Transcription
What's up, guys? Today we are in Miami, and we're going to be doing a photo shoot with Off-camera Flash and Annabelle in this blazing heat at 12:00 noon. We'll show you how I operate during the day and how I'm not scared to shoot at this time of day, or any time of day.
Now, here's what we're going to be using: The AD600 Pro 2 by Godox. This is a big boy, but it's going to come in handy, especially at this time of day. Now, Godox sent me the AD600 Pro 2 to check it out and see how it works in my workflow. They also sent over the X3 trigger here. This is for Nikon. I'm shooting on Nikon Z8. You might see the Z6II over there. And they also sent this 3-foot Octa.
Now, here's the thing: I'm not here to sell you an AD600 Pro 2. What I am here for is to show you how I am using these in my workflow because I've been using Godox ever since 2018 with their manual Explore 600s or AD600s. That was after I got rid of the Alien B600s and 800s, which are horrible to use compared to Godox equip.
So here we go. We got our approximately 3-foot octa right here. And by the way, if you don't know, these all pop up and attach our diffusers. Let's get a little higher here so you guys don't have to see me bend down and try to look at you upside down with a bad back. Here we go. Built up and ready to go.
Any company that sells octab boxes, soft boxes, or any kind of diffusers will generally have two separate diffusers for your softbox. I don't use the second diffuser; I only use one. To add the diffuser, you just circle it in around the Velcro. These, like most soft boxes and most companies that make soft boxes, have the Bowen's mount. These attach to a variety of different companies' strobes.
Now, like I've mentioned, I've been using Godox since about 2018. And you can see some of the strobes that I have here. These are just a few of them. These are the 600 manuals that came out around that time. And then these are the 200s. Usually, you'll see a lot of different branding like Flashpoint, Westcott, Godox, but Godox is the company that makes these. And then here is the AD600 Pro 2. This has TTL. These do not. This allows me to go down to 1/256 power. These will only go down to 1/128. These will go down to 1/128. And you can see the size difference in these from the originals.
Now, this is just a cover on here. And this is a little bit of a reflector. This is a new style reflector they have. The other reflectors are like 5 and 7 inches and come out a very long distance. Uh, but this easily comes off. And then you'll see what you're normally used to. There's your bulb. And this is going to go into our soft box.
Now, let's come over here by Anna, and we're going to set these up. I'm going to show you what I do to set up my stand, my softbox, and my strobe. I get this question all the time: "What kind of stand are you using?" "How are you traveling with your stands?" Cuz I literally fly every week to a different city or different country to teach or to shoot with clients. And this is my typical setup aside from the camera, softbox, tripod, which is about to be my stand. It's a travel tripod that I recommend to everybody. And then we have our 600 Pro 2. This right here is the clutch, game-changing, ultimate tool to be able to have a stand in any location: in water, in the ocean, on sand dunes, wherever you want. You might see us here in the pool today actually using this. Uh, but let me show you what this looks like when it's fully mounted up with everything on it.
Now, this is just a regular tripod. It's actually super duper cheap. You can get it on Amazon. I'll add the link down in the description for you. You can see how I'm pulling out the legs. Super duper quick. I recommend getting these where you don't have to screw them in and take up time. And then there's your stand. Now, this guy can mount on anything: stairs, on sand dunes, in odd locations because I can just pull the tripod legs wherever I want to get the right height or the right balance. And it goes up to about 77 inches. Now, I have an extra attachment on here that lets me go a little bit higher, but that's not necessary. And all you do is take the head off the tripod, attach this guy, which is just a little bit of a spigot, and this is what we're going to put our strobe on. Here's the strobe. We'll unscrew this bad boy so that we can get the handle where we want it. Screw the handle back on super tight. Everything locks in. And we'll just attach that onto here using the Bowen's mount. Good to go. And now this is what that setup looks like. Super easy to maintain, super easy to travel with. All this gets very compact and to put in my suitcase or my carry-on. Love this guy.
All right, so with Anna in our shot now, I just want to talk a little bit about the scene. And we have a whole backyard here that we can use, but the goal is going to be to split up this backyard into a few different sets. And we're just going to do two sets. One will be with this kind of scuba, uh, female type of setup for her upper body with her scooter here that she just pulled in after surfing or hanging out at the beach. And the other one we'll do with a bikini and eating some mango.
So the whole idea about all of this, though, is to try to create a little bit of a scene that can give us shots that aren't just standing there, you know, regular portraits of a person standing in a spot. How can we get at least a little bit more of a story going? And we're going to do that with props and with our Godox AD600 Pro 2 and the Octabox.
Let's talk about the light right now. And I'm talking about the ambient, the sun, as well as the Octabox that we're going to be using with the AD600 Pro 2. You can see the light hitting Anna on the back of her body here. It's hitting her hair, hitting her shoulders. And this is typically the setup that I'm trying to do when I'm working with off-camera flash. I'm trying to make sure that my subject doesn't have to worry about putting her face into the sun. If we were shooting natural light, that might be something that we're considering and doing: how she's looking up into the sun, closing her eyes, being very candid. Here we're going to do the same kind of thing, but in this case, I'm going to put the sun behind her.
Now, the sun is literally up there, but it's a little bit back there. It's a little bit back behind her body. If it was straight up above her body and above her head, we would be doing the same thing, but probably managing her face and where she's looking a little bit more. So, the sun is my second light in this shot. It's behind her here in this particular setup. And then here is going to be where we set up our off-camera flash. The reason I'm setting up my off-camera flash here is because I want to do a little bit of a motivated light scenario. The sun is primarily hitting her body here. I want my off-camera flash to come from this side, so it looks like the sun is wrapping around her body.
Right now, it's not the most beautiful light. Look, we have light hitting her cheekbone right here, hitting some of the areas above her forehead or on her forehead behind her hair. That's not creating the most beautiful light on her body and face. But when we have our off-camera flash coming from the same segment or the same side of her body as the sun, we can wrap that sun around with off-camera flash. Let's see what that looks like.
Now, here's how I get my exposure, my balance between my off-camera flash and my ambient. I don't even have my flash or my trigger on right now. All I'm doing is getting my ambient exposure. What that means is I'm looking in the background, looking at the highlights, things in her hair, where the sun is hitting, what the exposure looks like, and I'm getting that exposure. I don't care about the off-camera flash exposure right now. All I care about is what the light looks like on her body and face. So you, as a natural light photographer, can easily look at this and go, "Okay, cool. These are the exposure settings that I need." And right now I'm at f/2.8. I'm about .3 of a stop underexposed, and I'm shooting at 1/800th of a second, f/2.8 and ISO 250. Keep in mind that I'm shooting with a PolarPro circular polarizer. This is going to help me to manage reflections on her skin as well, but this is not to lower the exposure of my shot.
Now, I'm going to turn on my flash. Now, I'm going to turn on my trigger. And now, I'm going to get the proper power that I want. Nothing else is going to change in my shot except the light that is on her body and face. So, let's see what that looks like. You'll also notice from this angle that I'm feathering the softbox. So, this is the part going around to her body, and then the rest of this is going to come around giving my 3 feet approximately of light on her.
Now, we're going to go through the different powers of the flash. We're not using a light meter. I'm going to show you guys how you can chimp this and actually get the power that you want. Remember, nothing in my background is going to be changing. I've set up my exposure settings the way I want them. Now, I'm going to go ahead and test the different power levels here. And typically on a bright day when I'm shooting with HSS, I'm shooting over 1/200th of a second shutter speed. I need HSS to kick on, which it's automatically going to do because that's how I set this up. I'll start out at the full flash power, and then I'll come back down every stop to find out what power I want to have on her body and face. So, here we go on three. One, two, three. Typically, that full power is going to be too bright. And yes, it obviously is. This is also going to be good to show you guys what the power levels look like and my background and how that's going together to create a balance. Here we go. Half power on three. One, two, three. You're going to see the power start to come down. And I'll show you all of them. I'm going to go to a quarter power. We're going to flip the hat backwards so I can see through this viewfinder. One, two, three. And this is all just testing. Then we're going to start moving into how we can use the props to our advantage. The scooter, her walking. Still getting shots with movement on three. One, two, three. That's 1/8 power. And you're going to see how this is starting to look actually beautiful. I think I'm going to be here at 1/16th. On three. One, two, three. And 1/16th looks beautiful. As you can see on the screen right now, that's going to be what we go with. And the one thing to kind of remember with this is if I keep this distance approximately between her and the flash, that light is always going to look the same. Now, with the sun going in and out behind clouds, there might be some adjustments I make to shutter speed to get my background to be what I want it to be. But this right now is going to be beautiful with what we're seeing here on the screen. You can see how that light comes around the side and how the sun is hitting the back of her body still.
So, let's actually look at not just creating portraits. This is simple. We could do this all day. I could stand her up here. She could lean on this scooter, and I could just get a shot straight up and down every single time. But maybe we'll try and figure out some way to create more of a candid style scenario and speak to more of the story that I was talking about earlier, which is Anna's coming back from her surf trip here. She's pulling into her amazing little villa or her courtyard, and she's rolling up with the scooter. Let's get some of those shots here and see how we can make this a little bit more candid. Let's put this on TTL because one of the things that I really want to use this for is as Annabelle is walking down this side. I've moved her down to the edge of the pool over here to make it look more like she's coming back from something from her surf out on the beach. I want that power of that flash to adjust itself automatically as she gets closer or further away from it so that I don't have to worry about that. I can just set my manual exposure for my ambient, and the flash power is going to take care of the rest. Let's see that. Here we go. On three, one, two, action. You're going to do that same thing a couple of times. You got it. On this one, I'm going to have you looking like down towards the bike or in front of the bike. Yeah, like that. And looking over the side of it on action. Usually, I'm going from wide to coming in close, and with the 24-70mm f/2.8, that's easy to do. Looking towards me on three. One, two. Now, all of those are with TTL, so you'll get to see how the light is managing this distance and if it's changing or anything. That might be something you want to consider if you're using an auto style mode for the strobes. I typically prefer to use manual because I can manage everything. For these, just for reference, with this distance of the light from Anna and feathering it over her body, I'm using 1/16th, and this feels a little bit more natural to me. Sometimes TTL can be a little bit over. You can compensate for that by using exposure compensation or flash power compensation on your trigger, but I prefer if we're not moving to use manual. If she's moving, we can use TTL. On three. One, two, and just side-eye me from there. You can put the hand down. Just kind of keep that nose in that position. Can you maybe lean back and hold the handles like you're like pulling back a little bit so we see your chest more and your and the zip? Yeah, you like that. Let me have you, can you lay back and kick your feet up here?
Now, in this position with Anna, I just had her lean back so we can kind of change up the position a little bit. Have something a little bit more dramatic. Um, she's further back from the light now. She used to be right here. She's now a good three or four feet further away from the light than she was earlier. So, I'm just going to increase the power of the light. Again, if you're not comfortable with this sort of thing, you can use TTL to kind of gauge where you need to be. But for me, I prefer manual cuz I can set it and forget it. On three, one, two, test. Same thing here. On three, one, two. I'm going to get a little bit of a different angle here so that I can just not be the same kind of uh eye level as her. Keep in mind, too, her feet are going to be brighter than her face, but that's something we can easily modify and capture one.
Now, with the sun out, there is one thing I want you to see. You see how it's hitting her legs here on the opposite side of her body? That's great for me. I want more of that light. That's great. Now I can have the light hitting her face, which is more in the shadow. That's another benefit of this. This can balance out everything that's happening right there. On three. One, two. Typically, if I have the choice of where I'm positioning a person, I want their back or body to be in the sun. So, I'm sliding her down this way and getting her out of the shadow so that we get some highlights on her body in her hair across her legs. That to me is great. And then I can use the softbox to my advantage. Now, in all these shots, I'm going to have Anna looking over her left shoulder, which is down this way. And I'm going to bring this light down a bit since she's further down on the ground. This is going to allow the light hitting off her shoulder right there, her left shoulder, to work with this. That's my motivation for this light. On three. One, two. This way. Okay. This way. This way. Mouth open a bit. Do both legs, do both feet up on three. One, two.
All right, let's get a little bit of action. So, I'm going to have Anna jumping or pulling herself out of the water a little bit. And I'm going to take a shot as she does that. So, on three. One, two, three. I happen to see a cool little way that she was naturally hanging out on the ledge of the water. And instead of having her jump up, I'm going to get a couple of these real quick. These are at 70mm f/2.8. And the flash is right here above us pointed down on her. One, two. Stay looking over there. Looking towards me on a bunch of these. Now, on all of those, I'm shooting on the opposite side of the sun. Let's see what it looks like when I have the light on the same side as the sun to help amplify what we have going on with the sun versus fighting it from the shadow side.
In this case, I have the light coming from the same side as the sun. So, instead of fighting it from the shadow side, I'm going to be lighting her from the same side as the sun, allowing that to wrap around her body, giving me the soft light. We'll still see some hard shadows on some of her body when that sun kind of comes out in its full intensity. And that's totally cool. I want that, but I want her face to have more of that soft light. Her body can have hard light shadows all over it if we wanted to. Looking towards me in all these, the light on her face is going to be what we want it to be from the softbox. Let me get you to push up out of the water like we were just doing a second ago. Let's go with like a little bit of a lower angle. So, instead of being up there pointing down at you, I'm going to be here while you kind of shoot up. Here we go. On three. One, two, three. And last one. On three. One, two, three. Nice.
Whenever possible, it's kind of cool to have the different looks be a part of the same story. So, we're going to have Anna in a bikini right now eating mangoes here by the pool, kind of just hanging out, you know, beautiful, enjoying the pool, enjoying the sun. But we're going to go through the process of her taking that back down and then having her put the top on. Now, we're just going to see from the back from this side, and the shots are only going to show her back. Uh, but it's just a cool little transition between this look and the next look. And action. [Music]
Now, in true Miami fashion, it started to rain as we were setting up for our second part of this shoot. So, that's going to have to be a part two. I know, don't shoot the messenger. This stuff happens in Miami, but I wanted to show you guys what the carousel post is going to look like tying all these images in together. Now, these are just a few of the total ones that you saw there in the video, but you can see how I'm layering these in and how I'm going to be using these as a 4x3 carousel, which is now allowed on Instagram, where it used to just be 4x5 as the tallest uh shots that you could do. So, here's a little quick glimpse of what I'll be posting on Instagram from this set. And you can see how I'm layering them in as well as doing some seamless additions here where these cross over into other parts of the carousel. And this is just one way out of many. Here's another of Annabelle where we're doing a little bit of different composite modes across our set there for a really tight edit. Here we have some other ways of kind of doing this with frames, actual text. This is for Andy Bagus out in Jamaica. So you can see
How we're layering these in and crossing over onto different parts of the carousel. And then another one of Anna here in South Africa, in Cape Town. So you can see again how we can use this to our advantage. Real cool little text type of stuff. Black and whites. This is all natural light. So you can see how I shoot that as well.
If that kind of thing interests you and you want to learn how to do specific carousels in Photoshop, how to light people inside to actually look like natural light when it's actually off camera flash, how I'm directing individuals, editing individuals, coming up with different carousels for different social media platforms, all my presets, all my raw files, and of course, the carousel setups here. You can see right here, teaching you how I create my carousels, how I actually retouch in those carousels, and so much more.
It's here on dannybatista.com/learn.
If you guys have any questions at all, put them down in the comments. I'm very active and very easygoing. I'm happy to help you out in any way that I can. Talk to you guys soon.