Transcription
Hey everyone, I'm Jason Sterling, owner of Rocktown Media. Today, we will be going over a still pose for volleyball, and we'll be going over a couple variations of an action shot for volleyball.
So, for today's shoot, we'll be using the Westcott FJ400 V2. Really excited to be using this light and get to use the touchscreen features on this that really help streamline all of the setup process, and we're just ready to go. So let's get into it.
We're at Elwood High School today. We have Faith here, she is our volleyball athlete. We're going to be going through just a few typical volleyball poses that I go through on any given media day.
The first pose that we're going to do is a very popular pose that I've been doing the past couple years. She's going to have the net draped around her. We're going to have a couple people hold the net, probably about seven, eight feet away from her, and we're going to get a low angle shot, kind of shooting up. But we're going to use the net kind of as a leading line up to her. We're also going to have fog kind of running in the background just to create some nice texture stuff and also going to separate her kind of from the background.
So, the way I normally photograph my athletes or any kind of sports portraits, I love to darken the background. So, as you can see, we're in a fully lit gym right here. I'm going to show you how you can get a dark background without having to turn off the lights. All you need to do is have your strobe lights at a certain setting. Str over in just just a minute, and then of course, your modifier choice does make a huge difference on this. You need to use direct modifiers. Using any kind of shoot-through like an umbrella or anything will not get you the look that you're looking for here. So, by using like direct modifiers, you're directing the light at your subject. It's not bouncing all over the place like it would for like a shoot-through umbrella.
For our key light, we're using the Manny Ortiz Beauty Dish right here. We have a 53-inch umbrella for our fill light, and then we have have two 70-degree reflectors that we'll be using for the rim lights. Now, I love using this Manny Ortiz Beauty Dish, especially in combination with the easy boom, just because you get that nice typical portrait lighting, and it just looks absolutely fantastic. And we have really good coverage here with this 53-inch umbrella, just to give a nice fill all throughout the body. Because one thing you will notice is if you just use this Manny Ortiz Beauty Dish, you're not going to light the lower half of the body as much as the upper half. So, adding this 53-inch umbrella for a fill really kind of fills in the shadows at the lower half of the body.
Now, for our rim lights, I love using these 70-degree reflectors. They're very versatile. You can use them indoors and outdoors. You can back them up, raise the power if you need to, or you can bring them in close and lower the power. But it spreads the light out just enough that you can get a like good rim light on the athlete, as well as lighting up the fog in the background.
Both the Manny Ortiz Beauty Dish and the 53-inch umbrella come in a white or silver interior. I prefer the silver interior over the white. Gives it a little bit more specular look, gives it a harder kind of look as opposed to the white interior. If you use the silver interior, you don't have to shoot as high of a power. If you use the white interior, shooting with the white interior requires you to raise the power on your lights quite a bit.
All right, so the way that I like to light a scene, I will always take a shot of wherever I'm at without the lights on, or I just turn the trigger off on my camera. So I want to make sure that I'm cutting out almost all of the ambient lighting. So we'll go ahead and do that now. I'm going to turn off the trigger, take a shot, and everything on my LCD screen back here is dark, minus the little points of light that you can see in the ceiling, which are just the ceiling lights. Those don't really bother me. You can always take them out if you want to. Most of the time, I just leave them in there because everything else in the background is dark. Now, if you look on your computer and you start pixel peeping, it's not going to be completely black, but it is going to be really dark in the background.
So now I'm going to turn the trigger back on. I like to start from back to front by turning on my lights and making sure the exposure and the settings on those lights are correct. So I'm going to put Group A, which is my key light, and Group B in sleep mode, that way all that is left on are my rim lights here. So right now, I have the rim lights at a 6.0, and I want to just take a quick test shot here. What I'm looking for in the test shots here, I want just enough light that is going to give a good edge light on the side. It's not overpowering, and we're not overexposing anything on the skin or on the body. So this looks good. 6.0 seems to be just about perfect here.
So now what I'm going to do, I'm going to turn on Group A on my key light, take another quick test shot here. Good. We're at power 6.0 here. Now, if you're wondering why are we using 6.0 with our key light here with this Manny Ortiz Beauty Dish and the 70-degree reflectors? The 70-degree reflectors are going to project the light out more, therefore you're going to get more power coming out onto your subject as opposed to this larger modifier, this 36-inch Beauty Dish right here. So if you look, the proximity of this Beauty Dish as opposed to the 70-degree reflectors, the 70-degree reflectors are probably a good 12 feet away, 12, 15 feet away, as opposed to this Beauty Dish is 3 or 4 feet away. So you can definitely tell the difference in distance to subject where your light modifiers. This does play a big role in choosing your light power.
Lastly, I'm going to turn on my fill light right here. I love to have all of my lights really, really close. You get a lot softer of a light the closer you get your lights to your subject. Perfect. And you'll be able to see the difference here with the fill light and the key light and why you need to add in just a little bit of fill light, especially if you're using this Beauty Dish up at the top, and then you'll have to add in this umbrella or just any cup of fill light just to kind of light the lower half of the body.
So for this shot, I used two different props. We have the spare net right here, which our athlete is holding, and then I added in a ball just so she could prop her foot up on for the pose. So be your own judge of how your athlete should pose. You want to make them feel as comfortable as possible. So also, by having an extra ball in here, it just made the pose feel feel more comfortable for her, and it also just added another element into the image as well.
For this shot in particular, I always liked to get kind of low for this, just to get a nice perspective here of having the net kind of draped down and then shooting back up through the net, and then having the net as like a leading line up to the athlete here. To me, it always works best kind of as like more of a serious pose for this, but you can always have them smile or be serious and just take a couple shots. So we're going to start right here. Camera is kind of close to the floor here. I'm going to tell her to have a serious look. Now we can see the net being lit up specifically kind of from our key light, and then we have just some light fall-off coming to the side where we have the net coming to the edges of our frame right here.
This next shot, I'm going to add in fog. We have a fog machine running from my right to left, and what that's going to do, you're just going to see some really cool like effects going in the background. Our rim lights are actually going to be illuminating the fog in the background. We're going to try our best not to have the fog kind of come in front of the athlete for this. That creates a whole different type of look, but for this, we want to keep the fog behind the athlete. So, same type of shot, but now I'm just going to use this remote here to get the fog to come into frame. I don't know. So, what I'm doing now, letting the fog kind of come into frame. I'm going to let it kind of disperse just a touch.
For this shot, we're going to have our athlete dive or pass the ball. We're going to have someone pass her a ball. She's going to reach out, step forward, and she's going to hit the ball. So what I want to do for this one, I want to catch the ball either just before it gets to her hands or just after she hits it, just so we know that there's actually movement in the shot and the ball's just not resting on her hands.
So for this, I like to back up a little ways for this and zoom in, just to get kind of a different perspective on it. Doesn't have to be super wide for this, like a super wide angle for this. So this is just my personal preference. There's no reason saying you can't go in closer, shoot a wide angle for this. This is just the kind of style that I light for this particular image.
So we have two lights set up here. We have the Westcott 53-inch umbrella, silver interior, and our 70-degree reflector back there for our rim light. So if you're asking why are we using the 53-inch umbrella? Using this larger modifier gives us a little bit more room for error with the athlete moving around. So having a larger modifier is beneficial in this regard. So we will be using high-speed sync for this since we'll have quite a bit of movement going on, but yet 1/600 of a second, f8, and an ISO 500.
The positioning of our lights is going to be perpendicular to where I place myself to take the shot. Meaning, we'll have our 53-inch umbrella right here, directly in front of our athlete, and the 70-degree reflector directly behind our athlete. So if you notice the distance, I have the 70-degree reflector probably about twice as far away as I have the 53-inch umbrella or our key light. So I like to keep the key light as close as possible and just out of frame to get just a little bit softer light. And then of course, I have the 70-degree reflector just out of frame enough so I don't have to worry about the positioning and getting it in the frame, but also want to make sure the positioning of it doesn't light up the surroundings as well.
So when you build this shot, still work from back to front. Turn your trigger off. Make sure you're getting like a dark ambient lighting in your scene, and then we'll add in the rim light, and then we'll add in the key light. So we got our shot perpendicular to the athlete. So all I'm going to do now is I'm going to get up, move, and we're coming right over here, going to position myself at about a 45-degree angle, and we're just going to get a completely different looking shot without having to move our lights.
We got our two shots of our athlete. Now, let's just make it a little bit different. We're going to be using the Flexi Gel Vivid Blue. All I'm going to do is just put it over the globe right here, and then we'll be good to go. So this is going to make our fog in the background appear here, vivid blue.
So we got a really cool perspective shot with a net draped over our athlete's shoulders, our foot on the ball. Um, we used four lights for this. Now, you don't necessarily have to use four lights. You can definitely get away with using three lights and not use a fill light. We just got to be more aware of where your key light is hitting the athlete and try to light the body as evenly as possible.
Now, for our action shot, we only used two lights. Now, I will say using two lights is important because you want to have a key light and that rim light to separate your athlete or your subject from the background. So we kept it simple with the action shot, but we did use high-speed sync. So we got to be able to enable high-speed sync on our camera, and the FJ400 V2 is fantastic using high-speed sync.
Now, all I did for these two variations of the same action shot, which is move from one place to the other, but just opening my feet, and you got a completely different look. And then we added in the fog, and then added in the blue gel. So in a very short amount of time, you can get several different looks. Let us know in the comments which shot you liked best, and thank you so much for watching.