So I’m on location, we’re doing a product shot, I need to tether to my computer. But I want to have the right monitor settings so that in the sunlight I can see my image and see it right. I’m going to use a Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra. It’s made to calibrate in bright sunlight when you’re working on location. So let’s see how it works.
So we’re doing a photograph of Red Wing boots here on location. We’re looking out into the valley. That’s why we’re on location, because we want to take advantage of the scene that’s in the background there to give that really depth and interest and make it feel more epic, more production value. So we’ve set our little setup here on a table, got our boots there, we’re going to tether back to the computer so I can see exactly what’s going on. It’s so much easier to see on a larger screen versus a little screen on the back of your camera. It helps me set my composition. It helps me to see the little details. And helps me to understand my lighting. Before I start, I’m going to calibrate my monitor. I’ll use a Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra. It’s really made to be when you’re tethering, so if you’re out on location shooting outdoors. You can use it in the studio as well. But it’s ideal for high brightness monitors. And with a high brightness monitor, you want something that will calibrate it for the bright situation that you’re in. It’s going to do between 750 to 2000 nits. That allows me to be able to calibrate my monitor for exactly the situation that I’m in. I can see my scene, I know I’m exposing right. I’ll put my Spyder Checkr in. So I can get a sample, color sample and I can shoot my images. So let’s get this calibrated. And let’s get started.
Why should a person shoot products on location versus in the studio? There’s several different reasons. Number one is showing the products in use, showing the consumer where the products are used. So a pair of shoes or pair of boots walking in the mud. You know, a tent out on the hillside. I mean those kinds of things that show you context, this is where the product is used. That is a powerful message to the consumer. It also has an opportunity to show juxtaposition, a pair of dress shoes on a little rock in the mud. That’s like dressy place, messy place. It gives you that kind of juxtaposition that can be very interesting. It also allows you to get beautiful blurry backgrounds because you can make a background further away and allows that background to fall way out of focus. It just looks absolutely beautiful. I also love it because it just gives you production value. Look at all these mountains back here. That is all production value. It gives you a beautiful look. It also can have a very, a more of a natural look. More of a natural light look outside.
I use strobes almost always when I’m outside because I want to clean up the products. And it does start to look a little more like studio, the way I shoot. Some people don’t shoot that way. They shoot and make it look very natural, like it’s window light, or the natural light. Or, we just found these items here sitting on the side of the road, you know, kind of thing. But shooting outside on location is about getting your products out where it gives you production value. It gives you interesting backgrounds and just makes for a different product shot that has a different kind of application. So, that’s why I shoot out on location.
Let’s talk about the composition here. I want you to understand composition on a very simple level here when it comes to products. And that is we do not want things in a straight line. We want things to go up and down. Look at this, the way this comes in. We have a small rise and fall here with the camera. We’ve got a toe that comes up. And then we come down to this object over here. Then we come up to the high and down. These follow the rule of thirds. This is an upper rule of thirds, lower rule of thirds. We don’t want these shoes to be level with each other. We want them to be higher and lower. So we raised one up here on the end. So we have some different heights of these two. They’re not straight across from each other. Also these toes point back into this, point into this. This right here gives us a triangle with these three items. We have the compass, the shoes, the camera, it gives us a triangle. The bag in the background was just meant to be some mid ground back there to just give us something before we go into the leaves.But it’s about creating height. We want to create height. That’s why we put these logs in here so that we would be able to get this back shoe up on one log. We put one long log on top of another so that that back shoe could go up and this shoe could come down. We put a rock underneath this one to tilt it back towards the camera so we could see a little bit of the top of it and it wasn’t completely profile. So we took the laces and tuck them inside. And that helped to clean up the shoe to make it look right. We made sure we tightened the laces so that they’re all about the same tightness because those kinds of things will really show in something this close. So it just becomes a really beautiful rise and fall on the images. That’s the goal. Nothing straight. No horizon, straight horizons. We want stuff to incorporate a rise and a fall. And that’s composition when it comes to products.
Alright, so I’m going to calibrate my monitor now. And I’m just going to simply go through the steps here. It’s going to tell me exactly what I need to do. Display calibration, next. I’m on all-in-one laptop. Brightness. Room light on. So it’s right now analyzing the puck, sitting on the desk here. Alright, I’m going to continue. The puck is going to now start to measure the screen and create my profile. So that’s how you do it. It doesn’t take that long. But calibrating the monitor in this bright sunlight kind of situation is well worth the time spent.
So when you’re lighting products outside, there’s a couple of things that make this much more successful for you. The first thing is, I try to keep direct sunlight off of my products, always. If there’s direct sun, which we don’t have today, but if we did, the direct sunlight, I would put it behind the products so I get a rim light. You can’t always do that because sometimes you’re looking at a certain background you really want. And the sun isn’t exactly in the place you want it to give you a nice backlight. So I’ll either do one or two things. Create hard shade, take all the light off from the product. Or put a translucent up, which allows, if I have sunlight behind, allows that sunlight to be soft and give me a little bit of rim light. I can use that rim light and make it part of my lighting. Today, I just put a hard shadow up. I just put this up to give me hard shadows. And now I can light my product underneath there and not use the ambient light. Other than just fill light. As I lengthen my shutter it’s going to bring the fill up.
So the first thing I did is I put up my table to be able to work in the shade. And then I added my key light. It’s a soft box, square box. I like to use square boxes for products because they give nice lines on glass. They give nice highlights on, you know, different products. So I think square is better. Round is better, I think, for people. Square box is better for products. This is a 3’x4’. That 3’x4’is going to give me a little bit of look. I’m going to push it slightly behind the product. And it’s going to come from the back. So it looks right here. I’m just behind my product. And it’s going to give me highlights and this is going to roll into shadow towards the camera. My camera being out here is going to look into the shadow side. I love it when you look into the shadow side. Now, all of this falls into shadow, we get some nice highlights from behind. But that gives me just a beautiful light, beautiful soft light on the shoes and kind of rolls towards the camera. So slightly behind the shoes rolling towards the camera. Now I’ve got a key light, or I’ve got a rim light from behind here, which is a, I’ve got a warm full CTO on it. I want this to just give me a highlight on the shoes from behind. Now I’m going to use it two different ways. I’ll use it just as a rim light on them from behind. A little brighter, a little harder than my key light. And I’m going to shove it right in the scene. So it looks like a sun, like a big ball sun back there. And it’s going to, it’s going to just make that look interesting. It’s going to flare which is going to bring all the shadows up. It’s going to open up the shadows, that flare, and just give me a different look. So there’s a little different look. So there’s how we lit this. It’s two lights and a scrim to be able to create a shadow to work in. I would trade this out for translucent if the sun was doing a rim light from behind. And that’s how I light products on location. Now I can go in and put mirrors in and do all kinds of other things if I’m going to finesse this. But generally speaking, outside you’ve got enough ambient, you just lengthen your shutter and it opens up the ambient and starts to look very nice. If you feel like you’re not getting enough ambient on the shoes, then take a reflector. Walk that reflector in. Bounce the light back into those shoes. And it’s going to open up the shadows and look really pretty. So you don’t need to add another light, we’ve got plenty of lights here. Ambient really is our fill light. We’ve got a key light on the shoes and a rim light and then the ambient using the shutter becomes our fill light. So there’s how we light products on location.
So the Spyder X2 Ultra really is ideal for photographers if you want to tether on location, Graphic designers, content creators, anyone who wants to do HDR, it just calibrates your monitor so you can get a return. You can get the correct color. So the Spyder X2 Ultra works on multiple displays. So if you got two computers you can calibrate each of them and use them together so you get the correct color on whichever monitor you move it to. It’s ideal for tether shooting. I mean, why do you tether shoot? As a photographer I tether anytime I either, A. need to see detail like the Red Wing boots. I need to see detail. I need to see how things are set up. I need to see if I’m missing something. So I want to see a larger image. Or B. I want clients to look at it. I need clients to see what’s going on. When we’re shooting headshots. Like for Hansen or for Blizzard. They want to see the pictures. They want to see themselves. You can’t look at that little screen. It is so unprofessional. Just looking at that little tiny screen. You want to see it on a monitor so that they can see exactly what they look like. They get a really good idea of exactly what the color looks like because the monitor has been calibrated. And it gives them a great reference point. So tethering is super important. Most advertising is going to use tethering because if you’ve got someone on set and they need to see or approve the image, you’re going to need to tether. No one’s going to look on the little tiny screens. So tethering is really valuable. I don’t tether if I’m shooting something like a senior portrait, or if I’m doing a run and gun kind of thing where I’m really moving around a lot. But anytime I’m going to have someone who’s going to approve something, need to see something, or to be a part of that process other than me, then well, sometimes even me when I’m doing this kind of product stuff, I’m always going to tether. So it’s ideal for location shooting, and any kind of portrait. We have shot so many portraits in the last couple of years outside because of COVID and other things. It’s kind of become the thing. They want to do outside environmental type portraits. But they still want to see them. They want to be able to see exactly what they have going on. So it’s just essential for outside portraiture, any kind of photography, sometimes even landscape photography if you’re really going to focus on an image and want to see the different images, how they’re going to lay together. If you’re going to do any kind of focus stacking, you can see how the images are going to focus stack and you can put those together. That’s super important. So outdoor portraits, in the studio as well, it is a color calibration process. It doesn’t have to be outside. It works just as well in the studio.
So it has incredible color accuracy. It streamlines your workflows, because if you’re outside, you can create a color profile for being outside and direct sun, you can change the color profile, if you’re going to be in the shade outside, you can have different color profiles, you can just bring up immediately to be able to set it for the working conditions that you’re in. So you can create those profiles. Another way it streamlines your workflow is it allows you to be able to get color accuracy through the whole process, you’re seeing exactly what you’re getting from capture, to output. And in that you don’t have to guess you don’t have to worry about where things are at. It just moves you through the process much quicker and it takes one step out of the process. Unfortunately for most people, color calibration is like guesswork. I work with a lot of students who are on laptops, laptops from the university. Laptops and their color is all over the place. A simple color calibration process, once I get them to color calibrate, then their images look right when they hand in. They look good when you project them. It just takes this kind of guesswork out of the process of color. Which is so super important, especially if you shoot RAW. If you’re shooting RAW why would you not look at a monitor that is color calibrated so you can getthe color that you want and get the output that you want.
This is really made to calibrate just about anything that you’re going to use from a laptop and all in one, an iMac like this, desktops, projectors, anything that’s going to be something you want to have color accuracy. The Spyder X2 Ultra has video and cinema calibration targets. So Rec 709, it allows you to give you that target. Which is really nice if you’re doing any kind of video. That’s really awesome.
So the Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra allows for soft proofing. If you do any kind of printing, and we print with Saal Digital all the time. It allows you to put the ICC printer profiles in so we can look at simulations of what the different papers look like, the different inks look like. It allows us to see what we’re going to get in that final print and make projections on how we want the brightness or for color. And to make those changes so we get a better print outcome. When you’re making big prints, you want to have as much information as possible because you want them to be as color accurate as possible.
It has a thing called studio match calibration. Which basically means that you can match all of the computers, the screens in your office, in your work area. So that they all are looking at the same color profile and you’re getting the same color look. It makes it much easier for passing files from person to person to be able to see what other people are doing. And everything’s consistent. So that’s a really powerful tool to be able to calibrate everybody to the same standard.
So the Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra is perfect for everything from your capture to your output to your prints. It just gives you consistent color to the entire process. And it’s made for high brightness monitors so you can calibrate outside when you’re not in ideal studio situations. I’ve said this many times but it just doesn’t make any sense to shoot RAW, to want to really control video, to have a great look and not have some kind of calibration process so your monitors are calibrated. So when you’re looking at imagery, you’re making decisions based on an outcome that is going to make sense, it isn’t just a guess. When you combine something like the Spyder X2 Ultra with the Spyder Checkr it just makes that whole color process super easy and very predictable. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you want to see some other videos about color calibration, check them out here. I don’t know where they are, but check them out. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!
