Transcripts
1. Introduction: In this class, I hope to teach you some of my methods and techniques to take meaningful photographs. Photographs that tell stories, that inspire other people and that make people want to come and look at your photography. Hey everybody. My name is Jay Blakesberg and I'm a San Francisco based commercial photographer. I've been taking pictures for about 42 years now. I've shot everything from advertising to marketing, corporate annual reports, and of course, rock and roll today that's mostly what I shoot. I mostly shoot rock and roll. I shoot a lot of live concerts, music festivals, fan portraits, CD packages, magazine stories, anything that involves musicians on and off stage. The core skill that I'm going to be teaching in this class is rock and roll photography, music, onstage, offstage, portrait. But those skills can be translated to any type of photography you want to do, and these skills will work for any level of photographer, amateur, hobbyist, intermediate, advanced. Anybody who looks at these lessons will take something back and learn something from these classes. Over the course of this class, we're going to talk about marketing, business, camera skills, technique, technical stuff, everything on a computer. I want you to be well-rounded in what we talk about so that you can take this stuff back, whether you're going and shooting a local concert or shooting in the pit with 20 other professional photographers at the biggest festival in the country, I feel very, very fortunate and very lucky every day of my life that I've actually made a career with a camera. I want to take some of that experience, adventure, and knowledge that I've picked up over the last 40 years and share it with you because I want to inspire you. I want you to be passionate about photography because that is how you make the best photograph that you can. My name is Jay Blakesberg. Welcome to my Skillshare photography class.
2. The Class Project: The project for this class is to create interesting and engaging portraits. That is, the goal is to become a better photographer in this class. This project is great for beginners as it allows people to understand the basic functions of a DSLR camera. Those basic functions as well allows you to be creative and technically proficient with your camera, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, color temperature. Once we go over the basic principles we just discussed, any beginner should feel perfectly comfortable completing this portrait project. As we go through these lessons, I will be doing demonstrations on my camera so you can see where the buttons are, what they do, how to change those settings, and what changing those settings do on a creative and technical level. These hands-on demonstrations, they're going to be simple, clean, and easy to understand. Once we take photographs, we'll import them into my computer, and we'll go through those looks so you can see how you change these different settings creates a different look, feel, and style for every photograph that you take. All you need to succeed in this class and in this project is a willingness to learn, actually following through on the class project, and then, I will critique and review your work. For this project, a DSLR is not necessary, but it will help. On a computer, if you can have Adobe Lightroom, I think it'll really benefit you. If you're serious about pursuing photography either as a hobbyist or as an amateur photographer, or even if you're just a family photographer and you want to keep track of your photographs, and be able to do light editing, Adobe Lightroom is the product for you. If you don't have a DSLR, you can still follow along with a lot of these techniques on your phone or whatever camera you shoot with. I wanted to give you little bit of background about myself and so you have an idea of where I started out as a photographer. When I was 16 years old, I started borrowing a camera from my dad. In 1978, I was a junior in high school, and I brought my camera to a concert by a guy named Jorma Kaukonen. He was the original guitar player on the Jefferson Airplane and then later Hot Tuna. I was a big fan of his. At the end of the concert, we followed his limousine into New York City. He stopped at Delicatessen, I took a photograph of him, and I submitted it to a magazine called Relix Magazine. They published that photograph as a letter from the editor. That was the first time that it was published in print. When I was 17 years old, I photographed a Grateful Dead concert in Rochester, New York in Labor Day weekend, 1979. I was asked if I would submit some of my photos to a free weekly newspaper in New Jersey called The Aquarian Weekly. I submitted two photographs, they published them, and I was paid $7.50 for each photo for a total of $15, and I was on my way to becoming a professional photographer. When I was a teenager and looking in magazines like Relix Magazine or Rolling Stone Magazine, I was looking at other photographer's work. At that point, I didn't realize that this was the inspiration for my passion. I was bringing my camera to concerts. I was taking pictures of my friends in high school. It became my identity. I was the guy with the camera, and for us, it was like early social media. I'd make eight by 10 black and white prints in my basement in my mother's house, and I'd give them to my friends and they would thumbtack them to their bedroom walls, which is what I was doing also. I would be looking at these magazines and you would be seeing photographers like Annie Leibovitz or Jim Marshall. Jim Marshall is a legendary San Franciscan photographer. That was the music that I really loved, the music that was coming out of San Francisco in the 1960s, and so, Jim was probably my favorite photographer. It was Jim's work that inspired me to want to shoot rock and roll. There's a whole host of other photographers out there that I looked at early on. People like Terry O'Neill and Herb Greene was another Grateful Dead San Franciscan photographer, Baron Wolman, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn were really the guys that inspired me early on as portrait photographers. You can draw your inspiration from those sites, the way that I did, but also from the things that you're seeing around you that inspire you and where you go to find the photography that you really love. So grab your camera, and let's get into this and move on to the next section which is going to be an overview of gear.
3. Understanding Your Gear: Hey everybody, here we are with our first class actually doing a demo and looking at camera gear. This is a Nikon DSLR, it's an 810. It is a fully manual and all fully automatic camera. The first creative thing that I want to go over with all of you is depth of field and the way that you create depth of field is by lens choice and aperture. Aperture is the size of the hole inside the lens which is letting the light through, which is hitting the sensor on your camera. So a wide open lens is this and it's letting a lot of light in and a closed down lens is this and it's letting a lot less light in. Aperture on your camera is characterized by F for F-stop and then a number. So the apertures go 2.8, F4, 5.6, F8, F11, F16, some go to 22 and so as you get to those higher numbers, like a 16, that's more closed down, F4 is more wide open, letting more light in, F16 is letting less light in. Aperture ultimately controls your depth of field. What is depth of field? Depth of field is how much of your photo is in focus. The other super important element in terms of depth of field, is the focal length of your lens. A wide angle lens has greater depth of field and a telephoto lens or a longer lens, has less depth of field. So lens choice also is a creative choice as well. So here's some photographs that I took in Cuba a couple of years ago. These first couple of photos that I'm showing you have wide depth of field. You can see a lot of things are in focus for a couple of reasons. One, it's a very wide angle lens and two, I'm shooting in a small aperture like an F16, which means my lens is really closed down. So if you look closely at these photos, you can see the subject matter here is a couple of cows pulling a man on a cart and he's in focus, but the house that's a 150 or 200 feet behind them is also in focus. The same thing here of this photograph, of this horse. The horse is in focus, the man is in focus, the house is in focus, the mountains behind it are in focus and that's because I'm shooting with a wide lens at a small aperture. So now we're going to look at a handful photos that I took in Cuba using a longer lens with a very wide open aperture, which creates a very shallow depth of field. This particular photo here is a shot of an older man getting into a taxi. Now if you look at this photo, the point of focus is right on the man getting in the taxi, but if you look at the actual taxi, everything in the front of the taxi is out of focus and everything behind him is out of focus which really gives you the opportunity to focus in on the guy getting in the taxi and the taxi cab driver talking to him at the same time. Another great example of shallow depth of field is this photograph that I took in a coffee shop. We are sitting at a table, again, I used a longer lens and I focused in on the teacup right in the very front, closest to me, at a very wide open aperture and therefore you can see everything is going out of focus very quickly. So it gives it a really nice, what they call bokeh. It's this out-of-focus look in the background, it's really soft, it's very natural and it's very pretty and appealing to the eye. It's a lot like what you see in Hollywood movies. Generally, a shallower depth of field provides a much more dramatic cinematic look. The important thing you have to remember here is as you change your lens aperture and you open it up to get all that depth of field, we have to change your shutter speed in order to compensate to still get the same exposure. Shutter speed is essentially how long the shutter stays open for. A slow shutter speed opens up, lets a lot of light in, closes down. A fast shutter speed opens and closes fast and let's only a little bit of light in. The combination of shutter speed and aperture is how you get correct exposure. You have to remember that even though you're trying to be creative with your depth of field, you still always have to ultimately get the correct exposure. So to use the example of wanting to take a photograph with shallow depth of field, meaning you're shooting wide open, you're letting a lot of light in just with your lens, with your F-stop. So how do you compensate by that? You do a really fast shutter speed so that the shutter is only letting a tiny bit of light in that way and you balance them out again until you get the correct exposure. Shutter speed is represented by fractions of a second. If the shutter speed on your camera reads 250, essentially that shutter is staying open for one 250th of a second. If your shutter speed says 60, that means your shutter staying open for 160th of a second. The faster the shutter speed, the less light it lets in, the slower the shutter speed, the more light it lets in. Each demarcation for F-stop and shutter speed is referred to as a stop and F-stops, F2.8 to F4 equals one stop. F4 to 5.6 equals one stop. So F2.8 to F5.6 equals two stops. In shutter speed, it 's the same thing, 250th of a second to 125th of a second is one stop. So remember if you open up your aperture by one stop and you want to keep the correct exposure, you've got to compensate by closing down with a faster shutter speed to take one stop away from that shutter speed. So every time you double the shutter speed or half the shutter speed, that equals one stop. So if 250 F5.6 is the correct exposure, but you want to shoot at 2.8, so you open your aperture two stops at 2.8. So now we're going to close the shutter speed down two stops and we're going to go 250 to 500 as one stop, 500 to 1000 is another stop. So now the same exact correct exposure to 250 5.6 under these lighting conditions is 1000 F2.8. They equal the same thing, they just do different things creatively within your camera. The way you find the correct exposure in the old days was we had light meters, either light meters inside our cameras and digital cameras still have light meters in it and you can use them as a reference point, but because we all have screens on the back of our cameras these days, you can take a picture and look at it immediately and say, this is too light, this is too dark, this is just right. So if you're looking at your screen, you're saying, that's way too bright, you have a couple of ways that you can make it darker. You can do it by shutter speed, you can do by aperture or you can do it with ISO. ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor. The higher the number, that makes it more sensitive, it let's more light hit the sensor. The problem with high ISOs on a lot of consumer grade cameras and older digital cameras, is it gets very noisy. Here's an example of a really noisy photo. So those are three ways to bring more light in and conversely, to keep light out would be a faster shutter speed, a smaller aperture, letting less light in or a lower ISO number. A low ISO for any camera is 100. Every time you double that number, you're increasing it by one stop. So 100 to 200 in your ISO is one stop, F4 to F5.6 is one stop, 250th of a second to 125 is one stop. So all three of those things, exposure, aperture and ISO, every time they're doubled or halved it equals one stop. Each one of these elements that we've been discussing, shutter speed, aperture and ISO has a side effect. So if you have a slow shutter speed to let light in, if you keep going slower and slower to let more light in, your subject matter, if it's moving, will be blurry. If you open up your aperture, you can have less depth of field. If you're adjusting your ISO when you start going to a higher number, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, you're risking more noise on your photograph and less sharpness. Lower ISO, less noise, more sharp. Higher ISO, more noise, less sharp, little bit softer. Combining those three elements to get the perfect photo technically is important because you always want to have the right exposure. They also give you lots of creative opportunities. Briefly, I'm going to touch on one final element which is more of a creative thing sometimes, but also a way just to make your photograph look as natural as possible and that's color temperature, white balance, it's also known as. So the easiest thing to do is to put your camera on auto white balance. It'll adjust the color temperature automatically based on the light that it's seeing. So indoor lights, like an old-fashioned regular screw in light bulb, is typically very warm. Day light outside is typically more neutral and if you're outside in the shade, it gets a little bit cool and gets a little bit blue. With color temperature, there are basically indoor and outdoor lighting. Outdoor daylight lighting is what's called 5600 degrees Kelvin. Indoor lighting is 3200 degrees Kelvin. If you have your cameras set to 5600 degrees Kelvin, which is outdoor daylight setting and you come inside and you take a picture where there's regular yellow incandescent light bulbs, your picture is going to come out yellow. If you change your color temperature to 3200 in your camera, it'll come out neutral and you'll get a normal skin tone, but if you leave that camera set at 3200 degrees Kelvin for indoors and you go shoot outside, it's going to be blue because indoor light has a lot of yellow in it in order to make it neutral for a natural skin tone, it adds a lot of blue. So if you want your photograph to be normal, natural skin tones, the easiest best way to do that is to actually set your camera on auto white balance and let your camera correct it. The takeaway from this lesson is to be able to get the proper exposure. Now it's a little bit more difficult when you're indoors because you're in darker space and whatnot. So let's just start out very simply. Take your camera and go outside. If you want to be in direct sunlight, you could do that, but I recommend finding a shady area, what we call open shade. Set your camera to ISO 400, set your shutter speed to 125th of a second, set your aperture to F5.6, take a picture of a person who's with you that will stand there for you and look at your exposure on the back of the screen. Play around with that equation until you find the right exposure. From there, then start playing around with different shutter speeds, different aperture settings and different ISOs to see what effects you can get. Again, shoot with a lot of depth of field, with that lens closed all the way down and shoot with it all the way open and look at the difference of the effects that you're getting. Just remember, if you're at the exact perfect exposure point and you want to try something creatively by, let's say, opening your lens up, your aperture up wider, every stop you open it up, you have to compensate either with your ISO or most likely, your shutter speed, in the opposite direction. All three of those things all work together in one stop increments. Every time you double it, you let them twice as much light with your aperture, you got to take out twice as much light and shutter speed or ISO. So now grab your camera, go outside, bring a friend or a relative, get your baseline exposure down, figure out your basic settings and how they work with exposure with those three elements, play around with your white balance if you want to see what the difference will be on the different settings. When we come back, we're going to talk about shooting live concerts.
4. Shooting Live Events: Hey everybody, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about live concert photography. When shooting live concert photography, there's always that moment where the music, the lighting, the energy on stage, the audience, they all kind of converge in one split second and that's the magic of capturing lightning in a battle in that split second and coming away with that magical musical moment and that's the moment that I'm looking to capture and preserve forever. First of all, we're going to discuss how to get access to a live musical event, most musical events want you to be a member of the press. Now, many years ago that man getting an assignment from a print publication, it could be a local newspaper, it could be a free weekly newspaper, it can be a big magazine. Nowadays with everything online, a lot of artists are more interested in online coverage.There's all sorts of blogs, music websites, pop culture websites. The best way to get access is to form relationships with those media properties and have them back you in order to get a photo credential to go to a big concert. Now on the flip side, there's all free concerts that always happened everywhere all the time. A lot of concerts these days, even small ones have a barricade, they separate the audience from the stage and if you want to try be inside the photo pit, you need special access. It's always best to be properly credentialed if you're looking for it. But you can also just shoot from the audience and a lot of times those are some of the best angles. Most professional concert venues will not let you bring a professional camera in. Typically, the demarcation is no cameras that have lenses that will come off the camera. The process to get a proper credential to shoot a concert is to go through that bands publicist. Usually you can find that information online on the band's website, it'll say who their press contact is and there's usually an email. So if you're able to connect with a local music publication, most states, most cities have online entertainment websites. If you're able to connect with them and get to back you for a credential. Typically, it's a simple letter written by the photographer to the publicist that says, ''Hi, my name is Jay Blake's Berg and I have an assignment to photograph this band that you represent on this date at this venue for this online publication. My assigning editor's name is XXX and his email is this. Feel free to reach out directly to him or let me know if you're able to accommodate me with a photo pass to be able to shoot your artist.'' So now you have either a professional credential to go photographs something, or you're on your way to shoot a free event in your local community, what do you bring? You have a DSLR, what are your best lens choices? When you're working with stage lighting, it's a very low light typically until you get to like an arena level performance where they're using big bright spotlights. So even smaller nightclubs, small clubs, medium-sized clubs, small feeders, depending on the band, the artist, the venue, it may be bright, it may not be bright. When I first started shooting concerts, I would go and shoot things that were outdoors during the day. It was a good way to learn about exposure and it was a good way to just get a feel for where the action was. Before we go into detail about what gear to bring to a concert and how to shoot, I want to go over lens aperture. We really didn't go over that in detail previously. The speed of a lens is how wide open it goes at its maximum point. There are fast lenses and there are slow lenses. An xample of a fast lens would be something like this, which is a 1.6 lens. It opens up really wide, it's a fixed lens, 105 millimeter, 1.6, opens up really wide, lets a lot of light in. Most consumer brand DSLR zoom lenses open up to about an F4. Most concert lenses that you want will open up to about 2.8. These three lenses right here for years were my main three live concert lenses, they cover a good focal range from really wide at 14 millimeters to 24-70 to 200. All of them have the same widest aperture of 2.8. So that's the starting point for shooting concerts, if you want a fast lens, one that has the widest opening aperture you can afford. Specifically, what's best is if you can get a lens that opens up to 2.8. The great thing about digital photos is it contains all the metadata. So we can look here on the computer and you can see exactly what your shutter speed was, what your aperture was, whether a flash fired or not, and what your ISO is and all of that information is really key to understanding how to capture a good live photograph. So when you get your photos back and you import them into the computer, look at your metadata. The software that I use on my computer is Lightroom made by Adobe. That software enables you review any of your metadata. So if you go out and you take a great photo, you can go back, look at the metadata and say, that's a perfect exposure in that situation, and remember what that metadata is and go back and recreate it in your camera the next time you go out and shoot. When you're shooting a live concert, you have to remember that there's all sorts of things going on, it's not just the lead singer or the lead guitarist doing it solo. Make sure you shoot all the members of the band, make sure you shoot the drummer, the bass player, the keyboard player, the left side, the right side and of course never forget shooting the crowd because there's so much incredible, great energy coming from the audience. If it's a punk show, they might be doing a mosh pit, they might be going crazy, they maybe crowd surfing. If it's more of a jam band, they might be twirling in the sun, you know there's all opportunities for great photographs that are just not onstage. Let's take a look at some live concert photographs. So here's a band called The Flaming Lips and you can see that I'm shooting from onstage behind the band. The lead singer, guitar player is kicking his leg up, the audience has their hands in the air, it's a wide shot. So this photograph was shot with this lens, which is my 14-24 millimeter lens, which gives you a lot of natural depth of field. The wider the lens, the more focus you get. My focal point was probably on the singer on hands, so if I were to blow this up a little bit and look at it, the drummer here that's closer to me is a little bit softer. As you go past him into the audience, it's a little bit softer, but because it's a wide lens, it looks like everything is in focus. I shot it at F3.2, which is a third of a stop close down from wide open, it's a 2.8 lens. It's not really closed down. You're not getting a lot of depth of field that way. I shot it at 250th a seconds, which is why I was able to freeze the action of him kicking his leg up in the air, 250th of a second fast shutter speed. As a slower shutter speed, a 30th of a second stays open longer, more likely to get a leg blur while he was kicking. This has no metadata. It was shot on film. It's the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But I'm going to guess because he's jumping in the air and I'm still freezing the action that I probably shot this somewhere between a 125th of a second and 250th of a second, most likely F2.8. If you look closely at the hair in this photo, it's got a little bit of motion blur because he's whipping his head around and even his legs and his body. It's not as sharp as the previous photo that we looked at. That's why I'm going to guess that I probably shot it closer to 125th of a second. Here's a photograph that I took when I was 18 years old at a Grateful Dead concert in black and white with a 50 millimeter lens on my camera. This is my first camera that I owned. It was a Yashica camera. But the thing about this particular photograph, it's a peak moment in the action that I was trying to capture. I'm going to guess that this was about 125th of a second or 250th of a second wide-open on that 50 millimeter lens. This is the drummer from a band called Government Mule. Drummers are usually pretty active. There's a lot of movement going on, and in this case, he's doing is drum solo with his hands. He's whipping his head around. You can see as hairs got movement and then you can also see his right hand has a lot of movement as does his left. You can see a little bit of blur going into the metadata here. I shot this at 800 ISO and I shot it at 320th of a second, that's a third of a stop, more than 250th of a second. Pretty fast shutter speed because I knew I needed to capture that fast movement. The lighting was obviously pretty good, pretty bright, white light, which also allows you to shoot at a faster shutter speed and get the proper exposure. If they had dark red or dark blue lights on him instead, I would have to shoot a slower shutter speed and most likely would have picked up a lot more motion blur of his head moving and his hands moving. Now, in this particular case, because the lights were so bright, I could have made some different choices, I could have shot at even a faster shutter speed to help freeze his hands a little bit more because I was shooting an F4.5, I could have gone down to 4 and then 2.8. So I had one had one-third stops available to me, an aperture that I could have made up for in shutter speed with a faster shutter speed. Opening my aperture, still getting the correct exposure, but freezing the action a little bit more. On the other hand, I could have shot it at a slower shutter speed at 125th of a second, gotten a little bit more blur of his hair spinning and his hands moving. Then I would had close the lens down, another stop or stop and a half, whatever the exact amount was to get the correct exposure. I would have gotten more depth of field. Things would have been a little bit sharper in front of him and behind him. But because it's mostly black and there's no other people, depth of field wasn't my greatest concern with this shot. I wanted to keep it fairly sharp, but a little bit of movement and motion blur, just to give it that feeling of energy and excitement of what was going on in that moment. The reason why I had so many options for shutter speed and aperture in this shot is because the drummer was so well lit. This is an example of another angle that you might want to try and get. A lot of bands have really great light shows these days. This was taken from the lightboard. I was standing next to the lighting director. I chose the lens where you could see the stage and the lighting. I'm less concerned about what the band is doing on stage, I'm more concerned about the symmetry and the colors and the excitement of what's going on with the light show. I shot it at 160th of a second, not too fast, not too slow, still able to capture it, because also I find when you're shooting lighting a little bit slower shutter speed helps burn those lights in a little bit better. My aperture was 3.2 and my ISO was 640. These are pretty bright lights if I was shooting it at only 640 ISO. Here's another photograph of a band on stage. This band is called Moo, but this is how the guitar player doing a stage jump. You want to capture that peak moment, and so because I was shooting a 250th of a second, that's why I was able to capture and freeze his action during his jump. Here's a photograph I took of Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1979. There's nothing really special about this photograph except for the historic value. It's a photograph of Crosby, Stills and Nash taken 40 years ago. A few years ago, Stephen Stills put out a box set and a photo from this show that I took when I was 17 years old was used in that box set. With this Crosby, Stills and Nash photo, it's a good example of you never know who's going to be famous, who's going to become valuable. Now these guys were already rock stars at this point, but there's so many bands that are playing in your neighborhood for free on a Friday night in July in the summer that you're going photograph that nobody has heard of today are very few people have heard up today, but they might be the next big stars of tomorrow and you can photograph for them when they were a baby bands, those photographs have historical value and sometimes they have monetary value as well. Go out and shoot as much music as you can. You never know who's going to get famous. You never know what's going to be valuable. Shoot everything that you can all the time. It will make you a better photographer. It'll give you the opportunity to create more interesting photographs and you'll never know if that photograph will be the photograph that'll end up on the front cover of a CD in 30 years. Sometimes when I'm shooting outdoors during the day and I knew I had the shot that the magazine could use. I'd start experimenting or taking risks. I firmly believe no risk, no reward. How did I do that? I might start shooting a slow shutter speed, maybe a 30th of a second or a 15th of a second because that will create motion blur. What's happening on a stage when a rock band is playing? There's energy, there's motion. This is a really good example of that. This is the band Soundgarden and the guitar player sort of running across the stage and I'm panning the camera along with him. So I'm moving him and following the action, and I'm probably shooting at about a 30th of a second. It's a combination of me being able to capture and freeze him a little bit because I'm panning with the action as well as shooting a 30th of a second, so you're still getting that motion blur because look at the drum set behind him. That's completely blurry because he could see I'm moving the camera through it, whereas the subject, the guitar player is moving with my camera, so he doesn't have the same kind of blur. But what do you get? You get something like this. This is what I call no risk, no reward. You get something interesting, engaging, and you get motion and a still photograph. I won't go over a couple of really simple guidelines to follow if your shooting in concert. First of all, you being at that concert is a privilege. It is not a right. Even if you have a photo pass, it is a privilege and you need to respect it that way. If you're in the photo pit, first of all, do not block the view of patrons. Those people paid money to see the concert. You don't want to block them. Yes, you might block them for a couple of seconds but get out of their way. Do not stand in front of people the whole time. Secondly, move around the pit, don't stay in one spot the whole time. Don't get in front of another photographer. There's five photographers in the photo pit, don't just run in front of somebody and block them, so they have to move. Now let's say you're lucky enough to find yourself on stage someday. You don't want to be wearing a bright white t-shirt and white pants. You want to be wearing all black stage blacks, we call it. You want to be as invisible as possible. It's about the band. It's not about you. You don't want to get in the way of anybody that's working on that stage. You don't want to block the view of the sound man who's mixing monitors. You don't want to stand in front of a guitar tech. They always need to see their guy and if a guitar string breaks, they need to be able to see it. You want to be as innocuous as possible. Watch out for equipment, don't put your gear on top of equipment,don't put a lens on top of an amp, be aware of everything that's going on around you at all times when you're photographing a concert. White balance, of course, plays a big role in all of this. You have stage lights, you have daylight, you have strobe lights, you have shade, you have sun, all have different color temperatures. My recommendation for starting point is just to shoot on auto white balance. Next up, we're going to get a live model, our friend Maggie, and do some real portraits.
5. Taking Portraits: Hi everyone, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to do a live portrait shoot, and the way we're going to do it is using available light. Well, we'd like to call window light. I'm in my living room, I have two big doors with big window panels and two windows, so there's a lot of light all coming from one direction. We're going to approach that in a couple of different ways by moving the angle of the person, and doing some reflective light from just a piece of white cardboard or professional reflector and we're also going to try a bunch of different lenses. We're going to go with a wide angle lens, a medium focal length lens, and a longer lens. Typically, when we start shooting, we want to find the base correct exposure and that's our starting point. From there, we can make adjustments as needed for different types of effects. The three lenses that we're going to use are 24 millimeter, 50 millimeter standard lens, and a 105 millimeter. All three of these lenses are prime lenses that are fixed focal length, they are not a zoom lens. This is a zoom lens that's a 70 millimeter to 200 millimeter F2.8 lens. Your lens most likely as like an F4.0 or even a 5.6. That's the widest aperture setting on your lens. In order to get that shallow depth of field, and that bokeh look, you're going to want to be shooting at the widest aperture that you can, and at the longest focal length, so 200 millimeters. That will give you the same effect as that will get when we play around with a fixed focal length 105 at a wider aperture. Are subjects in place. The first thing we want to do, is make sure we have our camera settings proper for the right exposure. I'm going to set my ISO to 400. I'm going to set my shutter speed to a 60th of a second, and I'm going to start at F2.8. Now, pretty sure that F2.8 is going to make it too bright and over-exposed. But let's just start there, we review the shot and sure enough, it's probably two stops overexposed. I'm going to close my aperture down to F5.6, which is two full stops 2.8456, which is six clicks because each cameras and third stop increments. I'm going to take another shot of Maggie and this one is an F5.6 and it looks pretty good. But I still think that her highlight side of her face, which is the one closest to the window, is still a little bit too bright, so I'm going to close it down one more third stop to a 60th at F6.3. I'm going to take a picture of Maggie and I'm going to look at it and I'm going to say, it looks pretty good, but she has a fair amount of shadow on that side of her face. If I asked her to look a little bit more towards the window and I take a shot over there. Now we have a little bit more light hitting that shadow side of her face, and the highlights out of the face all looks good. If I ask her to turn all the way that way, and I do a shot this way, her cheek is properly exposed and the rest of her face is getting a little bit dark. This first lens that I work with is a 24 millimeter 1.8, it's a wide-angle lens that's very fast. I'm going to switch to the 50 millimeter lens now. The 50 millimeter lens is typically considered a standard lands for 35 millimeter. It's right in the middle of a telephoto and a wide angle lens. This is also a pretty fast lens, it's a 1.4, so it's a third of a stop faster than the 24 millimeter lens, but I'm going to go and set it at 60th of a second F6.3, which is the exact same settings as this lens that I did, and I'm going to do the same portraits again with Maggie. First, I'm going to have her look straight at me, I'm going to get my focus at, and I'll always focus right on her eye because that's where I want it to be the sharpest, so I'm setting that up, I got it right where I want it to be, and I shoot, and I look at it; and that looks pretty good, I'm going to ask Maggie to look that way. I'm going to shoot her again, I'm going to ask you to look that way. Now I'm going to focus on her left eye because that's closest to me so we have the same three shots that we just did with a 24 millimeter lens. Now I'm going to switch to the 105 millimeter lens, which is a portrait telephoto lens. Whenever you switch lenses, your camera pretty much remembers your previous settings, so it's still at a 60th of a second, F6.3. Maggie's going to look straight ahead at me and I'm going to focus on her closest eye to me, which is her right eye, and I'm going to shoot, and I'm going to look at it, and it looks pretty good; and I'm going to go that way. Again, I'm going to focus on her right eye and I will look at it, and it looks good and then I'm going to ask her to go that way and I'm going to focus on her left eye, which is closest to me and there are my three portraits. When I look at these photos in my view finder, the background on the 24 millimeter lens is pretty much all in-focus. 6.3 gives me a fair amount of depth of field, it's a wide lens, so Maggie is in focus, and the bookshelves are in focus. As I move to the 50 millimeter lens, the background gets a little bit more out of focus, but still there's a lot of detail back there and when I get the telephoto lens, it becomes even more. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to switch my aperture, and I'm going to go all the way down to F2, letting a lot of light in. The first thing that I have to do is find the correct exposure again. I'm going to open up my lens to F2, I'll start this time with the 105 lens. Now I'm at F2, and if I were to shoot at 60th of a second, which is what we had before, it's going to be completely blown out. You're not going to be able to see anything, there's going to be no detail at all. How do I fix that shutter speed? From F5.6 to F2, is three full stops, five six to four, four to two eight, two eight to two, and I was at 6.3, which is another third of a stop, so three and one third stops difference. In order to compensate for exposure with my shutter speed, I'm going to go from a 60 and go three third stops faster, so it goes 60th to 80th, 100, 125 that's one stop. 160th, 200, 250, that's two stops. 320, 400, 500 of a second, three stops. 640th of a second, that's three and one third stops. Now if I take that same photo here of Maggie, with her looking right at me, you'll see it's a perfect exposure. Now that I have the exact perfect exposure, and I look at the background here, it's almost completely out of focus on the 105 millimeter lens. I'm going to do the same thing or I'm going to have one photo of her looking right at me, one where she's looking over there, and one where she's looking that way. I look at this and I love the background, It's what we call bokeh, which is very much out of focus. I'm going to switch to the 50 millimeter lens now; I'm going to shut my camera off. Always shut your camera off when switching lenses, I'm going to go to a 50 millimeter lens. When I turn the camera back on, as I said earlier, it should remember my exposure 640th of a second at F2. Now I'm going to look at Maggie, and I am going to focus on her, and I'm going to go one, and then I'm going to ask her to go that way for the second shot, and now I'm going to ask her to go the other way for the third shot. If I look at all three of these, the exposures correct, and the background is getting a little bit more out of focus, but not as out of focus as with the telephoto 105 lens, because the longer focal length it is, the more the depth of field will be reduced. Now I'm going to turn the camera off, and I'm going to switch to the 24 millimeter lens and I'm going to look at Maggie, I get the first shot. She's going to look that way for the second shot, and she's going to go for the third shot, and we're going to look at these photos. Again, almost the whole room is in-focus behind or because it's such a wide angle lens, it naturally has a lot of depth of field, so how do we change that? How do we do something really different with a wide angle lens? If I want the background to go even more out of focus, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to come in close, and when I get in close on her face, the background become more out of focus because the focal length, the distance between me and her, also comes into play with depth of field. This time I'm going to turn her that way and I'm going to turn her back that way. I have my series of three shots. You can see here, I can still achieve a very shallow depth of field with a wide angle lens by being close to my subject. Real quick, I want to talk about reflective light. In this particular situation, all of the light is coming from one side of the room. There's almost no light there. Now the walls in my living room a little bit green, so there's a little bit of bounce going on. A way to fill in light into the shadow side of her face is by using a simple reflector card. Now, I have a professional reflector dish setup here being held by a professional C stand. But it could be as simple as a white piece of cardboard, piece of white foam core. You can even use a bunch of pieces of white photocopy paper tape together on a piece of cardboard. As long as it's white, it will bounce back pretty cleanly into their face. what this does, it just fills the shadow side of the face of a little bit more light. The light's coming in from the window over here. It's hitting that Reflector and coming right back to her, let's do a series of portraits of her. I'm going to do a close-up shot of her. You don't see the reflector in my frame and I'm going to do one,I'm going to do two and I'm going to do three. When we look at these photos in the camera, you'll see how it filled in some of the shadows. This one on the left has the reflector close to their face, bouncing light into the shadow area. The one on the right does not have that. You can see a little bit more shadow on the right side of their face. Using the 50 millimeter lens, I'm going to move around the subject a little bit with the light always coming from one side. As I move, you can see how the light changes on her face. Again, we'll start here. I'm 50 millimeter lens and she straight on to keep looking straight on. I'm going to move around a little bit. Now I'm staying over here. I'm going to say Maggie, you look this way for me, all the way, good, just like that. I'm going to go like this, then I'm going to go like this and I'm going to go like this. You'll be able to see how the shadows move across her face with me moving the direction and her moving her face and different areas of where the light come on. She's facing the window light, you'll get way more flat lighting and when she's facing away from the window light, you'll get more dramatic lighting. These are different techniques that you can use to create more drama in your photographs. Using the 50 millimeter lens, I'm going to show you one other creative way to do a portrait this time, manipulating the shutter speed. A Slow shutter speed allows you to see movement in a still photograph. Creates a little bit of what we call motion blur. That motion blur can come from the subject moving or the photographer moving. I'm going to go down to a 15th of a second, which is about four or five stops slower than I was before. Now I've got a dial my aperture and close my aperture down to compensate. I'm going to go all the way down to F 16. I'm going to take a picture and I'm going to look at it. I'm going to say that looks a little bit dark. But the other thing that's going on is because I'm shooting F 16. It's got way too much depth of field for what I want. I still want to shoot a little bit wide open and a 15th of a second. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go all the way back down to F 2.8. When I take that photograph revert 2.8 at the 15th of a second. It's completely blown out. You can't even see anything. Now I have to figure out how do I get the right exposure. I want to shoot fairly wide open and I want to show you that a 15th of a second. My other alternative, lower the ISO. I'm going to take my ISO and I'm going to go from 400-200 as one stop, 200-100 as a second stop, 100-64 is another stop. Then it has a low setting, which will go down to low 1.0. Now let's look at it and see what my exposure looks like and if it's correct. Now I'm still a little bit too blown out. With still blown out at 2.8 at a 15th of a second, I have a few options. I can increase the shutter speed, but then I lose the ability to get that motion blur that I'm looking for. But the one thing that's going on in this room that I still have to my advantage is my windows are wide open. What am I going to do? I'm going to lower the shades. Now with my shades completely down, my ISO is low as it can possibly be. I'll do another test shot. Look straight ahead of me, Maggie. I look at it here and it's still a little bit too bright. My only other option now is to either increase my shutter speed,or close my aperture down. On a professional level, if you really wanted to cut more light out, you can put what's called an ND filter on your lens and to neutral density filter and it just takes light away. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to go from a 15th of a second and I'm going to go two-thirds and the stock to a 25th of a second. Then I'm going to close my lens down to 3.2. Now I'm a full stop difference. I'm going to look at this test photo of Maggie and I'm going to look at it now, and that's actually not bad, a little bit dark. I'm going to open up on my shutter speed because I wanted to try and do something creative with a slow shutter. Now I'm at a 20th of a second, F 3.2 as low of an ISO as I can go. What I'm going to ask Maggie to do here is I'm going to say put your hands up, Maggie, and pretend you're yelling and screaming at me like this. I'm going to try and create some motion blur that way. Maggie and yeah, there you go. Keep those eyes open and keep those hands together. I'm trying to create something like my kid is yelling at me and they take a series of photos. I look at these and I'm looking at her hands and there's all blur going on. But I was holding the camera pretty steady, so in the background stays. But that's a way to get a different effect. Now we have one last thing that we're going to play with. I'm going to put the 50 millimeter lens back on. I'm going to leave the shades close because now it's a little bit more shady. There's less sunlight coming in. I'm going to change the white balance on my camera. Before I was at a daylight setting because there's daylight coming in, I'm going to lower my color temperature all the way down to what's called 2500 degrees Kelvin. I changed my shutter speed to a 60th of a second because I want to freeze the action. I do my test shot Maggie look up at me and I look at it at 3.2 and it's way dark, what do I do? I'm going to increase my ISL. I'm going to look back at Maggie. I'm going to say here we go. Look at this shot and that's the correct exposure. The other thing that's interesting about the shot, when I look at it and we'll see you on the computer, is that it's all blue, because the color temperature has cooled down. It's making everything go a cool blue. Now you have a whole other range of things that you can do in order to create an interesting and dramatic effect using color temperature. Now we're going to go to the complete extreme. I'm going to take my color temperature and I'm going to go all the way up to 10,000, now it's really warm. I'm going to look at Maggie and I'm going to ask her to look at me. I'm going to take a picture. Now you look at this and now it's really warm, it's really yellow. You can see the contrast from going really cool to really warm. Just changing your color balance from all the way to the lowest setting, all the way to the highest setting. Now you have a grasp on how to go out and do an engaging, interesting portrait of a friend. Go ahead and start the project. Play around with your camera settings, aperture, shutter speed, white balance to create interesting, engaging portraits. Try all different things. Try and get motion blur, shallow depth of field, a lot of depth of field. Just to see what you like and what style works best for you.
6. Editing Your Photos: All right, welcome back folks. Let's download these photos that we took with Maggie, our portrait model, and get them into Lightroom and start doing some editing. For starters, I've already taken the CF card out of the camera. I've already put it into the card reader. I've already got it set up here. I'm going to pull up a folder here that's got my Nikon folder and all that profiles are right here. I'm going to highlight them all, which is Apple A. I'm going to drag them right into a folder that already created called Maggie Skillshare. They are now importing directly onto the hard drive of this computer, right onto the desktop. My files do not live on the desktop of my computer or the hard drive. They actually live on an external hard drive. We're going to get into more of that file management stuff later for the ease of this lesson of editing the portraits we're just going to do it nice and simple and import them right onto the hard drive of the computer. Once they're imported into this Maggie Skillshare folder will then import them directly into Lightroom. They've all downloaded to the desktop. I'm going to eject that card, take it out so it doesn't heat up. Now I'm going to go into Lightroom. I'm going to Import which is right here on the bottom left-hand corner. Now there are a ton of tutorials about Lightroom on Skillshare YouTube, all sorts of places. I highly recommend spending half an hour of your time just having a professional Lightroom instructor, go through all of the different steps with Lightroom. I'm also going to explain it, keep it simple, but here we go. My master folder Maggie Skillshare is on my Mackintosh hard drive, which is right here. I'm going to click hard drive. I'm going to Users. I'm going to go Digital, which is what we call This Computer. I'm going to Desktop. I'm going to Maggie Skillshare, which is right here. Now everything is right there. I'm just going to hit Import and it's going to automatically just bring them in. Now what that's doing, it's not moving the files, it's not changing the destination, it's just importing those files into Lightroom. Essentially what it's doing is, it's just importing thumbnails and the metadata so you can actually work on those photos. Now we've got all the shots and Maggie in here in order from where we started shooting them. I believe the first shot that we did was this one right here where we overexposed a picture of Maggie. We're trying to get our actual exposure. Then if we go to the next shot, you can see that we're on Maggie with the correct exposure. In Lightroom over here on the right-hand side, you can go to what's called the EXIF profile. It's a little Drop-down menu right here. In there, it will tell you everything that you did. A 60th of a second F6, 0.324 millimeter lens, ISO 400. The first thing that I would normally do in Lightroom is I would look at my photographs and I would go through them and you can rate your photos. Lightroom has a system whereby touching the Number 1, it gives it a one-star Number 2 gets it a two-star Number 3 gives it a three-star, Number 6, it does red Number 7, it does yellow. Number 8 does green, Number 9 does blue. What I do is, I go through my photos and I look at photos that I like. The first thing I do is I say, let me give him a one-star, because those are the ones that I want to revisit. I'm going through them really quickly and say, don't love this one, don't love that one. I like that one. I'll give it a one-star. The other thing is, if you hit your Caps Lock button, every time you hit any key, it will automatically advance to the next image, which doesn't sound like much, but saves you a lot of time. I'm going to keep going through, I like this one, we're going to keep going through, I like that and I'm just picking the ones where I don't like it. Now I might get to something like this where she's blinking. When you get to a photo like this where Maggie's blinking, it's obviously something you don't want to keep. I want to delete this photo because all of these photos are about 40 megabytes apiece and they take up a lot of Hard drive space. In lightroom if you hit X, it sets it as Rejected and then later on, if you do command Delete, it will find all the images that you've xed and you hit "Delete From Disk" and that photo was gone forever. Now I'm going to keep going through and I'm going to find. Here's one that's overexposed. Again, you'll remember from the lesson, we intentionally overexposed some images. I'm going to leave this here for a minute because I want to show you some things about that photograph that are super overexposed. I'm going to mark it a one-star so we can come back to it. We're going to keep going through nice little smile and just keep going through different lenses, different lighting. Again, this is F2.0. You can see everything is almost completely out of focus. That's called the bokeh we talked about that earlier, really liked that shot. These are the shots we brought in the reflector dish over on the side and they can see how it's filling in some of the shadows there. We also have a little bit of a highlight here and we're going to work on fixing that a little bit later. I'm going to mark that one. Then here are some of those shots that we did where we really saw a lot of motion where she was moving her hands in her face. I'd like some of these. Look at this shot in particular. Her face is actually pretty sharp, but look at her hands and her arms are completely blurry and I like that. We're going back through and we're going to find some fun shots we're going to mark. Now we get to some of those shots where I was talking about playing with the white balance. These are blue intentionally I like this one. I'm going to do this one here because even though it's a little bit overexposed, I'm going to show you how we can manipulate that. Then I'm going to take one of these that are really, really warm setting on the color balance. Now in Lightroom, I've got a bunch of ones that I've one start. I'm going in and I'm going to click right here on the bottom is the Filter Setting based on rating. I'm going to click One Star. Now it's only showing me the 30 photos of the 187 that I've hit with a One-star. Now from there what I would normally do is I would do a Second Edit and I would go in and I would now Two-star these. I'm going back to a Caps Locks and they go a little bit faster. I'm going to pick about ten shots that we're going to play with. I'm going to pick this one, I'm going to pick this one, I'm going to pick down into his little dark. I'm going to pick this one, this one, that one. All of these that I'm choosing, I'm just hitting the Number 2, which makes them two stars. That one we're going to do that one, we're going to do that one. We're going to mess with these two blue ones, these two yellow one, this yellow one. We're going to play with these last couple. This is the 50 millimeter lens and this is the 105. Also look at her face, how their face changes a little bit here, between 50 millimeter and 105. The 105 compresses it a lot more because it's a longer lens. Now I'm going to click these two stars right here and I'm going to pick this as my final now down to 16 photos. Now let's just start right at the beginning. Look at this photo and I go up here to the upper right-hand corner on the hit "My Develop" Module. Now I'm in developed. The first thing that I want to do, as I think I want to try and bring some of the highlights down just a little bit. These are the highlights here on her neck, on her forehead. I'm going to take this right here and this right here, which are some highlights. I'm going right here to the Highlight button, and I'm going to just bring it down just a little bit. Then I'm going to add a little bit of black because that bumps up the contrast a little bit and add a little bit of shadow to it because I want to try and get some detail in her hair. Here look at this one. I really go extreme on the shadows. Look at how much detail it brings into her hair, but it also opens everything else up. I'm going to bring that down a little bit in between because I like that detail in her hair. If I were to get rid of the shadows and go the opposite direction. Look at that. You have no detail. At the zero mark, there's still has almost no detail but if I go up to about 1720 points, I'm starting to see detail. Now these other levels up here, there's one called clarity. Clarity is somewhat controversial level because it really almost sometimes makes your photos look a little bit more cartoonish and like a painting. Some people go really overboard and might go all the way up to a 100 on your clarity. It changes the whole vibe and feel of your photograph for a more natural skin tone and a person, especially if you're working with an older family member or a mother, father grandparent. It'll take the wrinkles on their face and it I'll make them deep and hard and contrast, and that's not always the most flattering look. On the other hand with your clarity, you can go the complete opposite direction. It diffuses the photo here gives that smooth diffusion look, which again is almost a cartoonish look. You might want to play with it in either direction. Again, I try and keep it to maybe not more than minus 24 on the clarity going below for diffusion, not more than 24,25 also on that. Now that's my starting point, and I like it. The one thing that I look at this photo and I don't really love is the skin tone. It's just a little bit too yellow for me. I'm going to go into color temperature up here, and I'm going to bring it down a little bit more towards a cooler color temperature. Now watch what happens if I go really extreme because blue, which is what we talked about doing in camera before, it will get to that later. A normal skin tone in daylight setting is about 5600 degrees Kelvin, which is right here, which is tell me the color temperature, but you can see how yellow her skin tone is. This is a color corrected monitor, so this is pretty accurate. Just I find that some of these Nikon cameras are also a little bit yellow in general on the skin tones. I'm going to bring it down to about 43. That seems to be a little bit maybe too cool. I'm going to go back to 4500, give or take this is 4479. I like that skin tone, a little tiny but warm. Now, the other thing that I might want to do with a photo like this is, I'm going to come into the crop tool, which is right here and here's a locking mechanism. If that's in the locked position as you do it, it'll do the whole thing. But if you do it unlocked, you could do just the top, the side. I want to get rid of her knee because I don't really love that. I'm going to come in a little bit tighter and I'm going go back to "Library", it'll show me where my crop is. That's pretty good, I like that. Now let's say I really want to turn this photo into a black and white image, I can go back to "Develop". It's got a standard in Lightroom. It's not a special effect, boom, click it and it goes right to black and white. Now, I like this, but to me this is a little bit flat, not quite so contrasty, so I'm going to add a little bit of contrast right here. I'm also going to open the shadows up a little bit more to get some of that detail in her hair. I like it right about there as a black and white image. The only thing that I'm going to do on this particular photo is I'm going to blow it up a little bit, with just Command Plus. There's little spot right here on her chest. I'm going to go into the healing tool right here. Using brackets we can increase or decrease the size of the brush. I'm going to do it and I'm going to drag it over to here and I'm going to click back on library. Now you can see that that's taking a second to render. You can see that the little spot on her chest is gone. Here's a little spot right here on her face, a little birthmark. I'm going to get rid of that just to show you how to do it. Again, I'm going go back into Develop. I'm going to hit the Healing tool. I'm going to come over to here. I'm going to shrink my brush size down, because it's a pretty small little speck. I'm going put it right over and then click on it. It's going to resample on that where other circle is, and boom, that little dot is now gone again. That's a way to clean up really simple blemishes on somebody's face. If you really needed to get into more detailed stuff, you could get into Photoshop. Let's move forward in the library here. Let's say I want to desaturate a little bit, so I can bring it way down. I can still leave some colorant to it. You can see that there's a little bit of red in her straps, but it's like a hybrid black and white color thing. Rather than bring the highlights down here using the Highlights button, what I'm going to is I'm going to go in and I'm going to brush it down. I'm going go to the Brush. I'm going to adjust my exposure to about, actually, I'm going to really go extreme. I'm going to go two stops. Using the brackets key on the keyboard, increases or decreases the size of the brush and I'm going to brush down my exposure on her cheek and her nose right here, just so you could see it. Right again, you can move it like I said. I just want to bring it down and I got it really extreme so you could see it. Then I'm going to bring the exposure way back all the way to, this is just about a third of a stop that I brought it down. You can see those highlights, I'm going to go back to zero on that brush right here. You could see it's a little bit more highlight and you can see how I slowly bring it down and it brings detail into those areas there. I'm going to go zoom in a little bit on her face and I'm going to take this little birthmark right here and I'm going to go really small on that one. Then I'm just going to go boom 1, boom 1, boom 3, boom 4, 5. But I'm going to leave all of her freckles, but I'm going to go in and I'm going to remove this one little one right here and this one over here and this little bump on her skin and I'm going to do it like that. You can see on the bottom of her chin how clean it is. Again, if you're dealing with kids that have blemishes or somebody's got a fever blister on their lip, these are things that you can remove very simply in Lightroom. Moving onto this photo here, this is one of the shots that I did where I did intentional motion blur. But you can see that the exposure is still a little bit bright here, and I'm going to go black and white. I like this shot, even with the blown out highlights a little bit. I'm going to add some black, I'm going to add a little bit of contrast I'm going to add a little bit of clarity. But I think the background to me is way distracting. The first thing that I'm going do is I'm going to crop and I'm going to bring some of this in. I have the crop locked over here, so it's doing the whole thing, so I'm going to go back to zero. I'm going to unlock it. Now I'm going to spring over that side and make this a square image, which would be great for Instagram. The other thing that I don't love about this image is how the mantle is a little bit uneven over here. Because I was moving my camera intentionally when I was shooting it. Here you have the angle adjuster, so I'm going to adjust a little bit down to the right, so you can go really extreme. I'm going to just go down a little bit to the right and I'm going to use the guides that Lightroom is giving me and I'm going to get that mantle straight. Look at it now, it's a lot straighter. That doesn't bother my horizon. Then I'm going to go into the Burning tool, again, and I'm going to make a really big brush. I'm not going to do the extreme one again. Well, let's see. I'll go about three-quarters of a stop and I'm going to just like bring down the edges of the photo. This is an old Darkroom trick where we used to burn down the edges of a photograph like this to bring your attention into the subject in the middle. I'm going to bring a little bit more detail into her hair. I'm going to go, New, to give me a new brush. I'm going to shrink it down and I'm going to just hit her hair. Everything that you've seen me do so far is bringing things darker and that's what this is doing right now because I'm just on my exposure on down. But I'm going to go to the plus side of things and I'm going to go brighter here as an extreme and I'm going to go back to where you're not really noticing that I did anything, just a little bit this about a quarter of a stop. I'm going to also go into my shadows and I'm going to hit the same thing and it's working on the same brush and look at what it does on the extreme. I'm going to bring in the shadows a little bit. Now I've got a little bit more detail in her hair. I'm going to say that pictures done and that square and it's ready to go for Instagram. This is one of the photographs that we did where we lowered the color temperature in the camera and we wanted to get this blue effect. Here I go. I'm going to go into "Develop" and you can actually see the white balance is way low all the way down at 2600 encountered said 2500. But let's say I really love this photo, but I don't want to do it in blue. I want to go back to normal skin tones. I can just adjust my color temperature and go right back to the 4300 we talked about earlier and get a natural skin tone. I can go super high, adding a lot of yellow. I can adjust my tent and put a bunch of read into it. These are all creative things that you can do. Those are some of the basic editing tools in Lightroom. Those are the most basic editing tools. It's basically burning and dodging just like you did in a Darkroom if you ever did work in Darkroom. [MUSIC]
7. Selecting and Exporting: So now, we're going to go back into Library mode up here in the upper right-hand corner. You can see all the photos that we did work on because they have these little boxes down in the corner. If it's just got one box, it means that we did some adjustment to it. If its got two boxes, it means, it was also cropped. Right now, I did not go in and flag any of these that we worked on. I randomly picked some of these out of the 16. So I'm going to go in and basically looking at these little boxes and I'm going to make all of those that we did work on three stars. So here's a three star, three star, three star. I'm going to skip ahead. Three star, three star, three star, three star, and last one, three star. So now, when I click the three star rating button over here, now it's just going to show me the eight photos that we did work on. Now we want to export them. How do you get them out of your computer and onto your phone so you can email them to your friends or Instagram them or Facebook or whatever social media platform you're using? Pretty straightforward. So we're going to just do them one at a time. So here, each individual image can be highlighted with the mouse. If you want to highlight them all, you can go to the first one, the last one, hit shift, and now they're all highlighted. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to export this first photo. You want to make sure you're in the Library mode and then you hit "Export", which is right here. Brings up a whole new dialog window. What is all of this mean? There's different image formats that you can export these into. These are raw photos. You can export them as a JPEG. JPEG is the most common form of image that you can use on your phone and to email people. It's a compressed image. It shrinks it down. It makes it small enough that at most email programs can handle it. That's the most basic one. You can make it a PSD, which is a Photoshop document. You can make it a TIFF, which is an uncompressed file that still has a lot of information and it would be way too large to email. You can do a PNG, you can do a DNG, which is an Adobe proprietary format called digital negative. Lastly, you can export it as the original, which is the NEF, Nikon Electronic File. For our purposes, we're going to export it as a JPEG. Here is a lever called quality. This is how much compression you want to do on it. You can export it in a 100. Most things that I export that are going to be used online, social media, et cetera, I export them at 90. You're basically compressing it just 10 percent. It's not noticeable, but it's shrinks it down enough, again to just take a little bit off of the file size to make it easier to email. Here is the size, okay. Resize to fit button. You want to click that and then your long edge, your long edge is, if it's a horizontal picture, it's left to right. If it's a vertical photo, it's top to bottom. If it's a square photo, it picks one. I always choose long edge for one, and then here, I always choose inches as opposed to pixels. Some people like to work in pixels, I like to work in inches. A pretty standard size to put on Instagram, Facebook et cetera is about 15-18 inches at 72 pixels per inch. That's this number right here. Screen resolution, your phone, a computer is 72 pixels per inch. If you're printing something on a piece of paper, you want to be at a higher resolution. You want to be at 300 pixels per inch. So different mediums require different amounts of pixels. The printed page requires more than a television or a computer monitor or your phone. So for our purposes, we're going to export for social media. We're going to stick to 72 PPI or DPI sometimes it's called. The other thing here we're going to choose is Adobe RGB. If you decide you want to get your photographs printed at someplace like Costco, they have their own color profiles. You can download it from their website, import it into your Lightroom profile, and it will live there forever. We have a couple of Costco profiles in New York. Okay, so we're going to stick with Adobe RGB, we're going to go to 17 inches, or you're going to go to 72. The last thing that we're going to do is a watermark. I'll show you how to make a watermark in a minute. But you see photographs all the time. The bottom left-hand corner, the bottom right-hand corner, it says photo by Jay Blakesberg, copyright Jay Blakesberg, photo by Jane Smith. So it's a good thing to do if you're sharing your photos out into the world to make sure that people know who took that photograph. You always want to be attributed, especially if you're trying to be any kind of professional photographer. I have a bunch of them pre-made. I'm going to make one that's called JB 2018, very tiny. I used to do bigger watermarks and I found that it was so annoying and taking it away from the photo. So I shrunk my watermark down. It still says copyright Jay Blakesberg, but I don't think it takes anything away from the photo. Then lastly, you need to choose where you want that photo to go. So up here on the top you have a couple of different things so you can go desktop. Now it's just going to put it on the desktop. But if you want to put it in a sub folder on the desktop, you can put it in a sub-folder and then you've got to actually make that sub-folder. Here's one called wolf that we're not going to use. I'm going to call this Maggie exports. Now, when I hit export, because I've set everything else up, JPEG, quality, Adobe RGB, size, resolution, watermark. Because there is no Maggie exports folder yet, I'm going to go "export". It's going to automatically make a new folder like that. So now, I'm going to go to the second photo and I'm going to export that. I can leave it in this but another way you can do it is, if I uncheck that and I go to my drop-down menu, I can go specific folder, choose, it's going to open a dialog window. I'm going to go to my desktop, scroll down, Maggie exports. I'm going to choose it. I want to export it, and it's going into the same folder. Another thing to do if you're exporting photos is Apple A, command A export. It's all set up to where it wants to go. Hit export. It already has two photos in it. As you can see, I can either overwrite that and I'll just rewrite them the same exact way, or I can skip it and they'll do the other six photos. Now it's exporting all six photos. You hear ding, I can do hot corners that I set up, I can go to the folder, Maggie's exports and here they all are. Now they're JPEG's. You can see they have a very small watermark on the bottom of each photo, where it has my name and they're already in there. From there, I can just go to my email program, attach them to my email, email them to myself, and then they're in my phone. Let's go back for a second and learn how to make a watermark. You're in Lightroom. You come up to Lightroom classic and it says, "Edit Watermarks". You come in here and you basically have a little dialog window here. Copyright is Option G. I'm going to say, test watermark. So look at how big it is. You go over to these tools over here. You can make it bigger, you can make it smaller. So I like to be about six or seven points, somewhere around six points usually is what I do these days. Then you can see, you can move it left to right. Here's a bunch of little bubbles, so that's the lower left corner, that's the lower middle, lower right, upper middle. I just stick with either a bottom left and bottom right. Then I want to raise it up a little bit and I want to bring it down a little bit. I'm going to come up a little bit, and there's all these other things you could do. You could add opacity to it. You can make it lighter or darker you can change the color of it. There's a white one. I can make it black, I can make it gray. You can go into colors. If I just choose the color wheel here, I can pick a red one now it's red. There's all these different options, of ways to make your watermark. Then when you hit "Save", it's going to ask you to save. It has a name and you can just say, I'll save it as "Test watermark" you type that in, you hit "Create" and you have a new watermark. One important thing is to make sure you always backup your photographs. Once they're in your computer, make sure they end up on a second hard-drive as well, If not a third. There's lots of options out there, in the Cloud that are inexpensive and if you're not shooting as many photos as I am, it's super cheap to upload them to Google Cloud or Amazon cloud. Maybe 10 or $15 a month. You know, they're always going to be there, but I still like to always have them on at least two hard drives. I do not let my photographs live on my main computer, they all live on external hard drives. Super important. You always want your Lightroom catalog to attach to where your photos are stored. So whenever you open Lightroom and you click on a folder, so in this case, Maggie skillshare, it's pointing directly to the folder on the hard drive where they live. Again, you can learn all about that in a Lightroom tutorial online. I have all of my photos separated by date. Because I shoot mostly events, so I keep track of everything by date. I also shoot musicians, so I keep track of it by artists and by date. So if I were to go into this folder called Master and I were to go to an artist named the Allman Brothers. Here is my date. This is May 12th, 2009. This is June 8th, 2014, July 24th, 2012. I keep track of my photographs by artists and sub-folders by date. If I were you and you're just shooting casually and you're not shooting events, I would create folders for every month of the year. January 2020, February 2020, March 2020. Then within that, you could do sub-folders. Vacation in Hawaii, home with Corona and the kids. Whatever it might be, just create sub-folders and keep them in. But you always want to make sure that your photos in Lightroom and the sub-folders that they end up in, always are attached to where they live on the hard drive. So that you don't have to go back and find them. Which brings me to one last thing before we close today. That is renaming your photographs. It's a very simple thing. We're going to go back to the Maggie's skillshare photos which we shot today, which is April 26, 2020. So they come out of the camera and they have some numbering system that really has no relation to anything that's going on. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the very first photo in the collection, go all the way down the last photo, hold shift, click on that. Now they're all highlighted, I'm going to go right over here to file name. I'm going to click on this drop-down menu and it's going to say, custom text. I'm going to just put in here JB_042620, I'm going to start it at number one, I'm going to hit "OK" and it's renaming all of these photos right now. You can see it up here it takes a minute to do it. It's 187 photos. Now it's done and now it's JB_042620. DG is something we created, which means it's a digital photo because I've also shuttle out of film in my career, 001, 002, 003,004. But we know that these photos were always taken on April 26th, 2020. Thanks for watching this lesson, I hope you learned a lot. Lightroom is a really important tool as a digital photographer, I highly recommend you get it and not use any simple programs that are already built into your computer. I also recommend taking your cards out and importing them with an external card reader, as opposed to importing them from directly from your camera. Now you should have all the tools you need to take photos, make interesting portraits, import them into your computer, do some editing, export them out, share them on social media. Now we're going to talk a little bit about marketing and business strategies.
8. Bonus Lesson: Marketing Your Work: Now you've shot about 10 concerts. What's next? How do you become a professional photographer or how do you get more access to shoot more shows? How do you get access to shoot bigger shows? Let's talk a little bit about marketing, advertising promotion, client relations and the value of your work. You've got some images, time to create a portfolio. Pretty simple. In the old days, we used to have to get prints made, put them in books, find people to show those books to. Ultimately what you want to do is you want people to see your work, who hire photographers to shoot the work that you want to shoot. You want to be a concert photographer, who hires concert photographer's? Websites, magazines, the bands themselves. So you want to start with those people. With the bands, you want to get a relationship going with the band or their management, with magazines, with the photo editor, with the web people, the editor of the website or the photo editor for the website. You want to connect to those people and you want to show them what you're doing. The easiest way to share your work is probably as a PDF. You have 10 great photographs. Create a PDF of those 10 photographs, make a slide at the beginning that has your name, your phone number, and your email address. Get the name and email address of the person you want to send it to and say, "Hi, my name is so and so and I live in this town and if you ever need a photographer to cover one of your events, I'm available. Here's a sample of my work. " That's the best place to start. Once you get a gig, will you get paid? Hard to say, really depends on a lot of different factors. On the lowest level, most likely not, you might get some access. You'll build your portfolio, you'll form relationships. Let's say they want you to go shoot a new upcoming band and the band likes the photographs that you did for that website and they want to put it on their Instagram site. You have a choice. You can license it to them and charge them money or you can give it to them and say, "Here, feel free to put this on your Instagram page and use it to promote that show or promote your tour or whatever, but if you decide you want to use it in some other fashion, please come back and ask my permission and maybe we will work out a small usage fee for the use of that photo.'' Once you've got some photographs, the best way to get it out there, Instagram, Facebook, social media. Put it out there, put a watermark on it, have your name on it, share it, let other people share it and let people see what you're doing. The best thing that you could do initially is establish yourself locally. Let your local clientele know that you're there and that you exist and that you're available to photograph what they need photographed. From there, you can spread out because we are a global economy. The internet has created that for all of us, photographs span the globe. Everywhere in the world somebody can be looking at your photographs and that's what you want and that's what social media will do. The other thing that I want to say is whenever you can protect your work, own your work, do not give up ownership of your work. Just like that example that I showed in the previous lesson on live concert photography. That photograph of Crosby Stills and Nash that I took when I was 17 years old, almost 40 years later, I was paid money for a photograph that I took when I was a teenager as just a fan, hobby photographer. There might be opportunities where somebody comes to you and they say they want to buy that photo out, they want to own that photo so they can do whatever they want with it. My advice is to avoid that as much as possible. You want to own your photographs. Your photograph equals intellectual property and it has value for ever and ever. You don't want to give up the rights to that photograph or series of photographs if you can avoid it, because those photographs could generate revenue for the rest of your life, you never know. One way that you can avoid what would be called a work for hire or a copyright transfer is to give a client, what I like to call unlimited usage for a certain period of time for a specific project only and you retain ownership and copyright of that photograph. It's all in the language of what you're giving them the rights to do and all of that comes down to again, your relationships with them and how you're presenting to them and the contracts that you're writing to them, which could be just your simple invoice where you write up an invoice and you say, "I'm going to grant you the rights to use this photograph for this particular purpose, for this amount of time, for this amount of money." Now you're shooting, you've got some relationships going. You're building portfolios as you get new work, you make new PDFs, you meet new people, you get email address, you look on the internet, you look on band websites for who their publicists are. You let them know what you do, where you do it, where you live and when they come to your town, you try and get an assignment and go shoot them. I also want to stress the importance of sharing information with other photographers. For the longest time when we were all starting out, everybody kept all that information to themselves. It's really important to share information because that information makes us all stronger. All of a sudden, 25 years ago, I learned that this guy was licensing these photos for $500 to the same company that I was licensing my photos for $200. All of sudden I said to them, hey, my fee is $500 and you know what they said, okay, right because they knew that's not their pain, they knew they were getting a bargain. Until that photographer shared that information with me, I had no idea that I could get more money. So just remember, other photographers are not your enemy. They are not your competition, they're your friend. Share information, become friends with them, connect with them, be friendly with them. Let's talk a little bit about showcasing your work, your set you're making PDFs, you're sending it to people, you have an Instagram site, you probably need a website. There's a lot of really good cookie cutter website companies out there that have the tools for you to make a really beautiful creative website. Every good photographer should have a website that will showcase your work. You want to also make a website that is easily updateable. You want to be able to change the photos on it regularly. You want to be able to create galleries that you can share with specific clients. Most of you probably have a Facebook page and maybe you may or may not know that Facebook only allows you to have 5,000 friends. Before you know it, you're going to have 5,000 friends, especially if you're posting photographs of rock bands that you're photographing, people like to look at that, they want a friend you, they want to know who you are, you're becoming more popular. The best thing to do is go and create a Facebook page that's just for your photography, so a business page. It could be your name followed by the word photography and you can start driving traffic to there and that has an unlimited amount of people that can follow you, that can like you, that could be friends with you. Additionally, you want to send out those PDF portfolios on a regular basis. You want people to see that you're constantly shooting, constantly creating, constantly creating new engaging work and they want to see you get better. Because if you're just starting out, they might say, that's cool, but not really what we're looking for just yet. The next PDF portfolio you send then they might say, wow, this guy's really improved, I really liked that shot and I need somebody in that town, in that city, in that region to go shoot something for me. I want to give that person a call and I'm going to hire him or her to go out and do this job for me. Client relationships are really important. Don't ever get mad at anybody. Don't ever use bad language with a publicist, an art director, a photo editor, even the most junior assistant photo editor because that junior photo editor, that might give you a break now, could be the senior photo editor on three years of that website publication. That person who you help out can help you out in a year or two or three, you never know who's going to be your boss before you know it. So don't treat anybody like a second-class citizen ever. Additionally, keep in mind, if you meet a band, you're not there as a fan, you're not a groupie. You're not there to get their autograph or take a selfie with them. You're there to work and connect with them on a professional level. To wrap this one up, share your work as much as possible. Share with the artist, let them share it on their social media pages because more people will follow you. If the artist is following you, their fans will follow you. Show your work to as many people as you possibly can that hire photographers that do the work that you're trying to do. If you're a concert photographer, show those concert photographs that people that hire concert photographers and there's a lot of people out there. Record companies use photos, social media directors for bands use photos, bands use the photos on their website. They use them to advertise their shows, they use them on posters, CDs. The uses are unlimited. To end this segment, remember, you will never get a job if no one knows who you are, you've got to get your work out there as much as you can, everywhere that you can to let people know this is what you do.
9. Conclusion: Thanks everybody for joining me with my photography Skillshare class. Hopefully you learned a whole bunch of things. My goal was to teach you some basic rules and now I want you to go out and break those rules because no risk, no reward. Once you're able to master aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and color temperature, you can go out and create all sorts of interesting engaging photographs. Take the things that you know and experiment. If you think you should be doing a portrait of 250 of a second, do it at 30 in seconds, 15, one second, break those rules and see what you come up with. That's how you will grow as a photographer. Check out what other people are doing online. Look at good photography, be inspired by it, see what's going on out in the world of photography. Instagram is a great place, if you want to follow me on Instagram, I'm @jayblakesberg. I also just started a new Instagram site called Retro Blakesberg being curated by my daughter. That is just photographs that I shot on film. There was no digital photographs in there. On Facebook I'm Jay Blakesberg photography and Twitter I'm @jayblakesberg. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Thanks for hanging out with us. Hope you had fun, hope you learned something. We'll see out there.
