Hard to get my thick German accent? Here's the transcript!

Hey fellow photographer, how is it going? I’m Michael Zelbel and today we are going to shoot some photos for the German hairdressing award, with our model De Nise, our super hairdressers Lutz and Uemit, and the lighting set up as always very simple. One main lights through a shoot umbrella from and one speedlight in the back shooting against the black backdrop. I think that is going to be it. So keep on watching. In this episode of glamour lighting set ups, you are going to learn how to emphasize a particular part of your model. That is really important if you make photos for a particular reason, like in our case we make the photos in order to win the German hairdressing award or to let the customer win the award. And in order to do that of course we have to focus on the hairdo of our model and on nothing else. In this video we are going to focus on 2 techniques which are the only 2 techniques that I have used, the first one being specular highlights on the point of interest, in this case on the hairdo of the model of course and the second thing I used was removing distractions,removing everything that is not essential. Now for the specular highlights, how did we do it? Simply by pointing the main light directly to her hair. The lighting set up is like this: we have got our model, she is sitting in front of the table and behind her, pretty close behind her is a black backdrop and now we got like I said, the main light coming from top pointing down. It is going through a big shoot umbrella and we have a silver reflector material on the table just in order to fill in the shades. Otherwise when light is coming directly form top, then it would harsh shades and with the silver stuff we are opening up the shades. And there is a second speedlight behind the model and that is just to shoot a vignette effect into the background. Otherwise the background will be a little bit boring but with the gray vignette, it is just fine. The camera is on 200mm and 1/200s and f/11 to have just nice depth of field. I pushed it from ISO200 to ISO400 just to stress the speedlights a bit less, to have them faster. Both speedlights are on TTL plus 1/3 and the way we came up with plus 1/3: actually we played around with the intensity of light until we founded the color of the hair was coming out best and we liked it most with TTL plus 1/3. Besides that you might notice I am not using any groups. It is both speedlights are, so to speak in group A, and shooting on the same power setting, only the main light is metered by the camera because of the background. On TTL the camera will only meeter the area which is exactly underneath the auto focus field and that would be hair, when I focus on the hair and what you can see on the hair is main light source, not the background light source. The background light source is just shooting along on the same intensity which is fine in this case. One thing that I would like to mention as a little trick, in order to get the model a bit higher, a bit higher, we added 2 extra pillows onto the chair so that she could sit a bit higher, a little bit away form the silver reflected light source and I could shoot comfortably her whole upper body That also leads us to the second technique that we used which is removing distraction, our first idea was to shoot a model with clothes that would amplify the feeling that her hairdo should transport. Her clothes were matching the wired, punk like hairdo. But I found that by removing the clothes I could bring out the hair much better and in the end we not only removed the clothes, we also had her doing poses where you couldn’t see her eyes, where you could see not much of her face, all of that was removed, so we ended up with just a bit of skin and the hairdo and I think that worked really best. How about you try it out in your next photo shoot and the first thing you do is you remove everything that is not really, really essential for your photo and the second thing is you can care your main light source is reflected exactly in the area of interest, exactly in the area that you want to emphasize. I really hope that that is something that is really good for you, so that this video will be useful and if you like please comment below the video, share your opinion below this video. I hope to see you next Thursday in the next video and until then, I wish you a lot of fun with your photo shoots and good light!