Transcripts
1. Introduction: The magic of concept portraiture is it really can transport you to somewhere else. My name is Soraya. I'm an odd and portraiture photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. I work mostly in commercial and fashion spaces and advertising spaces, but a lot of my personal work has historically been grounded in classical portraiture. My most notable work is American Boys, a book released in 2019, which is a portrait series of 29 trans masculine individuals from all across the US via the first-hand accounts. Lately, I've been more interested in taking portraits of people in a much more conceptual way and exploring the essence of who somebody is, their passion, their work, and drawing that out in an image as opposed to just a classic image of someone's face. That's what this class is really about, diving deeper with your subject to create conceptual portraits and really bring out the essence and identity of who somebody is. You're going to learn how to find a subject that you want to work with, sitting with them and conceptualizing a shoot, and then going into more practical things around prepping for your shoot, what to do on the actual shoot day, and editing and selecting images. I'm super excited about this and a little nervous because we're actually going to be working with the subjects and conceptualizing a shoot as we go. This class is really for anybody. If you're a beginner photographer, sometimes not even knowing the rules can be so beneficial because then you don't really know what rules you're breaking. I really encourage you to give it a try. If you're an intermediate photographer, this might give you a chance to explore some ideas you want to replicate. I'm really excited to teach this class because I think it's going to give you some tools to think outside of the box when it comes to photography, and really just make you a better photographer and a more creative photographer as well.
2. Class & Project Overview: Success in photography comes when ideas are simple, clever, and achievable. You don't need to overcomplicate things, in order to make a good image. Before we jump into the lessons, I'm just going to give you a quick overview of everything we're going to be covering. First and foremost, this is a guide for you to get out there and get creative. It's a structure to help you bring an image to life. The class is going to be structured into about five lessons. The first being how to pick your subject, and who you want to work with. The second part will be coming up with the concept and ideating on what is possible. That's like the really fun part of the shoot. That's the meat and bones. The third section will be more practical information around how to prepare for your shoot and things you might need to get together and gather and collect. The next lesson will be your shoot day, and the things you need to think about on that day. Lastly, we're going to do an edit, and select images that really work well together, and perhaps even pick one that's out of the ordinary. You're going to learn the skills in the process to creating a conceptual portrait using a wide shot, a portrait, and a detail image. Working within this framework of a wide, a portrait and a detail image, it allows you to have a really dynamic range of images to pull from. The wide image really helps you set your subject in an environment and into space in a time. The portrait image will give you a more deeper look inside your subject in the essence of who they are. A detail shot will give you more intimate texture of the individual. But I really chose this project because I'm right in the middle of this process myself. Yeah, I'm actually going to do a shoot today as part of this series that I'm working on. I'm really excited to share what happens. By the end of this class, you're going to have three photos that work with the concept of your shoot, that really bring out the essence of your subject. Your images are always going to be great and clever and new because you're daring to step away from a traditional portrait image into a new world.
3. Your Subject Is Your Inspiration: Now that you have an overview of the class, we're going to jump into how you find your subjects. It's really important to find a subject that inspires you. You want to have that little spark of wanting to get to know them and dive in a little bit deeper into who they are. I feel like that's really the motivating factor for creating any kind of image of an individual and to find the essence of who somebody is and to have that be really inspiring to you. Here are some examples of some of the people that I've worked with already in this particular framework and body of work is my friend Hannah who worked with natural materials to dye fabrics. She's a natural dyer and she has a lot of materials and fabrics that she works with as part of her daily process. We really worked with her fabrics and who she is to create these kind of almost sculptural images with her, draping fabrics over her body, using the materials that she dye, the fabric with in her hands and holding them against the fabric and it came out really beautifully. Another shoot I did was with another friend of mine, Renk who is a dancer and a mover. We really wanted to inject a sense of movement and light and spontaneity into her images. I had her running through fields and a lot of lens flare and back-light and really tight shots and wide shots. It feels really dynamic and beautiful. I guess when I'm looking for someone in the common theme between these two people and all of my subjects is they really inspire me and they're willing collaborators. They want to work with me. They're excited and I'm excited and so that kind of energies is always a great place to start from. They're boyfriends of mine, so that was easy for me to interact with them. There's a comfortability there already. It's been a simple and easy step into this world of photography. I want you to think about someone who you might want to work with. The first thing is, are they excited and willing to collaborate with you? A part of being a good portrait photographer is finding a subject that a viewer will also find interesting. That doesn't have to be a super celebrity, star, or anybody famous. It can be anybody really. But as long as they inspire you and their story is something worth sharing. Often creative people or business owners or artists really need pictures and are willing to dive into more conceptual portrait image of themselves that they can use for other reasons. That will help them, one to collaborate and give them a reason to want to work with you. I think it's important to simply start with the people around you, your friends, your family, your family, friends. Everybody I photograph so far are people who I know. Once you get one under your belt, then you can share how awesome the processes and that can inspire other people to get involved. Now you have this framework for finding a good subject. Think about people who you know, write a list and reach out and see if anyone bites. With that let's move on to concepting the shoot.
4. Develop Your Concept: You found your subject and now you want to sit down with them and brainstorm an idea for concepting your shoot. There are a few things that I always try to cover with the subject when coming up and brainstorming the shoot. Once you have your subjects, the first thing you want to do is identify an element that really inspires you about your subject. I'm going to be working with my friend Tyler. He's a musician, and that really inspires me. He has a lot of different instruments that are really beautiful, and he really likes to play with sound, and I'm interested in diving into how we could interpret sound in an image. What are you working on? I have this project idea, but I don't think it would be cool to photograph. I don't know how you'd photograph and make it interesting. Okay. The project is a water project and involves collecting water samples, so recordings of the rain, thunderstorms, the creek, and from that creating Indian samples as a background, and then furthermore, creating an entire drum kit on a drum machine where all the sounds will be drops of water and different rain sounds to mimic parts of a drum set. Okay. Then the idea for the performances is it's also raining while improvised water music is being made and there will also be live water being poured in live water projections on the ceiling, so everything is water in the performance. Second, you are going to consider relocation and putting someone in an environment or in your place really can dictate how you're telling the story narrative in your image. For instance, my friend Hannah, and she has a studio where she creates all her natural dyed fabrics, and so we shot in her studio and in and around her studio across the road in the field and that general location. That was really good for the shoot because she's really comfortable in her own environment, and it's just inspirational to be around your subject within their space. This is a creep down the road also. I was actually thinking, so the bridge goes over the creek out there, and I've a cool vantage point if we wanted to do like a bird's-eye shot at all. Oh yeah, like something further away. Yeah. I don't know how we would light it. Maybe if we do it like in the afternoon, we could get a mirror and bounce light down. We could try. I don't know what the light looks like there late in the afternoon, but we can try reflect light down there or we could grab if we leave it to dust time, maybe we can find some LED panels. Oh, LED panels could be fun to play with for all the night stuff. Maybe we can make you glow different colors in the night like red or. The next thing that I like to think about, which is tied to location, is the time of day when you're planning to shoot your subjects. For instance, Hannah, we decided to shoot on this particular hill across the road from her studio, and the light in the early afternoon is just so beautiful and exactly what I wanted, and so that's when we shot. With Rank, we wanted to really capture that early morning light, so we got up at sunrise and we shot with the sun coming directly behind her, and that was also really beautiful. You said the rain. Right, but wouldn't it be boring if I was just sitting there with a pair of headphones and a little field recorder? Why would that be an interesting? Well, I mean, we can shoot in the rain. I mean, that always looks cool. Actually, shooting at night time in the rain always looks really cool because you can put lights on and the raindrops will light up or we can use flash and the rain drops will light up and you'll light up. If we light you up at nighttime, we can almost turn you into this glowing hob figure which translate to sound waves or sound vibration in a conceptual way. I love this idea The next thing to think about is lighting. Are you going for something moody and dark? Or are you going to do something bright and colorful? That dictates maybe what lights you're using. Are you shooting with flash? Are you going to use daylight? Are you going to bounce light, reflect light, block light, you shadow it? All of these things are all things to think about. You can start thinking about things associated with camera techniques like, are you going to run a long shutter speed? Think about your focal length. What lens choices are you making? One of the great things about this conceptual portraiture project is it really gives you a chance to explore different techniques that maybe you haven't used yet and different camera lenses and shutter speeds and techniques to really play with. I like to think next about props and objects that help you tell a story. For instance, with Hannah, we started to use a lot of the actual materials she uses to create her dyed fabrics. For the rust, we found this beautiful piece of rusted metal. We had a piece of Brazil wood for the Brazil wood fabric and indigo for the indigo fabric, and that really helps tell the story of her and her fabrics. It's really important at this particular juncture to work within your restraints and work with the things that you have available and what is really achievable with what you have around you. I like the idea of maybe vessels of water and jugs or something holding them around so that your face gets distorted. I was thinking the same thing if you're shooting through the jugs. Yeah, maybe that would be a nice weird type shot like something close off. Oh, and we have a lot of really cool, weird glass jugs around here too. Yes, so we can use some of those. I had this idea for a healthy, guitar star and I realized I have five guitars, and I was thinking something like an overhead shot with the guitars fanning out from my head. Oh, cool. I think that would be more of non-night time. Yes, they wouldn't work in the night time. That would be a day shot.
5. Equipment & Props: I've got everything together that we need for the shoot. My camera bag. I'll just go through some of the things that I'm going to be using today. This is my DSLR, that I love to use. It's a Canon 1 DX Mark 1. I have two lenses for that camera that I love using. The first is the 24-70 Canon. I love it. It's a zoom lens, it's so versatile and allows me to really shoot super wide and also long using one lens. It's one of those must-have lenses, in my opinion. I also have another lens that I love using, a deck of cards, I'll need all those, is my Canon 100 Macro. This is such a beautiful lens both for macro tight shots and also further away portraits from more distance. As beautiful, just a fall-off on this lens is really what sets it apart. I highly recommend trying that lens if you can. I'm also going to be using some film cameras today. I have this Fuji camera, it's a rangefinder, which means that the lens which is here is connected to the viewfinder which is here. It finds the range of the image. I particularly like using this one for today's shoot because it has a little pop-up flash. It mixes the daylight with the flash really beautifully. The other little camera I'm planning on using is a tiny little point-and-shoot, it's a Yashica. This is the camera that Terry Richardson shoots all of his stuff on or he used to shoot all of his stuff before he was outed as being a misogynist. Casper also uses this camera. I love it because its little point-and-shoot and it has this film inbuilt flash and has a really beautiful Carl Zeiss lens in it. This is really inexpensive and great little cameras just for kicking around with. Those are all the lenses in the cameras I'm going to be using. I'm also going to be using for my digital SLR, is this on-camera flash that I love. Mostly because it sits of its low profile and it sits really close to the lens and allows you to shoot landscape and vertical shots without getting that weird shot that sometimes happens with those lenses that are further away. That's the camera equipment and then everywhere here we have all of the other stuff that we've collected for the shoots today, which are all of the props for the shot. We have a couple of pieces of mirror that we had lying around that we're planning on using to reflect some light. All of these glass bottles here that we're going to be using for more of the tight portrait style. We're going to fill it with water and try and get some distortion and light hitting the water and getting some reflected light for one of the shots. We have all of these guitars, which are Tyler's instruments. These will be used to create the guitar style. These are his instruments, so it's really important, I feel like to incorporate those into one of the shots. Then we have some really fun things, like obviously, these are his headphones that he's going to be using to record the sounds and his field recorder. Then we also have this LED. We didn't have a proper LED. These has glow lights that we just happened to have in the house so they glow pink. They help plants grow but for this particular shot, we're going to be using it to light Tyler up and help him grow into the best person ever. We have a tiny little head torch also to play around with. These are all things that were just around the house. Nothing too crazy that we're going to use to create the picture. When you're thinking about collecting all the things that you need for the person you are shooting, remember to go back to the conversation you had when you were coming up with your idea and your concept and the elements that you need to bring together and really think back to the specific items that you might need. For instance, in this case, Tyler being a musician, we've got his instruments and we've got his headphones and his field recorder. To try and convey this feeling of recording of water, we've got water jugs and we have pieces of mirror that we're going to use to reflect light as reflections off the top of the water you might see when the sun hits it. These are the elements that we're playing with, and they're all just things that we have lying around the house. Just be resourceful with the things that you have available to you. Now that we have all the stuff collected in one spot, we're going to go and jump into the first concept.
6. Daylight (On The Shoot): [MUSIC] We're here for the first concept, which is the guitar star that Tyler was really wanting to capture. We found a nice sloppy piece of grass. That way I don't need to be shooting directly on top, I can shoot him at an angle and we also have backed up. He just happens to own a truck, so I'm going to stand in the back of that. We've set all the guitars up that he has and he's in his outfit, which is his grandmother's dress. He's all ready to go and this is going to be our first concept. Remembering that with each concept, we're going to be covering off three shots. We have the wide shot, which I'm going to try and get the whole scene in more of a portrait image. I'm going to come in a little bit tighter and then the macro pictures so coming in and shoot some details. Because of the hill, it's in the shade, which is actually good because I wanted an even light, so either full sun or full shade. Given that Tyler is lying down, facing up to the sky, shades are going to be best for his eyes, he's going to be able to open them more easily. In choosing my camera settings, I always set my camera white balance manually. I use the Kelvins and I set it to daylight, which is around 5,600 Kelvins. Then, I balance my exposure based on obviously getting a correct exposure. I try not to let my shutter speed go below 400, so I don't get any movement. This is a pretty still image anyway, but as a rule, that's something that I try and do with digital cameras, is keep my shutter speed at 400 or above, so I get a crisp image in terms of no movement and then adjust my ISO and my aperture accordingly. This particular image, I'm probably going to shoot with an aperture of around five, six. It's a flat image, there isn't a lot of depth to it and that should be fine. [MUSIC] [NOISE] I took one snap and I looked at the image and the picture is quite cool. This particular moment, I'm going to adjust my white balance and warm up the picture a little bit. Most likely this is happening because of the grass and I am shooting in the shade. I'm going to warm it up to 6,000 Kelvins. [NOISE] That looks much better. [MUSIC] I'm shooting at around 28, which is pretty wide to get it all in. I also really like at 28, well even at 24, I'm going to go all the way at 24. With this particular lens, you start getting lens distortion at 24 and it's actually like adding a little bit of dimension to this picture by shooting the distortion of the lens. I like it. I'm framing him up right at the bottom of the frame and capturing some of the trees and things happening in the background also. That helps, I feel like it gives it a sense of place. I'm going to come in a little tighter. [MUSIC] Don't be afraid to, especially if you're outside, really try different angles. You don't have to always just be right in front of your subject, try from the side, up high, down low, even from behind, get them to sit up, move around, change different body positions, like maybe even roll over. You want to try it out a little the side situation. [MUSIC] I'm going to try 1/2 a second, which means I have to drop my ISO to as low as it goes because I'll open right up on my shutter and I'm going to have to shut down on aperture to I don't know what yet until we try. [MUSIC] Is that it? Play one more time [MUSIC]. I'm also getting camera blur. [inaudible] [MUSIC] The base. Let's use the base. That's going to be [inaudible] and it's also darker. [NOISE] Maybe I can get your hand in it. Here we go. Bring your hand to here. If it was blurry in the background, my hand was still. We just finished concept 1 and we covered the wide shot fitting in Tyler and all of his guitars. I ended up really liking when a framed him more in the bottom of the frame and shooting up the hill and seeing the tree in the background really gave it more of a sense of place rather than just like the grass and the guitars, which I think will be really nice. I came in a little tighter and did the overhead shot where I stood over Tyler and just shot straight down on him and got the tops of the guitars that we moved in a little bit closer for this particular shot. Then I came in and did some of the more macro detail shots. We tried something a little bit different, strumming the guitar strings, which was Tyler's idea, I love it when my subjects come up with their own ideas mid-shoot and we're like, "Let's do it." We played around with that, getting the vibration and I opened up on my shutter to get movement through the camera as well. When you're working with your subject with this, remember to experiment and have fun, get them to change body positions, and remember that you can also move around, get down on the ground, get up high, shoot different angles. At one point, I was just holding the camera out above his head, not really knowing what I'm getting and that's fine. You don't always have to have your head in front of the lens to get the shot that you want. Play around with things, try new things and you just never know what you're going to get. You might get something really cool.
7. Mirrors & Contrasting Light (On The Shoot): We're moving into the second shoot concepts. I have made it to a creek down the street from where we just were. The concept for this one was again, the sound recording of water. I knew that this creek sat below where the light would hit at this particular time of day so I came up with this idea of using a piece of mirror to bounce the light from up above, down into the creek bed and then create this light play. It reminds me of the way light glistens off the top of water. It's fitting into that glistening moment and reflected light off mirror can be so beautiful especially later in the afternoon when the sun is a little softer. I'm going to make sure that I expose my image for the brightest parts of the reflected light when it hits Tyler. I'm going to expose my image. That looks nice, not blown out. The rest of the image is going to fall into darkness but I'm hoping when in pause, I'll be able to bring back some of the shadows and lighten up the image and balance it out more nicely and it'll feel really moody and beautiful. That's what I'm hoping for. I also feel like playing with the mirror itself and getting Tyler to hold it and reflect the sky back to me. It's like a blue panels of light when I go down there. I'm going to shoot at the top and I'm also going to go down. That's going to be my wide and I'm going to go down and try and get as close as possible to do the portrait and the macro shot while I'm down there. With my exposure, I'm making sure I'm exposing the highlight from the mirror. That's the bit that's in focus. It's making the rest of the image fall into darkness in camera but when I edit, I'll be able to adjust the darkness by playing with the different settings in editing to bring out the detail in the darkness. It's not going to full dark to a full black. There's detail there, but I wanted to make sure that the highlighting in this particular shot is exposed correctly. That was super fun and cool. We just caught the end of the light with reflecting of the mirror. I was lucky that I had one of our amazing camera crew on hand to help me out, hold the mirror. Make sure you have a spare set of hands with stuff like this, it's usually helpful. As we started to lose the light, I decided this is the perfect moment to switch it up and to start using the mirror in the shot itself to reflect the sky back as everything else got darker. Again, we're playing with this. Everything in the image is dark except for I exposed it for the mirror. This is like this blue light they were reflecting the sky and everything else falls into darkness. I'm hoping in pause to balance the adjustments so we find a cool image meeting in the middle.
8. Sunset (On The Shoot): Here we are. We're jumping into the next concept. This is when we're going to use the water jugs with the water, we changed Tyler into this awesome orange jumpsuit. We're up on this beautiful hilltop. We're using this water element because we're celebrating it because this is what his music is centering around. We have these jugs, we're going to play with shooting through it, pouring the water. As the light drops, I'm going to switch from shooting normally to some flashed off and I'm going to whip out my film cameras as well. Well, that's nice. I can see the light on your face. Great. Ready? Ready? My camera shoots rapid speed. Tyler's going to spit some water out and I'm going to hold my trigger down and it's going to go, ba, ba, ba, ba, so I really catch every moment of the spiting. Spit it almost towards me but not at me. Okay. Ready? Go. Directly towards me. 1, 2, 3, go. Cool. It's really cool. We should do this one with the flash. This could be a good time to bring the flash, because it might light up the water. Can you try with your film camera? Yeah, I'm going to shoot the film camera. I'm switching to my film camera using my Fujifilm. It's a medium format. Here's a roll from before. These sometimes are a little fiddly. There we go. Got it out. This is from my last shoot. I'll spindle and switch it over to the other side. Can be a little fiddly because it's little tabs you need to line it up with, that. Then get your film. Put it back on the left side. Close it up spin it across. There's a little tab that the film goes into like this. Then you wind it on. So it gets going, close it up. Give the trigger a little halves touch, and it'll wind unto one. Make sure that you also set your ISO. So this is in film 400, these are 400 ISO, so I'm good to go. I don't know what's happened to this one. So, I'm just going to take one of the film crew here. Never knew what we're going to get. We can shoot it in digital and think like, oh, this is what it's going to look like, but sometimes you never know and the film is also can just be so magic. I'm going to start with a medium format. Oooh. With film, I always tend to shoot a lot slower and think about the shot a little bit more. I think it's good on the side where you're holding it with both hands. Yeah. That's kind of nice. Okay, let's try again, [inaudible] Okay cool. 1, 2, 3, go. Oh, yeah. We got it. A flash at a time? Yeah. Wow, holy shit. Sorry, that looked really good. Giving me a fully blown out image of Tyler, which is really cool, but that's not what I want. So I'm just trying to balance it a little bit. There we go. I just think that was a bit of a flash malfunction, and I'm going for more of this in him, but I'm going to open up on my ISO as much as I can and my aperture to try and let more of the remaining ambient light in. Just a bit of a balancing act. I'm going to go to 160 shutter speed. I'm at 2,500 ISO, and I'm going to go to 4.5, so really letting in as much of the ambient light as there is available, and then mixing in the flash. Hold that where the sky is. Yeah, great. We just did it, we just caught the end of the light. When the light starts dropping really fast, you really have to keep on top of your settings and keep adjusting, keep adjusting. But also it's okay for things to fall little bit underexposed and play with the light that you have available. As soon as it started getting too much though, it was time to switch to flash. I also got really inspired by the water and how the water was coming through the shot, I'm like, Oh, it just reminded me of that idea of how we wanted to shoot in the rain and capturing the raindrops in flash. Instead we got Tyler to spin at the camera with the water and captured that with the flash. I think it's going to look really cool, the film shots of that. Then we just got him walking around. What I did with the camera was because the ambient light is so beautiful, I made sure that I mixed in the flash with the ambient, so I opened up all of my exposure, went to 4.5 F-stop, 200 shutter speed and ISO 2,500 to capture the last beautiful ambient light and mixed that in with the flash and it has really beautiful results. Once again, we made sure that I covered the wide, the more portrait image, and the tight macro shot. The tight macro shot really came to me, and actually it was one of Tyler's ideas again, to capture the water spilling from one jug to another. As a little detail moment shot, I think that's going to look really cool. Also remember that the idea of this is it's a collaboration. So really if your subject is super involved and comes up with ideas on the fly, give them a go, really experimenting, work with them as they work with you. That's really the magic of finding the essence between the two of you.
9. Using Lights At Night (On The Shoot)): Here we are, it's nighttime. We're moving into our nighttime concepts. We are by a pond, and we're going to shoot Tyler in front of the pond using the same light that's lighting up me. It's just some car headlights on high beam. With this picture, what I'm imagining is trying to make Tyler a glowing orb of light. I'm going to try and find my settings, so he blows out a little bit in this picture, but then also just going to play around and just see what I get. With my particular camera, I tend to not want to shoot higher than 2500 ISO, I'm going to be 2500 ISO, just because anything higher than that, I start to get too much grain in the nighttime shots, or when in a dark image gets too pixeling. That's my limit that I set for myself. I'm just going to really open up on the shutter speed and see what I get. There's a little bit of movement in there and I also might try and use flash as well. With headlights and the flash, so it's really playing with light, get some core conceptual images and see what happens. With the wide shot, we're shooting hopefully, I'll get some of the pond and some of the detail behind Tyler. We might even get some interesting shadows, I'm not really sure. The more portrait shot will come in and that'll just be more of the light on him and maybe blowing it out. He's this orb of light. The detail shot, I'm not really sure. Let's just see what we get. It could just be like something that happens at the moment. I'm really pushing my settings and I'm playing around with the shutter speed. I'm shooting out like I started at a 60th of a second and I'm working my way back up. Now, I'm shooting at a 13. I'm just like playing the different shutter speeds. My F-Stop is 3.2, so I'm really wide open, and I'm just playing with the different shutter speed to just see what I get with different, obviously, I'm getting like camera shake as well because I'm not on a tripod and Tyler is moving. I'm just playing around to figure out, what's a nice amount of blow to blow out ratio. Nice. I'm going to shut down even more to 20th of a second. We sign in to pick out more details in Tyler's face at the 20th of the second. Close down even more. I'm going to try 60th of a second. This is more regular. What happens to the 60th is I'm losing.
10. Lights & Water (On The Shoot): Here here, it's our last concept. Gaping it weird. Found the grow lights that we had. The pink grow lights that helps the plants grow. Perhaps you have some at home. Very nice substitute for LED. We're trying to figure out how to incorporate the water element back into this picture. We've decided to shoot the lights through a glass jug of water and see how the light plays with the water reflections on Tyler's face. We're not going to close the lights aren't super strong. We're not going to do a wide shot for this. It's more of the portrait and a detailed picture. Only because to move further away, we're just going to lose the quality of light that we need. I'm going to open up on that one. I'm going to try 160, 3.5. See what I get. Let me try jiggling the water jug. Yeah, real good. Nice. I'll get some more lights to this. The light's coming from front. That's wrap. I ended up being at 400 shutter speed, at 3.5 and 2500 ISO. I didn't know what the macro shot was going to be. I decided to put my 100 macro lens on and I came really tight, and almost shot like a beauty image of Tyler's, just like his eye and his face with the light. I think it's going to look really cool. The water through the light was really beautiful and it looked a little bit like laser lights. It was really fun. It's really fun shot. I think the colors going through each picture is going to be really nice tie together. I'm really excited to go and download these cards, and see what we got, and drop the film off, and get all the pictures back, and get into the editing room, and start pulling a really dynamic, interesting series of pictures together that really captured Tyler's essence and the original concepts that we were going for. But also remembering to play with the edit and see what comes through. I can't wait to show you.
11. Select Your Images: We've come back from the shoot and now we're ready to edit. I'm pretty excited about stepping into the editing process. I've already downloaded the course, but I've also taken a break, so I haven't looked at them for awhile. This is a really important part of my editing process. If I have the luxury of time, I try to give myself a little bit of space between actually shooting and editing. The reason for this is because it allows you to separate your emotional connection you have whilst shooting the pictures, because sometimes you get caught up in such a moment, it was so fun and then you become attached to that picture. That's not always the best picture. Other times when you're shooting, you'll feel like something that you tried wasn't very good, but when you go back and look at it and you've given it some space, you go, oh, actually you know what, I think this was really good. It allows that process to happen when you give it a little bit of time between taking the pictures and editing, assuming that you have the luxury of that time. Take it if you can. Remembering that the idea for this shoot is we're trying to find a really dynamic range of pictures across all of the shots that you did, so the wide, the portrait, and a tight image. We're trying to get three pictures that look really great together. I did so many different shoot ideas. I think what I'm going to do is come up with a couple of different ranges of three between all of the different shots that I like. You can see a couple of different ways images can come together. Again, we did those three, the wide, the portrait, and the tight to get a really dynamic mix. But let's just see how we get. I mean I'd love to keep it like that but we're going to go with whatever looks best. This just helps you get a nicely wide range of pictures, then you can come in and really create a really tight beautiful edit. We're going to go into my selection process. I'm really excited to see the pictures. I'm going to talk you through some of the things I like and some of the things I don't like and edit them a little bit. [inaudible]. The first shot, it was Tyler's star guitar. Let's just run through these and take a look at it. These are the three. Really nice. I really love this one because we can see, right back into the tree here, I love the depth, I love his body position and how he's looking at the camera. These were really nice since we moved down into that little patch of light and that made all the difference to make these pictures look really soft and beautiful. I think I'm going to edit this down though. I'm going to choose this picture mostly because I love seeing the guitars there and then Tyler's hands and the way they're placed, it just feels like a really nice picture. This is also really beautiful and I love it. But this is more in theme with our star guitar concepts. I can take this one out. This is our macro shot from this particular image. We have the guitar heads in his hand acting as the sixth guitar perhaps. That was super interesting and keep that one in there. Moving onto the next shot. Let's take a look, this is when we were up on the bridge and we're using that piece of mirror to reflect light down to the creek, which is really cool and fun. I'm just going to flip through these and see what we got. There's little wides. Here we have the portrait image and these are the type ones. This is one of the mirror pictures. Looking over these, these are so nice, I really love the depth that you get from the river coming back. It's so nice in the way way light is just hitting Tyler. I think of these two and between these two and please tell me which one you particularly like. But I'm going to go with this one mostly because I love the green on the side here coming through and this line from the water up through Tyler and then how it travels up like that. It really takes your eye off the photo, which is really nice. I love this picture. I think it's great. I'm going to edit this one out and keep this one. This is a more portrait image. Again, lights are nice on his face, that golden light which is something that we keep going through. We'll recur through again with all the pictures. It's just really nice. He seems really ethereal and plays in tighter softness. I love this picture. Here is the tighter, more macro images. They're not super macro, but compared to this one, they really are. I kept this one in here mostly because it was a mistake of accidentally focused on the trees behind rather than on Tyler. But sometimes mistakes can be really good and don't discount them just because you've made a mistake. Really critique the image objectively and ask yourself, is this is a cool image. Maybe it's something a little bit out of the ordinary, a little bit weird, a little bit be more conceptual. Remember to try and keep those ones in. I think I am, I'm going to keep both of these because I like both of them. I'm really hoping that this picture I can mix in somewhere. Then we use a piece of mirror. I don't know if the piece of mirror worked for me in this particular concepts, I really love the idea and it's maybe an idea that I'll come back to at another time with another person and try again. Just with this shot, I don't really love it, but maybe it's something you want to try, grabbing a piece of mirror and if it works with your subject, it's a really cool thing to play around it, but the execution here, I just think these are much stronger. I'm going to take this picture out. Moving on to the water job. This is a beautiful type portrait of Tyler. I love a little bit of soft light that's coming through his eyes here through the water jug. His expression is really nice. This a more of the wide shot in the day light. Its just graphic and cool with the straight line of the green grass and all over the sky and how its holding the water just in Frankie's face. It's just how striking the oranges. It's really great. I love that. The water pictures. Let's have a little flick through. A couple of different options here. I personally and again, tell me which ones you like. I like this one. I also like this one, and I'm going to edit this one out mostly because of his mouth, and it does look like he's spout water out, which I think it's more interesting cool to not know that he had spout the water out of his mouth. I'm going to take this picture out and run with these two. I'm going to keep them because I love this one because of all the green, and this one because all of the sky. This is also just a really lovely portrait of Tyler. It hasn't got any of the water in it at all. I think I must have taken this image in between shots, but just the color, it's just so beautiful. It's underexposed, but just the trends of the orange in the sky and the glass is really nice. I'll keep this one. This is our macro picture with the water. I love this and this was when I mixed the flash because it started to get too dark, but I really opened up on the ambient to capture that magic hour light of the sky. I just love the way how the flashes picked up all of the detail in the water, and on his hands, it's a really cool image. That's my detail shot. Then this is again another wide shot that we have been the flash. These are, we've got the sky in pictures so cool against the heaviness and the darkness of the grass. But the gradient of the flash as it fades out into the sky, it's really nice with the clouds, thanks pilots who created this photo. It looks at recording in a moment. I love that. Definitely keeping that one. Upon pictures, let's have a little flick through, so nice, love this. This is more, I guess, of the portrait. Look how cool this got, the back of the picture here is of the trees with the headlights. It was really mysterious and creepy and I love him this blurring out figure, think of blowing out silhouette against the darkness almost like the inverse of the silhouette. It's really cool. I love that, just exactly how I wanted it to come out. Then this is more of the portrait image. I love part of these pictures, the movement, the blurred, this is for my shutter speed being wider and I've captured a lot of movement there. I'm going to edit these. Even though I love this picture, I'm going to edit it out because I personally like this one more just because of the eye contact and the simplicity of it. Sounds like I don't know. But yeah, I think of all of these ones, this is definitely my favorite. I can just imagine this one hanging up on a wall above the fireplace somewhere below negative space at the top of the frame. Then this is the forest mysteriously coming in, almost looks like a painting. It's really cool, and then compared to how shot and given the foliage is here, the grass and then also use reflection. Its awesome. Definitely keeping that one. I can just go like one shot left to look at. This is our bonus picture using these glow lights through the water bottle. This is the edit, so I may go through and look at them quickly. So nice. I really love this. It's such a soft, beautiful picture. It really looks like he's really engaged in the music. I also love how the water made made this digital effect on the skin through it, awesome. Keep that one, and then this is just out of that macro shot. It's super tight and I love how you can see the light in his eye here and just his expression, and the hair in his face. This shot is fairly similar. I think I'm going to go with this one just because it feels more sensitive, the flame [inaudible] Why I've chosen these pictures I think felt really good. I'm really happy. The next video we're going to do is I'm going to stop tweaking and editing some of the images so playing around some of the equation with saturation etc, to bring out that definition and make the adjustments to make the image really pop..
12. Edit Your Images: Now we've made our selects. I'm going to go through and run you through some of the adjustments that I like to do to edit the pictures to get them looking the best that they can look. Everything that we're looking at so far is just completely raw, unadjusted, straight out of the camera. I use an editing software called Capture One. But a lot of the functions of Capture one are the same as other editing software such as Lightroom or even Photoshop has similar functions. Hopefully, if you have different software, you can still follow along. I even think there is probably software for your phone. If you've shot it on your phone, that allows you to play with things like the exposure, the brightness, the shadow detail and highlight detail, the dynamic range. The white balance is another thing that I like to make sure looks really good. They're the main things that I play around with. It would be getting exposure, the contrast, the brightness, the saturation, so all of the exposure elements, and then the high dynamic range, and the highlights, the shadows, the whites and the blacks, and the white balance. How warm the picture is, how cool a picture is, and sometimes even the tint of a picture as well. Sometimes I can even play with clarity. It really depends if I want to have the image feel crisp. I like to play with the clarity sometimes. Another fun thing is vignette. From my experience, a lot of people don't really use vignette, I feel like it can be overused and abused. But sometimes, just a little bit of a vignette on a picture can draw you into the center of the frame, or it can lighten up the picture from the edges. I've picked three pictures of which we are going to work through. We're going here to start working on some of the adjustments and editing on three of the pictures. These are the three that I've chosen to work you through. Let's just jump straight in. I'm going to me start with this one. As I said, I do really love this picture. This is basically the file straight out to the camera, nothing's been adjusted. When I look at it, I see because we were shooting in the shade, that it's a little washed out, a little bit lacking in color, the skin tone is a little blue. The outfit is slightly overexposed. I mean, it's all holding all the white that's there. This is still a little bit washed out, and also the sky, we can bring in some detail on the sky. Going through the things that I like to play around with, the exposure settings: exposure, contrast, brightness, and saturation. I feel like the exposure on this is pretty good. It doesn't need to be any brighter and it doesn't need to be any darker, so I'm going to leave that where it is. I'm going to bump up the contrast a little bit. It does feel flat, this image, because we were shooting in the shade. There is a little bit of contrast there. Sometimes I like to play with brightness and bring back the brightness. It's a little bit different from exposure. For me, what I see that it does is it brings some richness into the image without messing around with the exposure. This is lifting the brightness. This is bringing the brightness down. Sometimes I even bring the brightness down and then lift the exposure back up. You see how the grass just feels richer? There's more density in the color of it. That's what I'm going for here. Slipping into the dynamic range. I really want to bring back the detail in the light. Is too too much? Does it really pull back? We're going to find a nice point with it. With the white, again, this is all the way back. This is all the way white. You can also see the sky changing in the top right corner. That's good. We're bringing some detail in the sky. That looks pretty good to me. Moving to the white balance. This is key, because it definitely feels bluish and shadowy, so I want to warm this picture up. That feels better to me. Feels like more of a normal skin color. Feels like [inaudible] with the little patches of light happening back here. Now, I'm going to slip back here again, I'm always jumping around. I want to pull back the blacks. Again, this is helping bring in some gradient into the image. It feels darker down here, and lighter up here. That looks pretty good to me. I'm just going to the extremes. Here is quite bright, and here it is a little darker. Let's set the brightness up a little bit. Some of these things do some similar things, like the blacks and the brightness, but it's about finding a really nice balance between two things. Forget that I said that. Edit that bit out. Clarity is another thing I like to play with. Clarity, to me, just feels like the crispness of a picture, how crisp it is. This is super crispy when I see it like this. All the way back to the beginning, this is the opposite of crispy, blurry even; it's soft. I like to have a little bit of crispness in my pictures. There we are. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, just a little bit closer on Tyler. I think it's looking good. I might just bring the exposure down a touch. It could be be a little bit warmer. He looks pale. His skin tone is still a little wishy-washy. Let's take a look at that. I'm going to zoom back out. I think that looks good. We're just going to compare that to the original, and this is where we are now. I think this looks much better. It feels richer. There's more contrast there. I like how the tree looks. We've got some detail in the sky, and Tyler looks great, and he looks like he's alive. He doesn't look like he's washed out and dying. Let's move on to the next picture. This is the next one I chose to edit. Again, I'm going to run through the same things. I feel like the exposure is fine. This is really bright, this is really dark. Look at that. That's cool. We just slide back up to where I think it looks good. Honestly, I feel like the exposure is pretty spot-on, so I'm fine with that. It already feels super contrasting to me just because we have this bright light here and then the darkness of the water, so contrast is not something I'm going to play with, in this particular image. Let's just see what happens to the brightness. We pull this back. See how it's different from exposure when you play with the brightness? When I played with the exposure, all of the screen went black. All of the image went black. Well, brightness, you can still see detail there even if the image is darker. You can still see detail. I feel like that's the main difference between brightness and pulling exposure back on the picture. Here it is super bright. I want to go with something moody. It's already pretty moody. Fairly consistent with how I shot. We'll also just going to leave saturation alone. It is colorful. You see what I'm going to find. Yeah, when I mix it up we can really see the blue in the water, the reflection of the sky. It's cool, isn't it? So maybe I will move the saturation. I do love that blue coming through, it's kind of nice. Okay, moving to the dynamic range. I'm just going to zoom in to my left, I can see that it's a little boy out, this here, the reflection of the mirror. So I'm just going to pull the highlights back. You see how that detail just comes back in really nicely. Then also I'm just going to play with the whites. Move it all the way, have it blown out. Somewhere like there feels pretty natural to me. I'm going to zoom back out because that's fixed that detail for me. Again, blacks. It's just so interesting, when you pull it up and down, what you get. I think the black in this looks good, usually the blacks are pretty black. I'm just going to leave that as it is. Zero. Kelvins, let's see if I play around with the warmth of the picture. Super warm, super cool. Everything was shot at Kelvins of 5,600. Actually, I must've adjusted it on the camera, let me just see. I feel like it looked good as shot, I lied when I said I shot it, on the day it must've looked too cool and I adjusted it. So this is as shot and it is 6,381. I think it looks nice, it's not too warm, it's not too cold. The warmth of the [inaudible] on Tyler looks great. Again, clarity, crispness. I think nominal adjustment there is needed. This interesting with a vignette. So here's a wide vignette, this looks so [inaudible] I don't know. Here it is with a dark vignette all the way. See how it draws you in. [inaudible] this slice lifting the vignette in this particular picture. Makes the edges of the frame for lines. Yeah, so that's that. I'm pretty happy with that. I think it looks really cool. It looks great. Awesome image. Okay, moving to the last one. Going through again, this one, I know what's going to happen. I feel like everything is great. I'm going to bump up the contrast a little bit, make that grass really pop. This one we have, maybe not all the way. That looks really great. I don't think we need to saturate it because already it feels so saturated, it [inaudible] to me. Yeah, maybe the exposure will make things a little brighter or a lot brighter. The brightness. I don't want to take away the vibrancy that's on here, so I'm going to leave the brightness and the saturation is also good. Here that's where we start working with the dynamic range. When you start bringing the highlight back with the sky and then you can start bringing in some of the blue that's in the sky, which is so magic to me, so I'm going to bring it in like that. Don't be afraid to really bring it in. There is no whites also. I think when we look at the shadow, again, it takes away from the vibrancy of the orange solid, maybe that is neutral, play with the blacks. See how the grass starts getting richer with black? When you bring the blacks in because of all of the black detail. I do like that [inaudible] it makes me want to just keep the exposure. Add a little bit of clarity. Again, I feel like it's already pretty crispy in the focus, so nothing too strangling. So the vignette, obviously that looks silly and so does that, it's too much. But I don't think it needs it for this one, we're good. It's good at zero. That picture, again, I can show you, that's where we started and that's what really comes in. Just bringing in that sky detail really makes a difference. [inaudible] There we go. I try and keep my pictures as natural as possible. I just want to bring out the elements of the sky. Something I always find, bring out the sky detail and then I try to bring out a lot of the sky detail as much as possible so it doesn't blow out too wide. Really, I think that really adds value to an image. Also just the richness, I try and find whatever I can adjust to really draw out the richness of an image. I feel like those are really good. I put the three of them up together. See how they look. Seeing them all altogether and I'm just going to pull back a little bit on the [inaudible] for that one. Yeah, these are the three together. I think I'm pretty happy with how they look. I'm going go ahead and continue to make those adjustments to the remaining pictures. So those are the elements that I like to play with, with my pictures. The exposure, the contrast, brightness, saturation, and find a nice balance there that you like. Then the high dynamic range is really great for pulling in the whites that might blow out and the sky details and then also bringing in the richness in some of the colors like the richness in barks, the richness in trees. To make something feel like the density of the color looks really beautiful. The clarity is something you want to play with or the crispness of a photo, if you're going for something crisp. Or something a little less like [inaudible] perhaps you can go the other way. Your white balance and how warm a picture is. Playing around with that is something that can be really fun as well. Yeah, that can be fun. To pull you into a picture or open the picture up a little bit as well. These are some of my tricks. I'm going to go and edit my other selects. Then we are going to try and start mixing some pictures together and see which ones look as our dynamics series of three images. Yeah, it's time to move on to the next stage.
13. Arranging Your Images: I've gone through all my pictures and made all the adjustments to the edits, and I am really happy with the way everything looks. Just flicking through all of the sky detail in these ones, final pose. Yeah, everything looks great. I'm going to go to the next step, which is putting pictures together, arranging [inaudible] images that are going to represent our subject in the most creative and dynamic way. The way that I like to do that is in Photoshop. Every photographer has their own technique for editing. I'm just going to show you, one have a few, but this one I really like. What I do is process out all of the images in fairly small JPEG size. I try to go for about 1,000 pixels in length along the longest side. Then hopefully when I process them out, they're all uniform and that helps me. All the same size works better with layout. Then, I just in Photoshop and I'll show you how going to do this. I create a big whiteboard and then I start just moving things around and laying them out. Yeah, let's jump into that. I'm going to bring all of these. There's 19 pictures in total and I'm going to bring them into Photoshop. Just for a reference, each picture is under one megabyte. They're really small files, it makes it really easy to work with and they're all here. Then what I do, is I take one of them, it doesn't really matter which one but we'll starts start with this one and then go and select "All". I cut the picture out and so I'm left with a white frame. Then I'm going to crop. It will swell out. Then from here I just build this big whiteboard that I'm talking about. Then [inaudible] is paste the picture and you see over here you put the layer in the background so the background has become its own thing. That's the quick and easy way to do it. You can also just open a new clipboard or custom or whatever and do it that way. But I think this way is simple. I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Maybe even a little bit bigger again. Great. Okay. Now, I can still move this picture around. What I'm going to do now is bring over all of the pictures onto this board. I click on a picture, I pull it out of there. [inaudible] Then I drag it in and I do that for every picture. I've got a lot of layers every picture is coming in one layer when you drag it in like that. I'm just going to go back to the Background. Okay, I don't know if [inaudible] Okay, so we have everything laid out here, doesn't matter that it's not super even, that's totally fine. But we can see everything overall on this workbook or worksheet that I've created. What I do at this point is pick one of the images that I'm really drawn to the most, one of my favorites. I think actually one of my favorites is this one. I'm going to drag this one down here. Down in the bottom here is where I'm going to start making my three selections in a row. Okay, so now, whilst I'm looking at this one, I can start playing around with some of these other pictures that I think might look good. Let's try this one. This looks nice and then because these are all fairly dark, keeping with a dark image is going to tie nicely. If we went for something like this, for instance, I feel like this blue is kind of similar to this blue and then when you look at the colors over all, when you take a step back, I don't know if I like these two blues together. If I switch them around, that definitely looks better. I like that. But for me now when I look at this, I feel that the proportion of Tyler in this frame feels very similar to the proportion in this frame, even though this is a title shot, just the positioning in the frame feels too similar, so I definitely wouldn't pick an image from the orange jumpsuit shot. I going to take this out and pick another one. What about this one? To me, this feels the colors for this, the [inaudible] fit nicely together, for me. I think these two look really great together. I'm just going to put the little one that is slightly longer in the middle. Even though this was a [inaudible] I still feel like because he is so small in this frame, this feels like a nice balance, to me it feels really balanced. I'm going to zoom in and take a closer look, it's actually a little smaller, I'm not sure why. Okay, Yeah, I think I really like these together. We've got one picture where he's really looking at the camera and these two pictures where he's lost in a moment. I've used this one, I think this out of focus one really fits nicely. Yeah. Yeah, this one is good because if we picked a picture perhaps which Tyler wasn't looking at the camera, it would feel too lost. This is image brings us back in, the audience and for him too, even when he still looks like he is caught in the moment. But he's aware that the audience, as in us the viewer, is present. Which I like. Okay, I like those three. I'm going to pick another picture. For me that takes [inaudible] chosen this image, it takes this one out. I'm not going to use this one because they're very similar. I'm going to eliminate that image. Next image that I really like is this picture of Tyler. This kind of pink image, so I'm going to bring this one down as for another series. Then something that goes with that. Zoom back out again and take a look. I think I'm going to pick. Let's go to one of these really lovely orange images. I love this spilling water, I feel like that kind of intensity of the spilling of the water will go nicely with this soft headphone picture. Let me drag this one and drag it down. Let's go back to the pond and pick a pond picture. I think because these are portrait images, I need something a little bit more pulled back. Perhaps this one. Let's switch these and see if it ordinates any difference. I like these two. Again, we have this one where he's looking at the audience, us the viewer, and then these two images where he's more in a moment. I love that this one here is glowy. This glowy one. Now I've got six going. I'll do a few more. There's so much variety in what I've done here. There isn't really anything that creepy super wrong. I love this picture. Let's drag this one down as a starter. We have this one here as style image and I also love this really wide. Pull that one. I'm going to drag this down. Again, here see the difference in scale. He's so little in this picture. Then this one, it's a really lovely portrait. I feel like we need to find a balance for that. Let me go with one of these. Let's try this one. That's fairly good. I haven't used anything from our star guitar [inaudible]. What am I bringing? This picture [inaudible]. I like those three together. Again, the detail image and then you've got Tyler looking at the camera, and then we have this more dreamy pulled-out landscaping picture as well, he's so small in the frame. Again, I just try to imagine seeing them on the wall and how they would look together and I think they look pretty good, pretty happy. I feel like we should definitely use this one as well. I'm just going to pop this one up here. We're bringing a star guitar back in. I love this, I'm going to drop his hands also, and then let's see what else is going to go nicely with those two. I'm looking at what's left at my little board, and all the pictures closer together again. This is what I'm left to pull from. Zooming out. I think I can easily bring another of these pink images back in. I think that looks really good. You can see that having all of these ranges of doing the tight macro shots to the wide shots to the more portrait images will really give you this range that you can pull from and create a series that feels super dynamic and interesting. Like if I went like this and just cropped out. Let's have a look. Bring it down to this place for now. I'm super happy with that. I think I love all the colors. I love the oranges and the pinks. I love the deep blue tones of the sky and the water. Then also the rich columns of the green. I think it has a really nice representation of water, and Tyler, and the softness, and the more edginess of his personality. I can see some of these being something that he would use for an EP cover or for press or anything that he wanted to use, and for me, they're great for my portfolio. I think it's a really successful shoot. I'm really happy with how this turned out. The key principles that you have to remember when arranging your pictures. Firstly, I feel like if you create that board to work from so you can pull right out and see everything at once and then zoom right in is really helpful way to lay everything out, so you don't feel overwhelmed with how many pictures you have. I'm always gravitating to the ones that I like the most to start with. Then from there, you can eliminate, you want some of the ones that feel similar, and then you can go from a wide and then get something tight, and something in the middle, and try and find something that feels really balanced where the colors feel really balanced as well. Is a really interesting way. I think it really works for me as an editing process. Remember to throw your mistakes in there when they come up because, like I said, I feel like this picture of Tyler, I really love these three together. I think they're really interesting and cool. That was one of the first ones that I did. Remember to keep your mistakes being weird and playful. When you lay things down, just keep moving things around. There's no real right or wrong. Just try to aim for three images that feel balanced and dynamic so you don't have two portraits that look the same or two shots that feel really wide, pulled wide or pulled out. You have this range taking the macro and the micro details. If you have a bunch of pictures where your subject is just looking at the camera, try mixing one where perhaps they're looking somewhere else, or if they're looking somewhere else, try mixing one where they're looking straight at the camera. That eye contact and in a moment range is another way of making it more dynamic.
14. That's A Wrap!: Hey everyone, we just made it to the end of the class. I hope that you really went out there, and experimented, and had a lot of fun, and got really inspired by your subject, and really played with some new techniques, and dared to try things and came up with some great shots. If there's one takeaway that I hope that you're getting from this class is that you dare to try to be creative and try new things and think outside the box with your photography. I really want to see what you've been doing, so upload your three images to the project gallery below. I can't wait to comment and see what you've been up to. Thank you so much for taking my class. I really hope that you've learned something and it inspires you to do more things with your photography.
