduated filter and then click and drag in this little corner with the burn darken effect highlighted. This is just going to pull in a little bit of a darkness to that little corner. I can adjust my exposure, bring it down a little bit more, and curl it. This looks vignette it right here, but it does take off that glaring difference there. If you don't like the way this looks, we can change it. We can use the adjustment brush. If we click on this with the burn slash darken effect, I can adjust using the scroll wheel and then just paint this in to my desired darkness. I can bring the exposure down just a little bit and that might have a better look to it overall. That's just a few different ways that I can fix that little spot right there that I missed. Honestly, though, it's so minimal that you probably could get away with not doing anything at all. I'm just going to pull this crop in a little bit. Then before I start editing, there's a couple of different little specks in the background and all my backdrop that I want to adjust. So I'm going to go into my little Clone Tool and clone a lot of these out. I'm going to clone this one. Basically, I'm clicking on the dot that I want to remove and it will sample from a nearby spot. I have the spot edit tool set to heal, not clone, make sure it's set to heal. This will generate a spot that fits rather than copying a spot exactly. I can also click and drag if there's a big section I want to adjust, and then that should be good to go. Maybe I'll fix this little leaf right here. I can click and drag if I don't like the selection it chooses for me, and then call that good. All right. Right off the bat, this image is pretty evenly exposed. But I'm going to adjust my contrast to see what happens. I love a really high contrast image, so I always adjust the contrast. I want to increase my shadow since I've got a lot of dark tones in here and I want to make sure I'm really showing off that coffee poor. So bringing up my shadows little bit, it definitely shows off the transparency of my coffee. I want to make sure that my coffee looks nice and dark, but also shows off a lot of those swirls. I want to increase the clarity just a little bit and bring my blacks down. All right. I've got this really big glare right here. I think I can reduce it pretty well, adjusting the highlights. Let's see what that does. I'm bringing the highlights later down. That brought in a ton of that little glare spot. Now I can see the swirl a lot more defined, but I wish it was a little brighter. With my highlights down so far, I'm going to pull my whites up and hopefully that will give me that enhancement in those swirls there. I'm feeling pretty good about how this is looking so far. I'm going to my exposure up just a little bit more and then I'm also going to increase the vibrance. This will just enhance my colors a bit. Then what I'm seeing is I've got this bluish tone coming through in my background in my plant pot and I've got the warmth the orange genus of the coffee and the platter. I'm going to play into that a little bit more by making my blue's a little more saturated. I'm going to scroll down to the HSL color drawer and I'm going to grab this little color picker and then pick out a blue spot in the image. I'm going to click on it and pull up and this will just add a lot more blue in that. It's a little bit subtle. Let me take back. This is before and that's after. It just added a little bit more blue there. I'm feeling really happy about this so far. I want to go ahead and do a custom paint to this particular glass just to add a little bit more emphasis. I'm going to grab my adjustment brush, I'm going to keep it on burn, darken, but I'm going to increase the contrast and the clarity. I might increase the whites as well. I'm going to zoom in, I'm going to press the spacebar, it will give me my magnifying glass, and click and that zooms in for me. Now I want to paint this glass and I'll do some adjustments as needed. I'm just going to go ahead and paint this little coffee spot. What I'm wanting to do is to deepen the coffee and brighten and add a little bit more punch to that swirl just to really show it off. Right now it's very, very dark. I'm going to bring my exposure up a little bit more and then I'm going to increase the shadows, increase the whites, drop-down the blacks, and pull up my clarity more, maybe a little more contrast too. I'm going to click to close this out and then zoom out and we're going to see what exactly we did. I'm going to scroll back in my history to right before my brush stroke. This is before, and this is after. It just added a little bit more punch to that particular swirl there. This is just soft and then my adjustment made it a lot more harsh. I'm liking how this is going so far. Let me add a sharpen to the overall photo. In my sharpening menu, I'm going to pull up my sharpening to about halfway and then I'm going to pull up my mask while I hold down the Alt key and adjust it just to get that sharpening right on the edges. Everything that's white is what's getting sharpened, and that looks awesome. I'm really happy with how this picture turned out so far. Let me copy these adjustments. So I click "Copy", copy, and then go to the next photo. I'm going to go ahead and paste my adjustments onto these following photos and see if I can pick my favorite. I like this shot a lot, but I do feel like this inch at the bottom could be filled with something. This flash is pretty cool, but let's keep going. I really like this one. I feel like we have a lot of really epic swirls in here that are really nice. I like the motion implied with this little drip. This next shot, I really like that stream, how it's just perfectly solid. I feel like we have a lot of activity going on in this class, so this probably might be my favorite. It's already two star, I'm going to add a three, this will give a three star, and so now I know that this is one of my top favorites. I'm going to have to go through in this one and edit out all those little spots. If you didn't change your setup, I could even just take this first shot, copy the spot removal that I did, even the crop too honestly. I'm going to keep those the way they are, but I'm going to hit "Copy" and then I'm going to pull this over to this shot and hit "Paste" and that should take out some of these adjustments, yes, perfect. Okay, so the nice thing about using a tripod is, if you've edited and spot treated your first image, you can paste those same spot treatments onto any other images that come after because it never moved, it's the same photo basically, so that's something that's nice about this editing. Just make sure that if you are going to do a copy and you're working in the future, you will want to uncheck these specific adjustments, because in most situations they're not all going to be identical like that, anyway, perfect. I'm really liking this shot a lot. I might actually, let's see, let's keep going, we're going to copy this and pull it into the next shot. This is what my coffee looked like after I was done pouring, but I did get the edge of that pouring glass in the shot which I don't want, so I'm going to crop this guy, probably I'm going to give it a square crop, that way I can just easily post it to Instagram. I'm going to line up that edge of the glass with that rule of thirds, and let's see how that looks, awesome. I think I can pull this down just a little, just bring more focus in, I'm lining up the top edge of the liquid with this third marker here and I really like how balanced that shot looks. This one I would want to go in and add a custom adjustment, I'm going to do a little bit of darking, bring down the blacks, bring up the contrast, maybe some clarity, and then we'll go ahead and paint this one in, just to add a little more extra emphasis on there. You want to be careful when you're painting that you're not painting outside the lines because you'll start to see in the final image that it just doesn't look very natural, so I'm going to undo that, just paint right in the middle, making sure that I'm using a brush that has a nice fade to it. You can adjust how much feathering your brush has by coming down into here, so if I bring it in like this, it'll be a much sharper line and if I bring it out, it'll be a lot softer. I usually keep my feather to 100 percent and that keeps it really nice. If you hover over this black dot, it's going to show you everywhere in this photo that you painted and I'm pretty happy with how that looks. If you need to erase a paint job, you can tap over to erase, and now you'll have a brush with a negative sign in the middle and then you can go in, and erase anywhere that you might have been a little messy. All right, let's tap into my next couple shots, so because I shot these on the same day, I might be able to just paste the same settings, okay, it copied my crop over, so I'm going to click this and click "Reset." and then let's see if I copied any of my crops, yeah I did. I want to copy this because I like this adjustment, but I don't want the spot removal and I don't want the crops, so I'm going to click "Copy" and then come over here, and then paste it down, perfect. That took my adjustments there, but since we have a different lighting setup going on, we've got a little bit of back light happening, which is really fun. I'm going to increase the exposure just a little bit, and then I want there to be a little bit more mood happening, so I've got a lot of really vibrant colors, I'm going to bring those down just a little bit, and then I'm also going to take them down in these custom settings, so this red is really bright, I'm just going to bring it down just to tone it out a little bit, same with this purple, just bring that more muted. The green is a little vibrant too, I'm going to bring down the saturation there, and then I'm going to adjust the saturation and vibrance here as well. I'm going to bring my temperature to a little bit more bluish, this makes the white really white, and then I'm going to bring the tint down into, I thought I liked the greenish, but it's making this look gross, so I'm just going to undo that tint adjustment and call this one pretty good. Next I'm going to bring my blacks down just a little bit, this is going to really make this brightness pop in here, and then I'm pretty happy with how this is going, I'm actually going to bring up the temperature just a teeny bit, there we go, and then I'm going to copy and paste these adjustments as we go. I think this first shot that I edited is pretty good, but I think I can do better. This shot has a lot of really cool movement happening, let's go into this next one. This next one has a lot going on, there's tons to look out, lots of swirls, really pretty shot here, definitely adding the ice made a really cool effect here. This shot is also pretty good, it's predominantly having a lot of cream going on, and then I also wanted to show you this last shot that I got where I'm spilling over, I think this is a really fun effect. At this point in the session, my editing, my pasting is making my photo look a little bit weirdly gray, so I'm going to bring the warmth up just a little bit just to tone that out, since I was shooting with an overcast day with scattered clouds, I've got to make sure that I'm adjusting as the sun is adjusting, and then I've got a little bit of green happening in this mix, so I'm going to bring my tint up just a teeny bit, perfect, so I'm really liking how that is looking. I'm going to maybe bring up the exposure just here and bring up the contrast as well. In this shot I don't want quite such a muted feels, so I'm going to bring my colors back up a little bit, okay awesome. I love how that one's looking, I'm going to go ahead and export it. When I export a photo, I right-click right on it, click "Export", and that brings up our export menu. I'm going to put it in my sub folder export to my pictures folder and then sub folder coffee, this is just how I keep my photos organized. I check the rename too, and then I change it to custom names sequence, so now I can call this one coffeepot and then start number one. I'm going to change my file settings to JPEG, this is what I do when I am posting my photos on Instagram or uploading them to a gallery, JPEG is just the easiest file for my clients and just anybody who ends up seeing this photo to handle. I'll put the color space sRGB, if you have any of these other color spaces selected, you might find that you have a weird green or magenta color cast, basically your computer's trying to interpret this photo. I've found that sRGB, it is the smallest, most compressed color space, but everything, all computers and screens can see it, so I have the least amount of issues using sRGB. I limit my file size to 1,800 K, this is 1.8 megabytes, and that is what is the maximum size for Skillshare, and so just to keep my life easier, sometimes if I try to upload a photo, it says the photo's too big, so I just always limit my file size to 1,800 K. I check the resize to fit in the image sizing the drawer to long edge, and then I change it to 2,500 pixels, this just resizes my photo down to a manageable size, so it's not gigantic, since it's going to be viewed on a computer only. I leave the resolution at 240, this is probably higher than necessary, but this is just what I've always been doing. Output sharpening, I do sharpen for screen in the standard amount, since I already applied a sharpening in my editing. I change the post-processing to do nothing unless I wanted to open it up in Photoshop and then I click "Export ", so this will just throw the file into the folder I picked, and then I can go ahead and AirDrop it to myself, and then easily share it on Instagram from there. So yeah, that is just my classic light room run through. Thanks for watching.
6. Final Thoughts: That's everything. Thank you so much for watching my class. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or need extra help, feel free to leave a line in the discussion/community section here on Skillshare. That way we can help each other out and figure out any issues you might be running into. Please share your project in the project section, I love to see what you're creating. If you decide to share on Instagram, feel free to tag me. My handle is just tabithapark. I love to come over and see what you are creating. If you want to get an email next time I post future classes, just make sure you're following me here on Skillshare and you'll be opted into the email discussions that I post. If you have any suggestions for future classes that you'd like to see, I would love to hear that as well. I hope that you feel inspired to go out and photograph this and I hope that you enjoyed it. If you have never seen any of my other classes before, just know I have over 20 back at my profile, ranging from creating your own backdrops to photographing people and products and a bunch of other fun stuff. Hopefully there's something there that interests you. Thank you so much for sticking around and see you next time.
7. BONUS: Using a Phone: Hi, welcome to this bonus section of class. I wanted to give you a demo where I show you how I would do this shot using only a phone. Throughout class, I've just used my DSLR with my remote and I received some feedback last week pointing out that, I don't really show how I would do this with a phone so I wanted to do right by you guys and include a phone demo. I'm going to do two pause today. The first one is going to be just using my iPhone, this is an iPhone 10S and right now I have it rubber-banded to just my classic tripod. This is my makeshift phone tripod. If you've got a phone tripod, you should use a phone tripod, but you have a regular tripod. I'm going to do this shot just as is and then for the second shot, I'm going to attach this telephoto moment smartphone lens to my camera phone case, it's a whole thing. I'll update about section so that you can have a link to this if you're interested, but then I can show you the difference between the camera that comes natively with the phone, and then how you can change it up with a lens which is a lot cheaper than buying a whole DSLR and lenses whatever. Maybe you'll prefer this one, maybe you'll prefer this one, we'll just see how this goes. To start off, I wanted to talk about my setup. I have two painted concrete backdrops that I made, they're held up with brackets and a clamp. I have a little marble cutting board, and I've sprinkled some coffee beans on here. You'll notice that I'm shooting on light. I wanted to provide a slightly different demo. The rest of the class is all dark and so I thought, let's mix it up. I've got this little Ikea glass coffee mug, and then for the second shot, I will be swapping in this short glass tumbler. I'm going to be using STōK bought cold brew coffee, and then I've already put my half and half in this cute corking from Ikea. It's just a little milk bottle. I'm going to be standing over here. I'm going to move you a little closer so you can see exactly what I'm doing. On my screen here, I have already framed my shot. I kept the glass in the very center and when I go to take a picture, I'm just going to make sure that that part is selected so it's in focus, and then I'm going to turn on my timer. The little timer, looks like a little timer, you can change it to three seconds or 10 seconds. I'm going to leave it at three because I'm going to make sure that I have my coffee in the glass and then I'm ready to pour my milk when I go so I don't have to wait a whole 10 seconds. That's already set up and ready to go. I know I'm in focus, I know this is going to be nice and still. I want to fill up my glass with coffee just like that. I left a little bit of headroom up there so that we can fill it with cream. When I do the self-timer mode, it's going to do a burst, it's going to do 10 photos really quickly. This is the opposite of how I would do it with my other camera where it has like some time in between. I need to work very quickly. I need to pour this milk quite fast. In fact, I'm going to try and start pouring before it takes pictures so that I can optimize how much is happening in the glass. I'm going to make sure I know where my hand is going to be. I removed only the chipped nail polish on my thumb because that's the only finger in this shot, classy, I know. I know I need to be about here. We're just going to do it. I'm going to aim for the front half of the glass so I can see if I can create some swirls. I'm going to just hit the button. It'll count down for me three, two. Should we see what we've done? You click on the photo and it's a burst so there altogether. You have to hit the select dot, dot, dot, and then you can choose between your shots to see if you got a good one. It looks like we got something. If I was clever, I would've hit it twice while we were still going, maybe I'll be clever, let's just see. Still in burst mode. Now it's still pretty bright. I think this one is done for, so I'm just going to go ahead and, chef's taste. We're going to swap and bring the next glass in. For this one, I want to include some ice. It'll be nice and frosty, this is grocery store ice cubes because my ice machine has a lot of minerals in it, and the mineral ice is white and it doesn't look as pretty. The grocery store ice is clear, that's the like. Let's add our coffee in here, this is really good coffee almost has a Nadine vanilla taste to it, which is super tasty. I'm going to fill this up just a little higher, great. Then we're going to try it again and this time I'm going to try and do multiple photos just so I can really make sure that I optimize my shots here. I am here in position, this is nerve-wracking, all I've had today's coffee, can you tell? I'm shaking. Here we go. I forgot it has the countdown, that's good. Let's see. I think we definitely got something fun in here. I absolutely love that shot. I could tell already. I got excited and forgot to hook on my moment lens for that one so let's hook it on now. Leaving my camera in exactly the same spot, you can see that already this lens zooms in a bit. I'm going to go ahead and take just a photo or two because the coffee looks really cool right now, and then I'll need to swap in another one. I'm going to blend that into the yummiest frappuccino ever. Take two. This time I've got my moment lens hooked up. You can see that it's framed in quite a lot closer. I'm just going to take my tripod back just a little so I've got a little more of the same composition. Same story. I got the moment lens on. I'm setting it to three seconds, we're focused on the glass, and I'm going to jump right in here. I'm just turning this around because we've got unmixed coffee on that side. I love how these turned out. Let me show you my favorites and how I would edit. We are here in my camera roll where I have all my photos. You'll see that this is a burst, which means that you have to select your shot. This one isn't the best one obviously because as I'm pouring and you can barely see the swirls. If I hit select, it, lets me choose between the different shots that it took. I think that this one is probably the best, this end one. Then I can hit done and I'm going to just go ahead and keep everything rather than the one favorite just because I haven't looked at any of these very closely. Pinching and zooming shows me that I was able to get the milk stream nice and sharp, and I really like how this shot came out, but I think that the photos with the other glass are better. I'm going to hit a heart just so that I know I can come back to that one. This is the one where I already poured milk in. If I go through the select, you can see the milk didn't change a whole lot as I did it, but I've got some milk stream in motion shots which are fun, but I'm going to go ahead and hit cancel, we're going to go the next shot. I think this one is going to be amazing. Adding the ice really helped, it gave the barrier for the cream to drip around. I'm going to hit select and then we're going to flip through these and see if we can see the best one here. Probably, this one toward the end. I really like this last shot, so I'm going to hit a checkmark on this one, hit done, and then keep everything. We're going to put a heart on this one and then go to the next shot. This is where I poured the cream after I had already poured. This was the second shot. These ones are all very similar, but I still think it is a very effective image, I'm going to select one of those, keep everything, heart. Here is right when I put the moment lens on which was just a photo and then I recomposed. This is the moment lens shot. Let's go through these really quick. So pretty, I think this one's good, but let's see if we have a better shot in this next group. All pretty compelling images, we'll keep that one and then this last one. This is where I flipped the glass around to work with the back. It looks like I got some on the outside of the glass which adds a fun effect. Yeah, tricky, they're all so similar. I'm gonna go with this one and then I want to go back and edit this one that I did with my phone that I really liked. Let's go into the Lightroom app to edit one of these shots. I want to edit this one. This one's my fav right now. Overall this image is pretty dark so I'm going to go ahead and hit the "Light", it'll pull up the Light drawer. I'm going to bring the exposure up quite a bit. You can tell already this picture is on a different level. I'm going to increase the contrast level, high contrast image. I'm going to bring the shadows up just a little bit and then bring the blacks down, I'm going to bring the whites up a little bit. I think I'm pretty happy with, I'm going to put it in the Highlights slider just to see what it's doing. I'm going to bring them down just a little actually, now that I can see that. Whites up a little more, I'm going to go into the color drawer. I feel like my white balance is pretty right on, but I might want to make it just a touch warmer, plus two. I going to increase the vibrance just a little bit, doesn't really need it, but I like a little vibrance, I'm going go into the detail drawer and bring up my sharpening quite a lot. Let's look at this picture. This is after, this is where we started, you can see very significant differences here and I think it turned out really really nice. I'm going to hit this export button, we're going to export that one to the camera roll. Let's say you don't have the Lightroom app and you would rather edit right in Instagram. That's another thing that's nice about Instagram is it'll show you which ones you've hearted, and so if you're editing here at Instagram, you can just click on the one that you want to edit. I'm going to edit this one, real quick tip, if you double-tap on the image, it'll make it full size and then you can adjust it up or down as needed. I'm going to make sure I keep my coffee right in the center because it will crop it for my grid, but it's going to keep it tall-for looking at the photo. We're going to go to next, I'm going to pull just a slight filter on, I usually do Clarendon filter and I usually do it at 12. I don't add very much, just enough, it'll add a little bit of sharpness, little bit of contrast, something new but the photo is overall quite dark so I'm going to tap into the edit section, we're going to pull up the brightness quite a lot, I'm going up about 40 and then we're going to increase the contrast quite a lot. Our image is looking really grungy and dark, so I'm going to bring up my shadows and then let's add a little bit of warmth. The Clarendon filter adds quite a lot of blueness so I like to compensate by adding a little warmth after the fact just to make it more true white. I can never decide if we want to increase or decrease the highlights probably increase a little bit, and I'm going to add a sharpen and then let's see what this lux does, this little magic one. Lux varies photo to photo. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don't, so I always have to check. I like what it does in this shot, so I'm going to leave it at 13 and, then let's add a little bit of saturation, bring a little more life into my hand because right now it's ghostly looking. I just brought that up to 12 and I'm pretty happy with how this shot looks. I might bring the brightness up just a touch just to give me a really high key look overall, and then my contrast up a little bit more, that'll just deepen up the darks in the image. Here's what it looked like before and now, so very, very dramatic difference there. I would go ahead and hit next and then I can post from here. That's just a go to show you just how much editing capability you have right at your fingertips with your phone. You can produce a gorgeous, high-quality photo with your phone and you don't even need a big fancy camera, especially if you're just going to post on Instagram anyway. This is how I would do my cold brew coffee pause shot with a phone. Fun fact, this as my leftover coffee and cream that I've mixed together. If you're not going to drink this plain, but you're worried about wasting it. You can blend it up in your blender with some ice cream and some ice, and you've got yourself a homemade frappuccino cause we know no one can resist a sugar coffee drinks. I'm going to blend this up. It's amazing.
Tabitha Park, Product & Food Photographer
