Become Better Photographer: Working with Ugly Indoor Light Using 1 Strobe and No Modifier with Vanessa Joy

July 21, 2019

*For more information visit AdoramaTV YT page, and of course you can keep up with Vanessa on Instagram @VanessaJoy.

Making the best out of worst possible conditions is sometimes required of professional photographer to save his clients day. In this episode with tremendous Vanessa Joy and AdoramaTV, we will explores Vanessa’s strategy of keeping control of the situation in any room/stage/location.

Vanessa starts: “You ever walk into a venue and it looks amazing but then you take a picture and it looks like this?”

“so here’s the thing sometimes you work with clients and they think this picture spot is gorgeous because of all the chandeliers and this and that one the other thing then you go to take a picture and it’s absolutely horrible. Well I could look at this picture here and then attempt to just fix it with white balance but it’s just gonna look like this.”

“…and that still doesn’t look good and then I’ve got a lot of post work to do I don’t want to do that I want to get it as right and camera as I possibly can, so what I’m gonna look for is just finding the biggest solid surface that I can and in my case this is a pale yellow wall.”

“I’d love the white wall but pale yellow will do. So we’re gonna point it at that. Light travels in straight lines ,so back to geometry class kids – you’re gonna have to think about the angle that the light is hitting that wall. It’s going to bounce off at an equal angle. If you play pool – kind of the same thing. I don’t have a modifier in this case so I’m just firing this light on this wall in that entire wall and that becomes my light source.”

“First shot doesn’t look so great. Why does it look yellow even though my white balance really isn’t all that off ? Because my light is reflecting off the yellow wall so therefore everything’s a little bit yellow! I have to adjust for that.”

“So adjusting for it works okay and now we’re just gonna tweak our settings adjusting the white balance,”

“adjusting the exposure to try to make it look good. When I’m doing this I’m getting my exposure just like I normally would as if I didn’t have a flash, and then I’m turning on my Profoto b1 and setting it to TTL . It does a little work for me. I don’t have to guess -I’m just gonna let it do the work for me.”

“Now we’re okay! We get it around where I want it to be as far as color goes but I see some ugly shadows on the wall. I can’t really do too much about that unless you have another light or maybe you’re reflecting a light so I decided to just move them over a little bit so that the angle of the light isn’t so bad because I don’t have another light.”

“Here in the situation I’m using reflector to bounce light back at them so my shadows aren’t as harsh, and it just looks a little bit more flattering on their face. So I’m gonna scoot them over a little and get them in a better spot where the shadow isn’t gonna show up on the wall not just because of where the light is but because I also move over so I’m just not seeing as much of the shadow on the wall.”

“It looks okay. Try to get a little bit better, cleaner background, making sure there’s nothing behind their heads and then zooming in. There really allows me to just crop out the shadow. Now I’ve got some nice portraits of them in an area that would have been extremely ugly.”

Check out our WORKSHOPS in Los Angeles that teach you hands-on how to make great photos!

One of our closest workshops –Studio Lighting 101: Introduction to Studio Lighting and 3-Light Set Up will take place on August 7th, 7-9pm, in one of our Los Angeles studios !!!

Watch the full episode with Vanessa Joy and Adorama TV:

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