Welcome to Canon's Redline Challenge.
This Redline Challenge is about finding light in the dark.
The dark is really an amazing playground to develop new techniques,
try out stuff and really be creative.
Shooting in the dark can, of course, be challenging
but once you've understood the fundamental idea of
how photography works you can go out and get
great results and it's so much fun to do that.
Sweet!
In this film I want to show you how you can use the shutter speed
to create amazing images when the light is getting low.
Got it!
Shutter speed.
It's the time between when the shutter opens
and when it closes.
This time is your place for your creativity.
Because I'm an actionsports photographer
I'm more or less on the short side of the shutter speed
to freeze the action but from time to time
I experiment with longer shutter speed.
With the long exposure you have the time
to create really the atmosphere in your images.
We were in a ghost town in the US.
I did a 15 minute exposure with
a snowboarder jumping through my frame.
I was freezing the action with the flashes
and just left the camera there for 15 minutes
with the open shutter
to get those star trails.
I was standing there alone by myself in complete darkness.
You just see the red light on your camera blinking
the image pops out on the display
and you're like, "Whoah!"
The satellite dish.
Still one of my favourite action shots
but I had one problem: I didn't manage to get any light
in the dish itself.
The only way I could make light in the dish
was with a long shutter speed.
So I went, I think, to 3 or 4 seconds.
The moon, that was pretty bright behind the clouds,
and it was just giving it enough light
onto the dish over those 4 seconds.
You can see the dish, you can see the structures in there
I thought it was so cool to have like a 4 second exposure
and get all the details in there.
Right now I'm heading towards one of my favourite locations
and we're going to try some portraits, we're going to try some landscape images
and we're going to see how the shutter speed
will affect each of those images.
First up, let's see how a portrait looks here.
For me I really like the soft light on portraits.
A soft light comes from a bigger area of light
so the wider my softbox is, the softer the light is on my model.
I'm going to show you a great tip how you can simulate the same look
just by using your phone.
The plan right now is to do like a 6 or 7 second long time exposure.
The cell phone has like a small light source.
It's pretty harsh normally
but you can use the long shutter to paint with that light source
and with painting in a wider area
you can create a look that is very similar to a bigger softbox.
Unfortunately everything was white around me
and I was wearing black so you can still see my clothing
but I really like it, it gives a little
special atmosphere to the image.
So the next shot will be a long time exposure
and we're going to do light painting with those flashlights.
More to the right.
Ah, that looks good.
Landscape photography is really a cool playground
for longtime exposures.
You can just light up the areas in your image that you want to show.
You can leave the other stuff that you don't want to show in the shadow.
And that's something you cannot do during day photography.
Move your light source to the left, your flashlight.
So, in this case, I asked 2 of my friends to just help me a little bit
and to light up the hill.
Of course you can do this by yourself but
it's easier if you ask somebody to help you.
Ready, steady, go!
We filled in the shadows a little bit more with a bluer light source
and then we had like a flashlight from the right that didn't move too much.
So we got like a glowing hill
in a very atmospheric background.
Now let's get a little bit more ambitious.
We're going to light it up with a drone,
put some lights on the drone
do like a long time exposure.
It's going to be interesting, it's still snowing
so I hope it won't crash.
When you're lighting up a landscape with a drone
you don't really understand where the light is coming from.
It pretty much looks like if you would light up that whole area
with a huge softbox hovering above the landscape
and that's really cool for me.
One really cool thing about flying with the drone
and this camera is back in the day
we had to guess a little bit how long the exposure would be
but now you can pretty much see
straight away how your image will look.
That's so cool. Actually it's just a pile of snow
and with this technique I really can
create a cool image out of pretty much nothing.
We've come back to the gravel pit and
all the snow has melted.
Actually I thought, "Oh my God! Where's all the snow?
It looked so beautiful the last time."
But it has left those puddles of water around
and I think I have an idea.
I want to fly the drone
above the hill so it creates like a light circle.
And, as a bonus, I'm going to add powerful flash
behind the hill with a blue paper on
and it will just fire a strong flash and hopefully
we can create like a blueish halo around the hill.
I think we need to lower the drone lights because it's a little bit bright.
OK. One more circle.
Wo Hoo! Got it!
It's so cool to see the reflection and the halo
and the red light above the hill and
yeah, I really like the shot.
So I've shown you a couple of my favourite techniques
of the slow shutter.
I think it's time for you to go out, experiment,
try new things, fail,
learn from the mistakes
most importantly: always have fun.
But remember, stay safe
and shoot within the guidelines of where you live.
This is Canon's Redline Challenge.
Get out there, get creative
and show us how you can master
the light in the dark.