I had the wonderful pleasure of being the Director of Photography one the Howard University segment of the 2021 McDonald’s Inspiration Celebration® Gospel Tour. Our segment was directed by Sir The Baptists and produced by his team at Tymple. I thought this would be a good shoot to test out some Sigma Cine glass so we shot all sigma with the exception of C camera ( 😅 I left the PL mount at home ). We shot on the RED Monstro Gemini & Komodo.
I had the amazing opportunity to shoot my second YouTube black creator summit. The most interesting part of this job is the amount of time I get with each creator and the dope images to come out of it. Last year when we shot the creative's we had a whole afternoon planned for just portraits. I was able to use one large soft box To give a very soft and even light across each creator. This time around was a little bit different, we did not have an 8 foot soft box available to us and we change the background depending on what the creators wanted. A beauty dish is a very soft yet hard light, so when you are adjusting you have to be very specific. In my case , we didnt Have much space to shoot the photographs so the subject had to be close to the background. This means that the main light will be casting a shadow on the background and I had to choose how I wanted that to look.
Lighting
2 x Profoto B1
1 x Beauty Dish
1 x Umbrella
I led a workshop on photo and video lighting alongside the Kingdom Creatives Conference. I love talking about why I light and how to craft images. I find that the separator is not being able to create a good image but to create a good image 10,000 times under different circumstances. I always stress studying and practice and workshops are a good way to do so. I talked about 3 main ideas during the workshop: Soft light vs.hard light , what motivated light and shaping tools.
A hard light source is a source with a narrow beam angle, think of this as a flashlight or a strobe with a reflector. A soft light source has a wider beam, think cloudy day. Though I almost always create soft light I prefer to used hard light…Why? Hard light can be modified to to be soft but softlight cannot be hard…When in doubt use hard light.
when lighting a subject always ask yourself these questions:
What story do I want to tell?
Why am I using these lights?
do they add or subtract from the vision?
I tend to have a preference of lighting I want to used but It doesn’t always make sense, these questions keep me on my toes.
Softbox
Beauty Dish
Parabolic Umbrella
Your homework is to look these up and see the difference…GO! 😊
Special shoutout to my good friend Gabby for being our amazing model 😊
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