Good morning guys, so you'll have to forgive me but the fog has been
Rolling in like crazy and I have been taking photos and running from one place to another for the last half an hour
It's 7:54 actually I've been
Running from here and there for an hour now not half an hour, but that means that I had fun, right?
hopefully this one too
She's having some salad. But anyway, I came today to the mountains here
These mountains are called Courel and they can be pretty cool as you can see
They can be very photogenic. And also there are plenty of trails here. So this place is going to be definitely
Another one of my playgrounds for the next few weeks or months
And I hope I get to explore a lot of it
I don't know if you can see the road there. But that's the road that I'm gonna take now
car
I'm gonna try to take a photo of that car
You see that car?
I'm waiting for it to get there
just gonna set the
continuous shooting
So, yeah, let's keep going
Okay, so this is the viewpoint
where I was going to come this morning, it's
Just okay, maybe with
maybe with some weather or clouds you can do something with those
three peaks there, but
otherwise
Yeah, just ok
Alright so I actually set up my camera here I
Thought I saw a composition but I don't like it that much
But since I'm already here with all my gear out, I wanted to talk, I wanted to mention a little bit about
How I go with the settings for my digital camera
You might have noticed from when I show the screen of this camera that I use most of the time P mode
P stands for program mode or auto mode that means that the camera chooses the settings for me
Now don't get me wrong. The ISO is fixed to 100. I like to shoot at ISO 100 as much as I can
I don't have any problem bumping the ISO because I need a faster shutter speed or because it's very dark or whatever
But during the day in situations like this
I just like to use ISO100 because... you know... because you can
but it's the camera who is in charge of the aperture and the shutter speed
now that doesn't mean that I don't change those settings because I actually like to shoot a an aperture of f7 to f9 or
F11 sometimes but between those values, so let me show you how you can change those settings in P mode
so
this is gonna be a little bit hard to see but as you can see as I said ISO is set to
100 and these two settings right now are being
Chosen or selected by the by the camera. So if I wanted to use like a
Smaller aperture because... to get better quality
Yeah and everything more... more things in focus, f5 in this scene right now here it's not a problem
Everything is gonna be in focus, but for other scenes, it might be a problem
so what I do is this dial with this dial I can just change as you can see the camera has
pairs of settings like if you want to use this aperture, then it's gonna change the shutter speed
So I just go to f/8, for example, and it chooses the shutter speed for me, of 1/50 of a second
Of course, the camera is not gonna make the right decision all the time
but most of the time it does but when it doesn't because the light is
Complicated because for example right now I'm backlit so I can always adjust the exposure using this dial the exposure compensation dial
So I can tell the camera to underexpose or overexpose from what it thinks is the best exposure for the scene
So I'm still in control. So this that I just talked about this pretty much the definition of aperture priority
That's another mode that this camera has, and many cameras
Where you choose the aperture and the camera chooses the share speed for you
The only reason why I have P mode on my camera all the time is because if you are using aperture priority
At least in this camera and you have it set to f/8
Last time you shot it
Then you when you turn it on
it's still gonna be at f/8 and that could be a problem if I want to take a photo
Really quick of a scene that I just found in front of me
you see if the camera is in P mode every time I turn it on
the two settings are gonna adjust to the scene that I have in front of me, of course
I might still have to change the ISO because I have it fixed to 100
But it's just one thing that I have to change instead of two
So those are the ruins of an old castle
as old as 1181, so the year
1181, so it's a twelfth century
Although that's the first reference that they found so it's older than that by anyway, it's pretty cool
these ruins are pretty cool and the landscape around.
I believe you can go down there and I'm pretty sure there's a better viewpoint of the castle
but who thought about putting that power line right there? I mean
You have the whole mountain the whole country here to put the power line and you put it next to the castle
So I've been walking around here for a while I wasn't able to find a better place
To take the photo from. from here
I'm not only able to get the silhouette of the castle
But also a little bit of the mountains so it conveys
the place where this castle is the surrounding landscape and everything else, that's the cool part about this
Not the castle itself that is in very bad shape. But yeah, it is a pretty cool place and that's such a bummer that
they put that thing there, I mean
They could even have put it here
I'm finishing this exposure, it's three minutes and twenty seconds. I'm using a
three-stop ND grad
For the sky because it's very bright compared to the castle that is very dark
I don't want detail on the castle. There's more of a silhouette, but without the ND grad it would be
too much like pitch black and
Pure white so that allows me to actually
Have a little bit of detail in the castle and a little bit of detail on the sky
And of course, I'm using a 15 stop ND filter. So that's what allows me to have a three minute long exposure
that is
finishing in five four three
two one and now
so that exposure didn't work at all because I made a mistake and I put the
ND grad in front of the lens and then the ND filter
So yeah, that's not how
How it works you have to put the ND filter first and then the graduated filter
so while I'm waiting for that exposure to
to finish
I just wanted to expand on what I was talking about earlier, about the settings, you know
When I first got my... when I got started with photography more seriously. I got this camera, the a6000
It was my first camera
Interchangeable lens camera. That was cool
it had all the manual controls that you didn't have in other cameras. So it was all new and exciting, and for a while
I think it took me like three months or something like that. I was shooting everything in manual mode
ISO, everything manual
With a manual lens too. So manual focusing and everything
I did that because I thought it was what you were supposed to do, you know
You buy a professional camera with manual controls and everything. You need to use them
at that time, I used to have a Rokinon 12-millimeter for that camera 12 millimeter in that camera is like 18 full frame equivalent
It's pretty wide
so for three months
I took all the photos in manual mode, manual focus and with a 18 mm lens
that means that every photo, every shot that I have from that time is
Boring and bad. Most of them not properly exposed because you see, manual mode was not my only mistake
But at that time I thought that you know, if you are in front of a vista like this
You have to get everything in the frame
That's the way to take photos and that's why I was using that
super wide lens 18mm and yeah, all my photos as I said from that time, they are boring because
There is no subject everything is subject
anyway
My point is don't be afraid of using any mode that your camera came with
They are there for a reason they are features of your camera
And there is nothing wrong with using manual
If you want to use manual there is nothing wrong with using program mode or auto mode if you want to use that
as long as you know what the camera is doing as long as you know that if you use auto
the auto mode and the aperture is f8 or
f16 or f4 that
Changes your depth of field and that changes your exposure and changes your shutter speed... as long as you know
All that it's fine to shoot in program mode
The mode doesn't have anything to do with the quality of your photos
The quality of your photos is gonna be the same no matter which mode you use the mode
just knows about the settings
If you use the correct settings
It doesn't matter if you use manual or program or whatever
For me personally program mode or auto mode works just perfectly fine for these kind of situations, for landscape photography
as I said, I just change the exposure compensation when I have to adjust something, and the only reason why I use manual mode
It's for the long exposures. Now for example now I'm taking a three minute long
Exposure and the camera is not going to do that by itself in any mode
You have to tell the camera to do that be
Exposed for three minutes and that's pretty much the only case where I use a manual mode
Well and at night, of course, for night photography