2 Tools to Propel and Elevate Your Portrait Photography

Mapping Your Photoshoot and WorkflowTechnical SkillsGrowth

Oct 16

X-rite Color Checker Passport

Image from www.xritephoto.com

Image from www.sekonic.com

In this episode we talk about 2 tools, 2 pieces of gear the will make a world of difference in your photography: The X-rite color checker and a light meter. There are many who will say that with today’s cameras neither one of these are necessary: They’re wrong. If accuracy in color, white balance, and correct exposure matter to you, if you truly want to not just take pretty photos but artistic photos that demonstrate your understanding of light and imaging, if you’re serious about your photography, ditch purchasing the next set of presets or filters and put your money into these 2 tools that will set you apart from the guy next door.

In this week’s episode I talk about both of these essential tools and how they will minimize your frustration behind the scenes and in post-production.

Here are a few highlights:

{05:31} The Color Checker ensures that your colors are accurate, it ensures that skin tone is accurate. The benefit of this is that if you want to add color, if you want to add vibrancy, or saturation, or hue, or luminosity, or whatever, all of that's wonderful; but you should start at baseline, you should start with what I'm going to going to call a clean image, meaning your white balance is indeed the white balance that the true white balance of the image that you took, I cannot tell you what a difference this makes in your photographs.

{08:53} But once you adjust your white balance on that first photo, you then sync all of your other photos that were taken at that time with those same settings. And you will get an accurate white balance across all of those photos.

{10:02} So I highly encourage anyone who's really interested in doing professional photos or photos that are accurate and really, really sharp and look their best to use color checker, it's definitely worth the money, you just have to take care of it, you know, try and avoid touching the, the little squares that have color on them.

{13:00} But you're going to realize, once you correct the white balance, and you use a tool like this to correct your white balance, that your colors are actually a little bit off.

{14:38} The light meter measures the light that is on your subject, the light that will be going to your subject.

{14:54} And again, I'm not going to get into the physics of it, but the light that's hitting your subject is not the same as the light that's bouncing off of your subject back into your camera.

{16:16} If you want true lighting accuracy, you need a light meter.

{16;54} But if you use a light meter, your accuracy increases tenfold, if not more.

{22:45} But what I want to say is the combination of using a color checker, as well as a light meter raises your photography to a superb, outstanding level, take the guessing game out of producing good photos, and use the science, you don't need a degree in physics for this, you just need to put some money into some tools that really make a difference in your photography.

Click here to listen to this episode.