 Hey everybody it's Craig back to hear it in this video. I'm going to share five tips with you to quickly improve your photos. Alright tip number one, use off-camera flash. You might be thinking why should I use off-camera flash? Number one, it allows you to control the direction of the light. So where the light is coming from and then that allows you to control where the shadows fall. Number two, having your flash off-camera allows you to modify that light source and you can control the quality of the light. So a tip for that is the larger the light source and the closer it is to your subject the softer the light or the softer the shadows. So I like to use a modifier that's 36 inches in diameter or 90 centimeters or you could use a 48 inch diameter or 120. Now I recommend a round softbox with two layers of diffusion and the round ones I prefer because it creates a round catch light in the eyes just like the sun would. And the third reason is it allows you to control the amount of light. So for example, if you're shooting outdoors you can have a different exposure on the background and a different exposure on your subject. So the three things that I like is one, taking your flash off-camera allows you to control the direction of the light, the quality of the light and the amount of light. That's tip number one, use off-camera flash. Now tip number two is to use different lighting patterns throughout your shoot. So I'll give you some examples here we'll go behind the scenes. So you can use the butterfly lighting pattern and that is straight in front of your subject 45 degrees and down. Now you can also use a reflector for fill that would be clamshell lighting that's very flattering for women. Now to create more drama in your portraits you can move that light source to the right or to the left. Now for example let's say your subject's good side was this side of their face. If you move the light to this side this is called broad lighting if you're lighting the broad side of their face. Now if you move the light to this side and this is their good side this is called short lighting and it's a little more flattering for women. So I'll give you some examples in this video of both broad lighting and short lighting and it really depends. So what I'll do sometimes is I'll do all three lighting patterns. I'll shoot butterfly lighting, I'll bring in a reflector, I'll shoot broad and short. When I get home I have some options. So if you do that you also have options too. So that brings us to tip number three. Now tip number three is to direct your subjects. Now even if they're experienced in front of the camera they don't see what you see. So it's important that you give them subtle directions. So for example say oh just put your right hand in your pocket. Put your left hand on your hip. Turn 45 degrees away from the light in the camera. Bring your head back. Those types of things and I'll show you some examples in this video where there's some subtle little differences. Now I suggest that you make shapes and lines. So for example if someone's standing in front of the camera with their arms straight down looking straight like this it's not going to be a very interesting photo. So I always suggest turning away from the camera and then maybe putting their hands on their hips, creating some space or some gaps so that you can see that they're not this wide. So think about those things when you're looking through your lens and saying is this an interesting composition? So which brings us to tip number four. Think about the background. What's behind your subject? I like to blur the background by shooting it f 1.4. If your lens only does 2.8 then shoot at 2.8 but try to blur that background and think about what's behind them. Is there a tree sticking out of their head? Is there a lamp pole? Look around and then have the move to a less distracting background and then blur that background. Now that brings us to tip number five. Now tip number five is to pay close attention to exposure whether you're in the studio or whether you're outdoors. I'm going to let you look at the back of my camera and I'm going to walk you through some of the things that I look at when I'm on a live photo shoot. Alright here we are looking at the back of my LCD screen. If you have this option I suggest adding RGB highlights to your menu so if there's anything blown out it'll flash on your screen. Now also too you can set it up so you can see your histogram. Now you can see the histogram of the image as well. So I also refer to this and then you can see that it shows just the full image. So I recommend enabling those. So just to recap the first one I have set is RGB highlights. I usually have this one first so if there's anything that's blown out I'll show you a couple images that are. You'll see a flashing on your screen so I'm just going to go through some of the shots from the shoot. Some of these are in portrait mode some of these the flash didn't go off but you can see that flashing on the screen there. That means that area is blown out and it might be hard to recover those highlights. So if you look here you can see the histogram is far to the right. So that's something you want to avoid. Although in capture one you can sometimes recover the highlights quite well you really want to avoid that flashing in the background and then especially on your subject I'll go forward a couple more shots. You can see on her clothing because she's wearing white that's blowing out. So you want to reduce either your strobe or the background exposure depending on what elements of the image are blowing out. All right I want to share this image with you too. You can see there's a little bit of a highlight. I was able to recover that in capture one but you could see here it doesn't look like it's blowing out but that's just sort of an overall histogram look and we do have that one hotspot. But like I said I was able to recover that and I shot this at 5500 Kelvin. I just set my white balance to one setting when shooting with strobes. So everything was shot at 5500 which is close to daylight. Daylight is estimated at 5600. So a couple helpful tips make sure that you have your RGB highlights set refer to your histogram set your white balance in camera manually to 5500. Also I shoot in manual mode only so I choose my shutter speed I choose my aperture and then for these series of shoots in this video I was using high speed sync meaning that I could shoot up to shutter speeds of up to 8000. So a couple helpful tips if you can shoot in high speed sync mode if you're shooting outdoors like I said make sure you have your RGB highlights set up there I can also see where the focus point was you could see that it was on her eye we can look at our histogram and then we can just look at our general LCD screen. So also too make sure you set this brightness to one setting so set it manually to say like five and keep it that way so you get used to how it looks when you refer to the back of your camera. Hey it's great to hear again and if you found these tips helpful give me a thumbs up for this video and if you're not already a subscriber just click on that subscribe button and if you found this helpful and you want to share it with your friends and photographers just click on share there's a little share link below the video click on share and you can share this on facebook groups or photography forums anyway thanks for watching this video if you have any comments or questions or helpful tips of your own just post them in the comment section below all right don't forget that thumbs up subscribe and I'll see you in the next video