Ahhh......there it is....Get it!!
Hello and welcome to a very cold and very snowy Scotland. I'm up in Scotland
with my friend Lyle for a few days and we've got lots of photography planned. So
it's gonna be a good day, we've got wildlife stuff, we've got landscape stuff so
come with me
we've come to this absolutely stunning forest and Lyle is currently setting up
the bird feeders and things to get the wildlife shots that he wants that I'm
gonna hopefully try and get as well....if my skill will support that, but while
he's doing that I'm wanting to try and capture a shot of these just absolutely
beautiful trees I'm finding it quite difficult at the moment because I can't
really find a composition. Just stood here the trees look absolutely stunning
and the light from the Sun is just catching them so perfectly and they look
beautiful but I'm just really struggling at the moment to isolate one and make it
work in an image. I'd like to try and get one that's sort of isolated
in the Sun with a slightly darker background to provide that contrast and
set the subject apart but I'm going to have a little explore around and see what's
happening
I just don't think I'm really going to be able to make this happen now
I found this tree here and I've got decent access to it here I've got the
woods in the background there in this tree covered in snow and it's
looking absolutely beautiful as the Sun is coming from up over here striking
through the tree putting a nice little leading line into the snow littles
strand of light in the snow which leads you up to the tree I don't think it's
gonna work though the problem I'm having is although to my eyes it looks sensational
sensational but as I take the image and we put that 3d world down into a 2d
world and the image gets flattened you just lose it you lose the detail of the
tree and it's just not working what you would need is some way of isolating that
tree with some mist or some.... I don't know it isn't there at the moment so it's not
working disappointing really for the first shot
of the trip but staying positive it's only the first location of the day and
I'm now gonna go and get some wildlife so staying positive
okay time for a little bit of wildlife and here in the Cairngorms where i am at
the moment in scotland it is pretty much the only place in the UK where you can
see a small bird called the Crested Tit it has a kind of fan on the top of its
head it's small, it's really quite an interesting little bird and that's what
I'm gonna try and capture right now I'm not massively into my wildlife
photography and particularly not into shooting small birds very often but it
is quite good fun every once in a while to put yourself to that challenge to try
and capture a nice wildlife shot because it is slightly more time
sensitive than landscape photography you've got to be in the right place get
as close as you possibly can and then get all the camera settings right and
then focus and track and get everything in place to capture a really nice shot
so it is an enjoyable challenge and that's what I'm doing today I'm here at
the visitors center in the Cairngorms and there's a feeder up in the tree
there that the center have provided to keep the birds interested in this area
and to get the squirrels to come as well I'd love to get a squirrel shot today
but I'm not sure how realistic it is there that's gonna happen this branch
down here where some of the nuts have been falling toward it seems to be a
really nice spot it's a nice composition the background is a little bit busy but
some of that sunlight coming through the trees and then hitting the birds as they
sit on that little little branch is making a really nice shot and that is
going to be the composition I go for. So for this I have my 400mm
F/5.6 lens. It's perfect for wildlife, it's light it's easy to carry around, it's got a
really fast autofocus which is the important thing for this type of
photography and it's cheap and it's just a great lens all round so that's what I
use for my wildlife photography.
Now settings wise, at the moment, I am at f/5.6
because I need to blur that background as much as I possibly can because like I
say it is quite busy and really I want as clean a background as possible and
then ISO 800 at the moment and that's just to balance out my
shutter speed which at the moment is..... I'm rolling between 1/1000 of a
second and 1/1250 because you need to get the shutter speed as quick as you
possibly can with wildlife photography and particularly bird photography even
though these birds are stopping they move so fast so you need
to have that nice a shutter speed get focused in as best you can on the eye as
well so you need to be quite accurate with your tracking and with your focus
and that's why generally I will handhold it as well it's just on the tripod at
the moment while I film this piece then it's just a case putting the camera in
AI servo mode so the focus system tracks the bird as it moves as you keep it in
that focus point the Canon 5d mark IV does have lots of different focus modes I just
prefer to track it with sort of between one and five focus points to keep the
bird sharp or keep the picture sharp on the bird's eye I'm gonna have a
little go to capture one of these Cresties, persevere a little bit and see
what I can come up with.
So I'm down on the ground I'm really struggling at the
moment where I was before I was just shooting too far down at the birds and I
wasn't quite getting the perspective that I wanted so I've had to get down
and dirty in the snow I'm shooting back towards the birds there are patches of
Sun coming through the tree so I'm trying to wait until the birds are in
that patch maybe on a branch maybe on the floor in the snow I'm not really
sure but I'll try both and see what I can get so let's have another little go
there's one on the branch now let's see if I can grab that ah there it is get it
let's have a look at that I'm gonna crop in a little bit yeah that actually is
looking pretty good it's pretty decently sharp on the eye I think that one might
very well be usable let's have another go.... it's good fun
Right after that wildlife we've come to do a bit more landscape photography and
I've come here to what is called I think if my pronunciation is correct Loch
Morlich. It is in the Cairngorms still and behind me here you can see the
absolutely beautiful Cairngorm mountains and they are currently covered in snow
now the composition I have is fairly
straightforward and if like you can see behind me the loch wasn't completely
frozen I don't think I'd be particularly interested in this image. It doesn't happen
that often when it gets snowed across the top of it as well which is what
happened today which is why it's so white. It's frozen, snow and it's quite
interesting and I want to capture it so I've just had a little walk along and I
found these rocks in the foreground here which again have had a spattering of
snow on top of them and they look really really good what I'm gonna do because
the mountains behind me as well are quite flat across the top I'm going to do a
panorama to try and get it all in and create some kind of composition which
really gives some scale to the scene I have here because it's just absolutely
massive. Now settings wise I am at f/11 to get everything in focus and then I've
got a shutter speed of 1/160th of a second and then just very simply rotating the
camera around and capturing it all with the panorama it's about an hour or so
before sunset we're probably just coming into the golden hour and it's casting
some beautiful lights across the scene I'm keeping the Sun out of the image to
the right hand side I've got the lens hood on to keep the Sun out of the shot
and then I'm a panning round I just need to wait though and be a little bit
patient because at the moment there is a little bit of cloud cover and I'm
getting patches of light and at the moment the Sun is not hitting those
Pines across the loch and I would like that because as soon as that warm Sun
hits those trees and the snow on those trees it's gonna warm up the image
overall and just really add another element to it so let's take it. Lets pan
around and just using a scale on my tripod to go around let's check that
it's been a really great day today although very very difficult I find
every time I come to Scotland you are sometimes just overwhelmed with the
scale of the place when you don't know the area you're not quite sure where to
go it can cause an element of difficulty especially when you're trying to make a
video as well it just adds to the pressure but I hope you've enjoyed
seeing a little bit of landscape photography. I'm happy with the bird shots I've got and I
hope you enjoyed seeing me capture them please leave a comment down below let me
know what you think of this I'm sorry I missed last week but situations arise
that I can't always stay in control of so I had things to deal with and I
missed a week for the first time in well..... since I started First Man Photography so
I hope not to do that too often but I didn't mind having a week off. I hope I've
come back with a video that you've enjoyed and I'll see you on another one
very very soon please do subscribe to the channel if you have not done so
already hit the notification bell so you see all the videos. There will hopefully be
another one coming from Scotland next week and I'll see you very very soon
I'm Adam this is first man photography in the very very beautiful Cairngorms in
Scotland
Out!!!
I've just had my very first drone crash straight to a tree. Thankfully it fell out
and I got it back.
But...one broken propeller.