I'm Anthony with Videvo and today we're going to be talking about filming outside. Filming inside in a controlled location can be easy, especially when you compare that to taking your film equipment outside into the elements. I'm going to show you a few ways you can control and adjust the natural sunlight outside so you can make your shots look just as good as they would indoors. All right, well let's get going. Okay, so here we are out at my local park out in a bright sunny day and I'm joined by my friend Dylan here who's going to serve as our subject and we'll show you a few examples of how you can improve your lighting and camera positions outside to get an interesting image. So as we start right now the sun is directly in front of us nice and bright and this is kind of the worst case scenario. If as you can see the sun is right in his face casting a lot of shadows just under his chin and they're contrasty they're they're dark and there's not really a lot of definition going on here in his face. So this is kind of our starting position. This is kind of a worst case scenario you can be when shooting outside. So before we start moving the camera around and adjusting the lighting situation we're actually going to start with the camera itself and first off we're going to apply what is called a neutral density filter to our lens. What an ND or neutral density filter does is what basically applies sunglasses to your camera making less light come into the front of the lens. What that's going to allow us to do is open up our aperture a lot more and blur the background separating Dylan from everything that's behind him. After applying the ND I think the difference is kind of night and day. Before we were at about an F22 on our aperture and now we're at an F28. What this does is blur the background behind Dylan making it a lot more interesting and I think the background we have right now today is actually kind of ugly and by blurring it you're not able to discern exactly what's going on behind him and it separates them a little bit more. The next step that you can do in camera is increasing your focal length. By increasing your focal length one you're creating more depth of field like we were able to achieve with the ND filter but you're also able to compress the background against the subject and you'll be able to see how the background and the compression changes even though the framing is exactly the same. So now that we've backed the camera up a little bit and we've zoomed into that full focal length that it's able to achieve we're able to see that compression happen and we're able to blur that background quite a bit more making it a little bit more pleasing to the image. So now that we've achieved everything in camera that we're able to change we're going to change the positioning of the camera and Dylan in relation to our key light which is the sun and right now we've kind of have it in the more situation possible. The light is directly in front of Dylan making some harsh shadows in his face creating no definition at all and we're going to change that by adjusting the camera and changing the position of Dylan himself. First thing we want to tackle is that hard light I was talking about. As you can see in my face and on his image right now the shadow is hard we see a definitive line where the shadow starts and ends and that's not something we really want and really isn't pleasing to our subject. So what we can do is just apply some diffusion to the sun itself and we can do this easily by what's called a reflector. A simple reflector is easy to find on Amazon it's cheap and it'll run you 10, 15 maybe 30 bucks at the max it has a few different functions that we're actually going to use multiple times today and what I'll do is I'll use the diffusion function kind of a clear silk on it so diffuse the sun to make that shadow on his face quite a bit softer. Yeah it's good exactly what we need. Whoa! Oh it's blue weight. So some of the issues you might run into is a windy day outside like we are where this is going to be a little bit more difficult to manage but if you get a smaller one you'll be able to achieve the same function this is just kind of a really big one that I like using. So one good tip is to use diffusion whenever possible especially if you're filming subjects that you want to make more flattering because softer light is more flattering light. So one of the reasons you'd want to position your subject in directly in front of sunlight is when the background needs to be seen in relation to the subject that you're filming. If the background doesn't matter all that much you can always shift the camera and shift your subject to a more flattering position in relation to the sunlight and that's what we're going to do next. We're going to shift Dylan and position him so that the sun comes at him at an angle rather than directly in front of him. So now that we've moved Dylan and our camera you can see that the sunlight's coming at him from a 45 degree angle. This creates a lot of more depth and contrast that's falling on his face rather than just fully lighting his face and creating all the shadows underneath his chin and on his chest. So now the next step like we did before with the front facing sunlight we're going to diffuse this by diffusing again we create softer more flattering light on Dylan and this is something you want to do all the time when possible. So now that we've kind of shown you ways to use the sunlight to your advantage as a key light we're going to flip the switch and flip the sunlight behind Dylan now and use the sunlight as a backlight. So now we position Dylan between the sun and our camera we're seeing that the light is backlighting quite a bit. The only problem here is that we're not really getting a lot of definition on the face again. His face and full body you're falling completely into shadow. So now we have to adjust our exposure quite a bit but also we're not getting the same kind of detail that we were achieving with the directional sunlight that we had just before this. One quick way to do this is again use our awesome 5-in-1 reflector. So what we're going to do is take that sunlight and bounce it right back into his face using the white part of the reflector and we'll be able to achieve a little bit more definition on his face brightening it up using the light of the sun. Now let's use the shiny side here it's going to cast quite a bit more light on to Dylan rather than just the the white kind of silk side as you see here. Yeah hitting hard there. So yeah with this 5-in-1 reflector we're able to bounce that sunlight behind Dylan back into his face creating a bit more definition yet again and creating a more interesting image. We're going to take that sunlight and position it at about 45 degrees or just that some sort of angle behind Dylan making it so that sunlight is acting more like a backlight and hair light rather than just kind of trying to get it out of the way. Now the sun is serving as a backlight but also creating a lot more definition as we see it kind of bleed a little bit in front of his face. Now at the same thing that we do before we'll take the reflector and reflect that light right back into him creating a bit more definition rather than just having a straight in shadow face. With using kind of the back side light of the sun and bouncing it back into Dylan we've created almost what is the iconic filming process and lighting process for a subject. We have our key light which is actually the bounce going back into Dylan. We don't have any fill unfortunately but you could use an additional reflector to bounce the light back into Dylan again and we have a backlight slash hair light that separates Dylan from the background and creates some definition there on this honey side. So to wrap things up this is how things progress throughout the day. We started with Dylan directly in front of the sun without any indeed or without zooming in on our lens and then we did that and we could see how the background was blurred quite a bit and was a little bit more pleasing your image. Then we added some diffusion to the direct sunlight which softened up the light hitting Dylan's face and then we kind of changed the direction of the sun or it really changed our camera in Dylan's position to change the angle that the sun was hitting him. And as I said before you always wanted to use diffusion when possible so we added a diffusion to that to soften up the light hitting Dylan's face quite a bit. Then we positioned the light behind Dylan again bouncing that light right back into Dylan using that sunlight as our key light and then positioned the sun at a 45 degree angle behind Dylan to make that a background slash hair light that plays a little bit on the side of his face and then bouncing that back into Dylan to create a standard lighting scenario. Shooting outdoors can be difficult on the surface but can be a breeze if you tack with the right way. By using these techniques you're able to improve what your image looks like when shooting outside and you won't be afraid to be shooting indirect sunlight. Well I hope you learned something today and I hope the tips I shared with you were useful. If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments and again I'm Anthony with Vidivo and I'll see you next time.