1 Light Sports Bike Shoot
Wednesday 25th September - 15:00 BST / 10:00 EDT
LIVE WITH YOUR Q&A
Continuing our theme of Motorcycles, tune in to see how Karl approaches these larger scale shoots: utilising a lot of studio space and perfecting the light to bring out the details in the subject's form.
We'll cover the preparations and skills required to shoot such a dynamic object and find the expression in its many elements.
Learn to capture the essence of movement in a single frame in this high octane live show.
Comments
Hello Karl, I repeated this video for almost 4 to 5 times to just understand every detail you have said and captured. While buying my gear, I had always wondered how do I use the independent flash firing button, now I know perfect use of it.
Yes, I know the shot was perfectly executed, I still want to clear my understanding on “blend mode” techniques” and combining multiple exposures in one scene. Is it possible to have a post-production video or if you have any other similar ones, that i can look into and learn better. It’s those smallest techniques which takes us to bigger leaps of understanding on the entire approach.
Hi thank you. I didn’t use any photoshop ‘blend’ mode techniques for this because I captured all of the bursts of light in one exposure (just a very long exposure). However another method is possible and that is where you take lots of different images with maybe just 2 or 2 bursts of light at a time and then you take all of those images as layers into one photoshop file and then you set each layer to ‘lighten’ blend mode (accept the base layer) and then the lighting will build up on top of each other. That method doesn’t always work perfectly and you may need to do a bit of masking to fix it.
Brilliant class, thank you Karl!
As an alternative solution, could you take individual shots with – for each shot – the light positioned differently, and then combine all of them in photoshop with the “lighten” blend mode?
If that would work, then it seems to me that you could take more time to carefully position the light for every part of the bike instead of rushing and getting a different result each time. (although it wouldn’t be so much fun to do! 🙂)
Thanks and cheers
Remi
Hi Remi and thank you, yes that would be an option but I thought it would be interesting to try it in one shot. Also I like the idea of using this technique outdoors at twilight and it would be good to do it in one shot so that the sky luminosity was a constant in a single image. It would still be possible to do it in separate shots with a lighten blend mode though but the sky would default to the lightest of the selections and as you progressed through each shot a twilight sky would be getting darker each minute. I do wonder though if in a studio environment it would be exactly the same using a single shot and lighten blend mode or if the crossover patches of light would interact in exactly the same way with our ‘base layer’ exposure from the ceiling. Theoretically it should be the same but I’d have to test it. One disadvantage of doing it as 37 differnet exposure though is the time to do it and put it together and of course the risk of knocking or moving something (including the camera) on each take. The advantages would be reduced noise in shadow areas although I didn’t notice any noise in the shadows on the 3min exposures.
Great results, just curious why the camera needed refocusing at the start of each sequence?
Hi John, thanks. We have a problem with that lens and I need to send it back, for some reason even in manual focus it sometimes trys to find a focus point. We switched it to AF and then just refocused it at the start of each shot but on some attempts it was focus seeking in the dark even though no one was touching the camera. Obviously once the exposure has started it shouldn’t move focus during the exposure but it often was so something wrong with it!