Sean McWard

Hi, I'm Lindsay Koff. I go by Z. Welcome to my masterclass. I'm a commercial photographer. I've started off with a lot of automotive, um, car photography. I've done a lot of magazine covers for motorcycle magazines and automotive. And then I've kind of worked my way into product photography, packaging and a lot of hand photography, hand nails, skin, all that sort of thing. The photography, I really like doing concentrates on reflections, low lights, highlights, a lot of commercial type things. I really love working with external lighting and I like creating highlights, low lights on, on product, on vehicles, on your nails, pretty much anything shiny. So I'm really excited to show you some basic skills that you can use. Things run on your house to create really great shadows and reflections and, and really just really great portfolio pieces of your art. In this first segment, I'm gonna have you gather all the things you really need, uh, for the entire masterclass, but then we're gonna show you really how to shoot a really great window light portrait. So let's start by explaining some of the things you'll need, um, for a window light setup. Um, some of these things you might have at home already, some of them might need to purchase, but most of these items, uh, you could find some kind of substitute at your house, uh, to use if you don't already have them. Uh, first of all, we need some sort of backdrop, so any kind of fabric or something that you think would be, you know, pretty in the background. So, um, picking a backdrop, uh, just grabbed a piece of fabric that's got some sparkles in it that I thought looked really nice with the nails. We're shooting this though. I'm gonna put it kind of far behind the hands and I'm gonna use a short depth of field, um, so that the nails are in focus and then that this falls out of focus. So this won't look as streaky as it is here. Kind of just go into like a blue gray. You can kind of do this with any background and you can do it with pure and white or gray or maybe even like a cutting board wood or something else. As long as you separate it from your hand, then you won't see all the grain in the backdrop. And then you're gonna need something to put the fabric on. Um, for me, this is gonna be a bounce board. This is just a piece of foam core that you could pick up at, um, on an art store or even those project boards that you get for your kids. Um, you can use one of those. So what I've done is taken two pieces of foam core and I've just taped them together. Um, they create a v situation and you'll see how to use this and we put it all together. Um, other things that are helpful for this kind of stuff is clamps. These are little a clamps. You can get 'em from the home improvement store. You could also use binder clamps or something else you have at home. Um, but these are pretty easy to get ahold of. You can even provide the in store or someplace like Harbor Freight. All right. And then sometimes you like to reflect in a little light from the windows. So I have a mirror here. Um, but if you don't have a mirror that you feel comfortable moving around, you could grab something like this from, from the store or from the car. Uh, reflects in, we'll help you catch some light and you probably need a table, something to work on top of, and something for your model to sit on. And you can't forget that you need a camera or a phone, something to capture the actual images. Now that we have all of these items, uh, we can start constructing a set and we can get ready to shoot. So I'll get the most amount of light if I get as close to the window as possible. What you're looking for in a window is some sort of window where you're getting a lot of light coming in, but you're not getting any directional light coming in. So directional light's gonna be when the full sun comes in and you're gonna get like the sun hitting it. So what you're gonna look for here is something that's already kind of more ambient and you're not seeing like sunlight come in with. You are seeing like residual light come through the window. Uh, this is gonna make it look like a really big light source, um, which I'll pick up big highlights on the nails. So I'm gonna get as close to the window as I can. I'm gonna move up here, uh, and then I'm gonna set my tripod up here so that I can get kind of over, over the table a little bit. All right. Then what I'm gonna do is take this V flat that we talked about earlier and go open it up. And this white part here is gonna reflect back on the window. So we're gonna set this up and then we can grab our fabric and kind of make a back straw. And then if you wanna be able to reflect in even more light, if this white isn't giving you enough, then what you wanna do is use your silver reflectors to reflect in the light from the window like this. And that should pick up some of the glitter in the nails. Um, but you can get more directional with it using a mirror. So if you have a mirror in here, you'll be able to adjust, um, right onto the knees, which should. So I'm gonna talk about angle a little bit. I only have the tripod set up, but it's not necessary. You can just do this handheld. Um, but I'm gonna do a tripod today. So today I'm gonna shoot down on the nails a little bit, um, because I'm using a real camera, I get to pick my millimeter on my lens. I get to pick my manual settings on an iPhone. You're not gonna be so lucky, but you can still make it work. So first we're gonna do this with, with the real camera, uh, and then we'll do it with the iPhone. So I'm setting this to a really short depth of field so that I can get the nails really sharp and then the rest of the hand will fall out of focus. Um, we're also gonna use the silver to catch the light on the ends of the nails, like on the glitter. And we're gonna get the best of both worlds cuz we're using this big, this big light source that'll look really great on the skin. And then we're gonna use the silver to bounce into the, uh, the glitter on the nails. All right. All right, so I've got the tips of your nails in focus, and I'm going to shoot this without the mirror for one, and that looks great. And what happens without the mirror is right around the fingers. You're gonna get more, you're gonna see more of the shape of the hands because one that's gonna fall darker. But if you really wanna fill in those spots, you can use the mirror. What you do is you're gonna take the reflection from the, the window and you're gonna put that reflection right into the right into the nails, And that's reflecting in diffuse light. All right, so now the difference with the iPhone, you don't get to pick your millimeter on here. So what I would suggest doing, if you're trying to do like a really close portrait of just the ends of the nails, something like this, I would do portrait mode and I would get over it and I would pick your spot and you kind of let the camera do its thing or the kinda let the iPhone pick and let the background fall out of focus. So this is really great for social media. Kind of do the same thing and you can reflect in with the iPhone as well, but it's gonna look a little different then. So now, uh, you've got your images. You can either throw them into Photoshop or you can throw them into straight into your social media and filter them however you'd like. And I think this is a pretty clean way of shooting and getting you something quick that looks really professional. So now that you've learned a little bit about window light, keep on hand all those objects that we use and we're gonna use them for the next episode when we work on open shade photography. Well, now that you've learned all these tricks, if you use 'em, I wanna see 'em. So if you could, if you could post 'em on your social media and tag me at Car Creative and Glossary Live, we would love to see what you put together.