Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I've been doing floral flatlays
for a number of years. They're beautiful. They're
inspiring. They're easy. I can set up at a
window here in my house and not have to go out
on bad weather days. I'm Denise Love, and I'm a still
life photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. I want to show you the piece that is the inspiration
for this class. This is a piece
that I had printed and framed a while back. It's roses. It's one of
the first rose flatlays that I started
experimenting with. To this day, it's still one of
my favorite pieces. I'm so glad I had it framed and it's hanging
in my living room. What we're going to
do in this class is I'm going to show you
how I took that photo. I'll show you my
background options. We'll talk about lighting, different flower choices
that you might select. We'll talk about
camera settings. We'll get into a
little bit of editing. I hope when you're all done, you'll be inspired to take a few of these flatlay
photos for yourself. I'm really excited to have
you here. Let's get started. [MUSIC]
2. Class project: [MUSIC] Your class project
for this class is to set up your own still-life
flat lay near a window, and take several
photos of your set. I'd love if you stayed at your
set for quite a while and took top-down coming
from the side, experiment with the side
lighting, back lighting. All the different
things that you can do. Because while you have thought
up this set and you pull the effort to get it together and your
props and everything. I want you to spend
some time at it and go past just taking
the one photo for the assignment and see how many beautiful
things that you can come up with and maybe
even create a series. But for your assignment, I'd like you to take
one flat lay of your set and come back and
share that with the class. This is another print of the framed photo that I
shared in the welcome video. Look how beautiful it is. I want you to experience having a print just as
beautiful for yourself. Spend some time on this. Don't rush through it. Get everything set up, experiment possibly with some
tethering so you can get all your composition and your layout from the very
beginning just right. But if you handhold
and you want to stand over it and take your photos
that way, that's fine too. It's up to anything that's
going to work for you in this setup and come back and show me
what you did. [MUSIC]
3. Flat lay inspiration: [MUSIC] I wanted to
show you some rose flat lays that I've
done just so I can give you some inspiration
for different layouts and things that you might do
for your own rose photos. Here, we have a completely different layout than the one that
we're doing in class, but I wanted you to see that
if you have five roses, you can do something fun. If you have three roses or three flowers or if you
have, in this case, eight or nine or 10 flowers, some of the different
things that you might consider setting up. This one's really fun and
there's two stacks of roses. I love the way the
light comes in and there's really
a pretty setup. Then we get into same set
from a different angle. I want you to not be
afraid to come in from different angles while for the main project in this class, I'm doing top-down photo
for a true flat lay. While you have all that setup, go all around the photo and take different shots
of your setup. Don't just stop at the one
photo and call it done. I like to get as
many pictures as possible of a setup
that I've put together. It really makes it
worth the time and effort that I spent
thinking it up, pulling it all together, getting my studio all ready, getting my camera all ready, and then getting in
there and taking photos. I want to get as
many great pictures out of one set as I can. I don't want to just take one
picture and call it a day. A lot of times, I will spend hours
at the same set. Sometimes, if I have say, a set of roses, I'll go back two or three days in a row because the first day, I'm getting the standard
stuff out of the way, the things I first thought of, the stuff that maybe
you'll think of. Then if I go back
the second day, now, I'm starting to think
outside the box and think, well, how can I change this up? How can I make it different? How can I do
something completely different than I did yesterday? Then I really start to move into more interesting
layouts and compositions, and I'll think of new
angles and I'll start playing with light manipulation. I really like going back to
the same set more than once. I definitely encourage
you to do this to start off with your main plot
lay as a top-down photo, but then don't be afraid to
move all around that and get different photos and different layouts and
different compositions. Change out your
lenses if you have more than one camera
lens to play with, especially if you get into vintage lenses or art
lenses like I do. Take those photos with every different
lens that you have. Take a ton of photos
with your first lens and then switch out the
lens and start over again. Don't stop and switch the
lens out for every photo. I want you to take a
group of photos and then switch out the
lens and try again, but I just want to
give you some ideas. This was two stacks of roses and some rose
petals all spread around. To get my main flat lay photo, I pulled back a little further and I'm getting a bigger scene. Then here's where I'm going back in different directions,
in different angles. Maybe in some of the photos, I even got really close
on the rose heads. This one right here is
particularly beautiful. That would have been
a nice single shot if I'd gotten in close on that. Remember, if I did or not, these are photos
that I took over the course of a
year every time I ordered flowers and
decided I wanted to do a new set of photos. If it came with roses, then I set up my flat lay table and took another set of photos with whatever flowers
that I happened to get. Oh, look, this one's real
pretty too coming in from the side focused on a
flower petal up front. Everything else is
thrown into blur. I love that movement back there. Every time I got flowers, this one's on the angle. I might not edited that one, I had some light coming in, but just playing there. Another angle coming in. Every time you get some flowers, set something up and play. This one actually was using a different lens and I can tell because up
here in the corner, this was that Lensbaby
Sahlin's with the texture plates closed
down because I can see that texture up here
in that corner. This right here is what started
out off my obsession with these roses and it's the photo framed that I showed you
there in the welcome video, but it's so beautiful and it's almost three-dimensional
and in person, it almost is like you can reach out and grab
that center rose. It just looks so real. This photo is the one
that makes me want to take another and another every time I
get a new set of roses. [LAUGHTER] Maybe
they'll never be as good as my favorite, but the more you practice and the more you
try, you never know, you might end up with
something you never expected, something different,
something cool. I think this one's really pretty with all just the pink roses. Then I started playing
with some peonies. There are some photos in the
flat lays where I've used other flowers and this was a time when I could
get some peonies, a time of the year when
they were blooming. These were my neighbors. She actually let me cut
a couple of her stems to play with and I thought,
well, I've got them. I'm going to take as
many peony pictures as I possibly can, and I set them up on my
little flat lay table too. Then this is another
peony variety. This is actually the peony that I grow right out here
in my front yard. I have one random
peony plant that was planted before I ever
bought my condo, but out front and randomly it's bloomed every
single year for me [LAUGHTER] and I don't do
anything special to it. It's just out there. It's not my favorite peony. I really like these peonies that have all these
petals in it. This is more of a
single layer of petals that's in there with the
bright yellow center, but right here where
they're still closed up, they were so very pretty that
I cut the three blooms and thought time to photograph the one peony
flower that I grow. This bright pink or red that these come in are actually
a harder color to photograph because the pink or red actually comes
out almost neon. They're almost too vivid. A lot of times when I go
to edit red and pink, I will desaturate the photo
just a tiny bit to knock off. Some of that glow, that bright neon
coloring that just doesn't even look real it's weird and not a good way to me. I knocked saturation down a couple notches so that
they come out pretty. But these are almost
like flower portraits here that I've done
with these and I love how each one of these came out whether I
did two flowers, or three flowers here on the little triangle for composition and this one
is more on the angle. I want you to play with your compositions,
with your flowers, and see what you can
come up with and even a single flower portrait
ends up beautiful in this. This would be really pretty as a triptych if I did the
single, the double, the triple, I'd have a really beautiful triptych
there in that set. It was the perfect
flower [LAUGHTER]. Here's one where I've triangled
the flowers and then a nice setting where I had
two different colors of flowers and I had six
flowers and I thought, what can I do with the
sixth odd ball flower? Because usually you do things in odd numbers, and here
I thought, well, let's just see what we can do and I played with that
composition there, almost like it was a bouquet of flowers rather than
a flower portrait. Another one where I've
got some peonies. These might have been
some that I ordered in during peony season from an online flower resource
because I think I had a dozen of them
when I took this photo. Something that you could
consider if you've got a bigger
quantity of flowers, try to fill the frame
with the flowers. Then one thing that I
mentioned briefly in one of the segments in class is this is a really
great opportunity, especially if you're
tethering to do hand in the frame as
part of your flat lay. That's exactly what
I've done here. I'm tethering onto my iPad with my wireless tethering
device connected to my camera. I'm getting everything
positioned, getting the focus on the
flower head where I wanted it, and then hitting the
shutter button on my iPad with a little timer delay
so I had like 10 seconds to really nail it and see
what my hands were doing and get that exactly in the composition and the position that I wanted, and then 10 seconds and it
snapped the picture for me. The thing to think
about when you're doing hand-in-the-frame is you want to use a little bit of olive oil. Olive oil is what I use. You want your hands and
nails to look moist and manicured like they're fresh
and have lotion on them, and I usually do
this with olive oil. I'll put olive oil
on my cuticles. I'll rub it into my hands
real lightly so that my hands and my cuticles look like they're freshly manicured, so don't take a picture with
your hand in the frame. If your hand is all dry
and your cuticles are dry, go get some olive oil
and spread that on your cuticles and your
hands and rub it in real good and then
take your photos. Another one with the hand in the frame a little bit
different composition. Again, I've just got
some pretty roses, different compositions
there on the roses. Here's the two that I'm
showing in class as some examples of with the
triangle and then up and down, up and down, and then one
with the hand in the frame. Again, I put olive oil on my hand and rubbed it in so that the hand looks
nice and moist, and then I'm picking
up a flower and focused on hand in the frame, I'm paying attention to
where the hand is located, the position of my fingers. I want it to be a nice, elegant hand-holding frame, not something where my
fingers are sticking out or it looks odd or
something like that. I'm keeping all
these things in mind as I'm tethering on my iPad, looking at my composition
overall. Here's one. When we go through
backdrops and I talk about using different
backgrounds. This is one of those
vinyl backgrounds that I showed you
and you see how beautiful that turns out with the vinyl as
the background. If you've just got
little vinyl backdrops, you can order some of
those off of the Etsy. Etsy is probably my
favorite source. These are a little
two-foot by two-foot, just random backdrops that I have purchased that I thought, these are pretty, and
that's one of them, and it turns out as a
great flat lay piece. Same with using my wood floor so that's on the wood floor itself all the way
down on the floor, and look how beautiful
that turns out. Here it is on the white chipy wood background and that's actually a
photograph that I took. I do mention that
you can take some of your own photos of surfaces
and then have them printed and I have those
mounted to foam core board so that I can use them
as a backer board in my photographs and
that's one of them. That's the side of a house that I took and
printed and look how beautiful that is as a backdrop
for something like this. This is another one, a texture photo that I have printed out and mounted and used as a backdrop and I love that textured background behind
stuff too, so that's fun. Another one hand in the frame, just positioning the roses where I thought they looked
the most pleasing, olive oil to my hand up
and then tethered to take that photograph
and get everything positioned exactly
where I wanted it. You can do photos like
this with like a remote. If you don't want a tether, you can get everything set up, get down on the floor, and then snap the picture
with your remote. I just feel like I'm
doing it a little more blind that way and maybe I'll get the photo I want or maybe I'll have to take the photo 15 times before I end up with one
that I'm happy with. I just find tethering
made that a little easier for me and I tried putting my hand here in a different spot on the
photo just playing. I wouldn't say
that's my favorite, but I did experiments. I did this one better with
the hand in the frame. Our last one here with the
hand in the frame and putting some of the flower petals
down as your background, and same without the hand. Almost too busy,
without the hand, with all the flowers and the
petals that runs together. But just fun to experiment
and give you some ideas on some different
things that you might consider for your flat lay. I hope you enjoyed this
little run-through of all the ones that I've played with and experimented
in the last year or so. I'll see you back
in class [MUSIC].
4. Background choices: [MUSIC] Let's talk
about different backgrounds that you can use for your beautiful
flower or rose flatlay. What I'm looking at here
is some vinyl backdrops. Normally, I love real
wood backdrops and the depth and age
that you get on a weathered wood
antique surface. But when I did a bunch of
these type photos for myself, playing with different
backgrounds and different roses, I discovered that I liked the vinyl backdrops almost as much as the real
wood background. I just thought I would
show you some of the options on the
vinyl backdrops. I'm shooting on a
two-by-two vinyl backdrop. These are about two feet
wide and two feet long, so they are very small. These are fairly
inexpensive if you get a backdrop this small, which is a great
size for a flatlay or some project like
we're doing here today. I love this one because it looks like antique
wallpaper on a wall. That was one of my
favorites that I've used. This one not so much. When you're looking
at backdrops and evaluating whether you're going to like the surface or not. If it's got so much going
on and then you put a flower say on top
of that surface, I think that what
you're going to find is that really no element
has its chance to shine. For instance, if I've
got the rose on there, it may look okay. But I really think in
evaluating the backdrops, I like that one better. But that's personal preference and you're only going
to discover some of your preferences by actually
doing some of this work. If you're looking
at backdrops and something really
jumps out at you, try it, buy it. Give it a test run.
You never know. This was that same wallpaper
and a half brick wall. Not my favorite for this project but I do love this
particular background. A faux wood surface. Those work particularly
well because I liked the flowers and
the wood surfaces anyway, especially like my table that we're going to get
to here in a moment. If you don't have a real
beat-up wood surface, a faux wood surface will definitely do a
good job for you. That's a darker one. I have a lighter one. It depends on if you're
going for dark and moody like I'm going for
or if you're going for light and bright and
maybe you want to go with something in the white or
the lighter color range. Then this is more medium tones. Not my favorite
color tone but it is pretty for a backdrop for
maybe some other projects. You see it's really
totally getting into personal preference,
your own style. Which one jumps out at you
and which one doesn't? To figure out which ones of these are going
to work for you. Now, something like this, it's almost too busy. But when I put the rose
on it, I don't hate it. Just have to give it a tryout and
see what you like. This is like antique wood
door, shutter kind of thing. Then a really more weathered, got the chippy paint on it. That's a fun surface. This is my favorite
surface and it's a beat-up antique table
that I got off of Etsy. Yeah, I got off Etsy. It is a 1900s salesman sample of a dining table with
drop leaves on it. Both of the leaves on
this table drop-down. This was in somebody's attic and a grandparent passed away and it came up as an item for sale that the person
wasn't going to keep. I about had a fit. This is the most amazing
texture and grunge. Who knows what is going on
the top of that table over the last 120 years but it's so delicious to
photograph things on top of. As soon as I set my
flowers on top of that, I knew immediately that was the surface I wanted
to photograph on. Keep your eyes open
when you're on Etsy or eBay or at the
antique market. Any kind of small
table like this. This is only a foot and
a half off the floor, so it's very low to the floor, which I like because
now the light comes in from the window, a little above it,
but from the side, which is very interesting
for the lighting. I can put this up
on a bigger table if I need it to be up a little
higher to work with it. It's just such a yummy surface. Be looking around for the
beat-up wood surfaces. Even if I just had this two-by-two top
without the base on it, that'd be a great
photography board. I could eventually take
the base off this and then set this on any surface I wanted to use it on.
That would be great. The other surface that I loved using is this wood floor. That made a really
beautiful photograph too. If you've got real pretty
wood floors and you don't mind setting up your project
on the floor by a window, that's a great surface. Another good surface,
let me go grab one, would be some type of wood photography board
that you've either created or purchased or come
across at the antique store. What I like about
these is the size. This one is a two
foot by three foot, and it's perfect for a project like this
because I can move it around and photograph whatever I want right here
on the surface. You can make or buy
these in lots of different finishes
if you're looking for photography boards online. The last one I want
to show you is a printed photo mounted on some foamcore board and that's a great surface
to photograph on. If you go out and you find the most amazing set
of shutters or doors, or wood on the side of a
house and you think, wow, look at that great texture and color and I love everything
about it and you're like, man, I wish I had that
as a photography board. Well, you can. What
I recommend is, you take photos of that surface, true to life size of how
much you want to print them. Let's say, you want to print them 20 inches by 30 inches. What I would do is measure with my measuring tape on say, the wall on the
side of the house. I'd measure 20 inches to figure out how much space that is. I would fill my camera
frame with 20 inches. I would get right
up close to it, fill the frame with about the
size I want to print this. Then when I send
it to the printer, I would print it about the
size I had in my mind. If I'm working with 24 by 36, like on these photography boards and that's the size I
want to print these out, then I would take a
section of the wall. I'd get it close enough where I had two feet worth of wall by three feet worth of wall in the frame of my camera and
I would take that picture. I would take it on at least
an F8 so that all the details and everything that
I wanted to be in focus was actually in-focus. Then when you print these, you want to print it on
matte or satin photo paper. This is on satin paper. Some printers don't
offer like a true flat, so you'd get like an
eggshell or satin. You can see, there's
some glare on it. But if we tilt these
just a little bit or where it's positioned
differently in the light, depending on where we are, the glare doesn't make
any difference when I have my camera shining
down on the surface. That is some of my
recommendations on different surfaces that you
might consider shooting on. You might look at
vinyl backdrops, you could print your own
surface, photography board, some type of real
fun wood surface you find at say the
antique market, or if you've got some wood
floors that you love, set right up on the floor. I'll see you back
in class. [MUSIC].
5. Styling our flat lay: [MUSIC] Let's talk about
styling our set. For this particular project, I like to use five flowers, and in this case, the roses have become my
flower of choice when I'm doing this flat lay
photo for the flowers. What I like with the five
flowers is now I have a chance to style where I
want those flowers to go. You'll notice as I'm
laying them on there, there's a lot of leaves still on these flowers that
are distracting. So I want to take off most
of the leaves really. I want to take off all the
leaves that are further down. I might leave one random
leaf on some of my flowers, but I don't want to leave
most of the leaves there. I want to pull off any of
the ones that are fuller down and then maybe I will strategically come back in and place some of these that we've pulled off
and still use them, so don't throw them out. I want to be careful not to have them sitting under
the flower really, I don't want them to be so distracting that
they look strange. Let me set these behind me. When I pick out these roses, I want to have long stems. If you go to a florist and they try to
cut the stem short on you. Tell them no, you
want long stemmed. When I frame these out, I like the flower head and the bottom of the stem
to be in the frame. I want the flowers at this point to probably be fairly fresh. No brown and peeling spots on the petals. That
one had thorns. [LAUGHTER] If you've got a petal that looks particularly bad, go ahead and pull that off. These don't look too
bad. I've had them for a day or two so
that they can open up. I like the stems to be
as straight as possible. Then the prettiest flower, I want to be the center hero. I'm just going to
visually adjust and figure out what's the
best layout that I like. As I've taken many of these
as each time I got roses, I'm like, let me go
to a rose photo. [LAUGHTER] I actually
started experimenting with the composition. I've liked this composition. I also like it when you bring it down and you have the
flower heads in a row, and they're going up and down. You can also do a composition where they're
in reverse and you have a nice V going rather than the original where we
have an arrowhead going. Get creative and play with the different
elements that you've got and decide what's the layout that's
appealing to you the most. This is also the
perfect type layout. You want to practice with
your hand in the frame. I've taken several
of those also. What I'll generally do
is sit by the table and I'll have my hand in
the frame as I'm down low. Then maybe I'm holding
a flower and I'm taking that photo of that setup
with my hand in the frame. I've done this particular setup with lots of different
types of flowers. I like peonies. Roses are great. You could do tulips. You could probably
do calla lilies. I have some calla
lilies in this bunch. If you want to get real creative and you had enough flowers, you could throw in a
few other elements in there as you're experimenting
with your layouts. Those would be fun.
Take the photos, and just be thinking
what's the best lighting, what's the best composition? Let me move these around. Let me trade the flowers in and out from where I have them. Maybe I want the flowers to be set up more with the bigger, blowing the ones out further. Play with them. I like the two-tone roses
when I do stuff like this because they dry really pretty and then I can keep
taking photos with them. But get creative and
play with these. I'm going to set these back up, take some photos of them, and then play around a bit and just see what I get. [MUSIC]
6. Shooting with natural light by a window: [MUSIC] Let's talk about the
lighting of this setup. I'm set up by my window
here in my studio. I'll show you a pullback
of that real quick. What I've got is I'm by the window and the
window has curtains, they're close because
it's pretty bright out. There's a photography
scrim in this window. The reason why I
have the scrim in the window because if I
take this scrim out of the window and I
opened the curtain, look how bright and harsh the light coming in
on that picture is. To really get an
understanding of the light, it'd be really great if you took this photo with the bright
harsh sunlight on it. Then took this photo with say, the curtains closed a bit. Then took this photo with
the squirm in the window. Just see which of those layouts, which of those
lighting settings on your computer do you end up
thinking looks the best? I'm using natural
light for this setup. I have all the lights
in the room off and I'm pulled right up within
about a foot of the window. I'm only going to have the
natural light on this frame. The way that I have this setup, the light is coming
in here from the side a little tiny bit
above it because I'm sitting below the window. But I'm going to have
the yummy side lighting with all the shadow
here on the right side. If I wanted to do a photo
where I had backlighting and I wanted the light coming in,
backlighting the photo. I could rearrange
this setup this way. Then the light would
be hitting the top of flowers and coming
down the stems. Just as a side note, when I threw those
down like that, look how pretty the little stems crossing over each
other just did. That might be something
you consider. If you've got stems that
aren't quite straight, maybe crisscrossing
the stems to make an interesting pattern would be really cool for your photo. I didn't try that when I took lots of these flower
photos in the past. Some of these are
not straight stems. In that styling, I might consider
crisscrossing those and see if I liked that layout. When you're set up in a
window or you're set up by the window you've
decided to photograph in and I want you to
diffuse the light, take a picture with the
harsh light if you want to see the difference in
the outcome at the end. But I want you to
diffuse the light, turn the lights in the room off, and shoot this photo with
just the natural light. [MUSIC]
7. My behind-the-scenes camera setup: [MUSIC] Let's talk about the
set-up that I have going on here to take this photo. Now, if you want to
stand over the photo and hand-hold the photo and
just shoot straight down, definitely try that out. But the older I get when
I'm taking photographs, the less in a hurry I am. At this point, I've already done the years and years of hand-holding and taking
a thousand photos, trying to get the
one great photo and standing over things until
my back hurts so bad I couldn't stand
up straight again [LAUGHTER] and doing
all the things. What I would really
consider the hard way, the working harder, not
smarter way for me. I have decided on
these flat lays, it's much easier to use a tripod with a boom
arm, and that's boom, B-O-O-M and that is the telescoping arm that comes out 90 degrees from the tripod. That makes this job
so much easier. What would really
make it nice on that camera that I
have is if it had a flip screen and
the screen flipped up and then I wasn't trying
to look through the eyepiece. I found that difficult
too and at some point, I decided to start tethering my camera to my iPad
or my computer. You can tether your camera
in many different ways. If you don't have the capability in camera like a lot of the new cameras do now. You can tether with
wireless tethering devices, which is what I use. I've got the CamFi, C-A-M-F-I wireless
tethering device that hooks right on the top of the camera and plugs right in. Then it talks to the
CamFi app on my iPad. I control the camera
from my iPad. I can see the scene
that's going on. I can focus my lens so
that my focus is perfect. Then I can take the photo from the iPad and do everything from that wireless tethering
so that I'm not touching the camera the whole
time causing any shake. That's my very favorite
way to take the photo. Because when you're looking
at the photo through the little tiny eyepiece as
you're standing over it, it's really hard to decide if that composition is dead on
exactly where you want it. Whereas if you're
looking at it on a bigger screen like your iPad, you can get over there and
move those roses around and tweak that layout until
it's absolutely perfect. Looks really great
for composition. Everything is exactly
where you want it with the extra leaves
that you added in, you'll take that
picture once or twice and then you've got the
picture that you wanted. That's so much easier
to me than standing over the setup for an hour, snapping and then looking, thinking no I still
don't have it, let me try again or
miss the focus or the focus is in the wrong
place or the layouts wrong, or I was looking crooked, so it's slightly
skewed and you just eliminate all those extra
steps in the photo. I really get the
most beautiful ones when I take a moment
to set it all up, put that camera on that tripod where the
arm telescopes out, tether it to my iPad so I
can tweak it just right. Then I can comfortably be sitting in a chair
taking that photo. [LAUGHTER] Then you
can see my pullback of my scene here also, where we're in the
window and there's enough light coming
in because you can see how that light is
reflecting on the curtain. There's enough light
coming in that I needed to diffuse that off
the table itself. I do have that round reflector
diffuser sitting there. I don't have harsh light
on that table setup. Now reflecting
through that curtain because that curtains thin enough for the light
to come through, but still is a good
diffusing agent. If I wanted the roses with a little bit of sunlight on it, but not super harsh, like it would be if I
opened the curtains, I could move the diffuser, leave the curtain shut and get a little bit of the sunlight streaming on the
flowers and that might be pretty because
it's still diffused. Just a personal preference
and choice there. Just wanted to give you a
little look at my setup. Talk about tethering. If you've got a
camera that's got the Wi-Fi in it that already connects to its own app on
your computer or your tablet. Use it. The newer
cameras have that. You can also tether
with a tethering table. There's so many choices
out there that there's no way for me to really tell
you what's the best for you. There are just a lot of tethering options
and if that sounded interesting and definitely
look further into that. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC]
8. Tethering and Camera Settings: [MUSIC] I want to
talk about tethering, a moment more as I talk
about camera settings. I just showed you that
we're set up still. I tweaked it a little
bit as I was going, but I got the CamFi hooked
up so I could show you what that looks like
tethered here on my iPad. Why I really loved
this is because now it's much larger
for me to see, and I can zoom in on that flower and nail the focus of whatever it was I was
trying to get in focus. I can now adjust my camera while I'm
looking at the iPad, and I can get the focus exact,
exact, because I'm using manual lenses when I'm
shooting this scene today. I'm using a Lensbaby Velvet, and maybe my eyesight is
not what it used to be or looking overhead
at this camera angle. It's hard because I don't know, you're standing over,
you're looking down, maybe you can't really get a clear sight in
your screen there, and on here, I can
nail the focus on the head exactly where I
want it and I love it. I can adjust all the
little flower stems. If I think, there's an
open spot right here, I could go get some
leaves and fill that in, and I can just make
all my adjustments and then take that photo. Keeping in mind camera settings. I want to have great exposure, I want the ISO and the f-stop and my shutter speed
to all work in conjunction to give me a
beautifully exposed photo. To do that, I want the
ISO to normally be between 100-400 so that I
get not too much grain. If you're on a really
nice camera and you can go higher than that
and not be very grainy, then that's the decision
that you can make. Also want to make sure
that the f-stop is at the right place
for the amount of blur that I want for this setup. If I want all the
roses in focus, maybe I need to be at an F8
or something along there. If I want the main flower
in focus, the head thing, but the background to fall
into a little bit of blur, maybe I want to be on an F4. If I want it to be really blurred and glowy for this lens, maybe I want to be on that 2.8. I prefer, and you can see
the sun going in and out, you can see your exposure
varying a little bit. But I prefer the flower to
be in heads, to be in focus, so I want to be on about an F for my own preference
on these photos. Then once I know that I've got
to have an ISO of say 200, an f-stop of say, F4, then the only other decision that
I got to make is how fast does that shutter need to go to give me a
properly exposed photo. I had it set up when we
started this video at on 1, 120 bit of a second. But we can see now the light has gone in a little bit
and I would need to change that to probably 180th of a second or
160th of a second. Being able to see this on
my screen and judge what exactly I want that
exposure to look like really makes that
nice and easy for us. Then you can see I can just take that photo right there on the screen and then
move to the next photo. I really loved tethering. I like to get the
exposure right in camera so I'm
usually going to be adjusting those settings
working it as I go, so that I've got great exposure. If I move that scrim out of the way, you can see some brighter
light come in on our scene, and you can see on the
iPad what that light does. You can see, we really don't
want that stream of light, so I need to go and close
the curtain a little bit more but it's pretty
on the rest of it. If I go and close that gap, having that little
bit of light on this setting might
be pretty today. I might test that
out just to see. Then I might open it
all the way up and get a good harsh picture just
to show you the difference. That's my little spiel
on camera settings. Decide how much blur you want and that's your
f-stop, and to do that, I do little tests with
my photos at like F2, and F4, and F8, and just see how
much blur do I want. Then I'll do a little
test on ISO at 100, 200, 400, 800, or 1,000 and see which
one is just too grainy, and I'll stay below that. Then the shutter speed
is just how much that shutter speed needs to
be sped up or slowed down, depending on those
other two numbers, and how much light that I've got coming in that window when it goes behind the clouds
and it's really cloudy, that shutter speeds got to slow down because it's
got to stay open a little bit longer to let that light in to get
the good exposure. But when the sun pops out from behind the clouds and it's
shining in like it is now, well, I got plenty of light, I can speed that
shutter speed up, get that photo a
little faster and still have a properly
exposed photo. I'll see you back
in class [MUSIC].
9. Shoot recap & Editing in Lightroom: [MUSIC] I thought
it would be fun to go through and edit one of the photos that we took of this exact set that I
was just showing you. If you zoom in really good, you can see how I really nailed the focus on that
with the tethering. This particular table has big lines in it where the leaves come up and then
you have a line in it. A lot of times if I'm
shooting a little closer up, I will try to shoot
the flowers in between those lines so that I
can crop the lines out. Sometimes before I get to that, I will come down here to the transform window
and I will hit the auto button
because when you're shooting straight
down on something, sometimes maybe you're
not as straight as you think [LAUGHTER] because I didn't have a level
set on that camera. [LAUGHTER] If you hit
that auto transform, it might pull some of the
distortion out for you. This is generally that transform feature that
when you're taking a photo of a tall building from the ground and the building looks distorted the
further up it goes, this helps you undistort those buildings and it's the same concept
here on a flat lay. I like to come down and just
hit the auto and see if it straightens and tightens
up that photo better for me. If I don't like it, I can always turn it back off. But you can see I must
have been slightly tilted because it's not as
straight as it could be. I'm going to leave that
on auto for that and then go back up here to the basic and start
tweaking our photo. I'm actually going
to crop that in. I don't want these lines
in the photo and I'm going to hit the shift key
to retain my ratio. I'm just going to decide. I just want to crop
the lines out. I'm either going to
include the lines on purpose and take that photo with the intent of the lines being
there or I'm going to take my photo inside the lines with the intent of
cropping them out. With these particular photos, I do like to crop those out. I'm just going to go
through and tweak wherever it is that
I feel like maybe it needs it as I'm going down. In my basic panel, I'm tweaking some
different things here, just eyeballing it to see
where I'd like to have it. I may go back and change
those and tweak them again. I might add some clarity, a little bit of texture. Maybe I want to
add some vibrance, but in one of the other
videos I mentioned, pink and red are sometimes
harder to photograph, especially if the entire flower is bright pink or bright red, and in that instance, I'll come right down to this
little desaturation button and I'll just come
down a little bit on the saturation of that two
or three or 10 little points and just pull the, knock-off the intensity
of the pink or red, because sometimes the
whole flower is red, it's almost neon
and it looks weird. If you'll desaturate
that a tiny bit, you'll make that flower look
a lot better in its photo. I'm going to keep going. I always throw a curve on these. I start off with maybe
three control points here. Then I'm going to make it matte because I like the matteness. I wanted to delete that
point I accidentally added. I want it to be a
little more matte. I like the matteness. It's a little more film
like and as I go down, I may go back up to the
top and adjust some of those sliders again. I always go to the detail and I up the sharpening
and we can be right here on our flower if you want to see how
much that sharpens. Then I'm holding down
my Option key on a Mac, my Alt key on a PC, the Option Alt button there. I'm going to mask it off because currently everything is
included in the mask, so you're going to be sharpening every single pixel in the photo, which might add
some grain that you didn't intend and I
don't want to do that. If you mask it off while you're
holding that button down, moving that mask button, you can see exactly what's
being sharpened and now I'm not over-sharpening
every pixel in the drawing. Hold down the Option
Alt key and you'll see what's being masked and mask it off to where just the details are showing up there for you. If you have any noise, you can make things with the noise reduction
here if it's too noisy. You got to be careful
with that button because if I push
it all the way up, it makes the whole
picture look plastic. [LAUGHTER] Be sparing
with that button. I've seen people
before in videos say, I just push it to 100 every time and I think,
oh my goodness. [LAUGHTER] I like to come down to the effects on these and I do want to vignette, I wanted a fairly large
midpoint that's rounded and I want to pull the eye
in by darkening the corners. I can determine how
feathered that is, Here you can see
exactly what that is. I would like it
nice and feathered. Then I might go back to the
very top here and start tweaking again just to
get my final thing in. It's almost, I don't
know that I like the vibrance up
and I may want to desaturate it just a little bit. Because it's almost very
vivid and color in its own. That's really
pretty right there. Just make sure I've
got everything here where I want it and I may want less contrast rather than more
contrast, Let's see. I'd just like to go
through and be like, do I like this, or
do I like that? Then if I've got any
spots that I want to heel off my photo, like there are a few spots
on here that could be heeled on that table. I actually prefer to
do that in Photoshop, but I don't know that I'm
going to do that in Photoshop today because I don't
plan on doing anything else to the photo beyond
what we're doing. I might see what these look
like doing it in light room. I prefer it in Photoshop
because I feel like the spot heal works better in
Photoshop but for those little spots
that I was doing right there that took
care of what I needed, and I could get the ones out here that are bigger
on this table. These are actual spots from the manufacturing
of the table, but, see that looks good. Take off any blemishes you
can before you're finished. Sometimes I'll put this in Photoshop and do
an extra layer of sharpening and maybe I'll add a texture and just
see what I like. But for these flat lays, I generally like a
really yummy edit and I'll call that a day. Here is our photo that I set up. I hope you enjoyed
walking through the editing and I will see
you back in class. [MUSIC]
10. Final thoughts: [MUSIC] Wow. Now you've
taken the class. I hope that you have been
inspired to set up a flower flat lay near a window in your own home and
taking some photos. Then I would really love
if you went back to your class assignment
and made sure that you come back and
share at least one of the photos that you
took of your flat lay. I have really loved
having you in class. I hope you enjoy and are inspired by this
particular subject. I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]
DENISE LOVE, Artist & Photographer
