Well hello and welcome back to the channel again. Something slightly different in today's video
we're at Dalton-le-Dale and I'm gonna do some photography. A few days ago I got a message from
Tim Bell at Cheap Shot Photography and he asked if I'd be up for a challenge, now Tim has featured
me on his podcast in the past so how could I possibly refuse. So we've got a challenge today
we both have Panasonic bridge cameras, so the idea is that we shall have a little challenge,
both using those bridge cameras and we can take some photographs and compare the results.
What better to shoot with the bridge camera than bridges! That's the subject of today's vlog.
I don't have a clue what Tim's going to be photographing other than it's a bridge
but I've headed here to the little village of Dalton-le-Dale and there are two bridges within
the dale so I'm going to take a photograph of each of them and see how they come out.
I'll be using my trusty Panasonic fz82 and Tim will be using a Panasonic fz200.
I have the advantage of being able to have a slightly wider and longer lens than Tim
but he has the advantage that his camera has a faster lens which is f2.8 throughout the range
all the way up to 600 millimetres. So while I go and find the composition let's see how Tim's
getting on in Kent. Hi Andy, I've just arrived at the location of my bridge for the shot.
It's a little bit bigger than yours, I will turn the camera around in a moment and show you but
this bridge is actually spanning the river Medway in Kent at Cuxton. It carries the M2 motorway
from uh basically we've got two carriages we've got the London-bound carriage and the Dover-bound
carriage and also at the end is a separate bridge that carries the HS1 high-speed rail link
but I'll turn the camera around and show you my viewpoint from here.
As I say I haven't got a clue what Tim's got planned in his vlog but this is an absolutely
fantastic morning had a little bit of snowfall during the night and it's just
put a little bit of icing on the cake quite frankly literally absolutely stunning,
just nice to be out this early in the morning.
So as you'll be able to see from behind me there's the first bridge
and unfortunately the composition's kind of blocked with all these overhanging branches
so we'll have to try and get myself down there and then back up again
which might be interesting! I hope you can hear me over the rushing water but finally got down
to look at the bridge at an appropriate angle avoiding all these branches coming in the way and
the fun part is going to be getting back up but I'm going to try and set up a shot right now.
This is the first image landscape shots with a bridge in the background green rocks in the
foreground and the water moving throughout the image just quite like this composition.
It's fairly simple, there wasn't a lot on offer to be honest in that position so apart from either
taking a landscape or portrait shot it was pretty much that was the shot. What I do like about
it is as I say the movement within the water I think it's just it's been captured quite well.
The settings for the image ISO 80, f 7.1, half a second exposure and the focal length was 34mm
equivalent. So this is the second shot we've gone for a portrait composition here centralized the
bridge more into the middle of the shot and used this green rock with all this moss and
algae and bits and pieces all over it to provide some foreground interest. I've actually stacked
two images in this to make sure that both the bridge and the rock was sharp, the images were
both set on ISO 80, f7.1, focal length was 22mm equivalent, the exposure was 0.6 of a second.
This composition was actually taken hand held, I was stood and I thought it could make a
quite a nice shot with the rock at the bottom leading into the image this was shot at ISO 200
with an f-stop of 4.5 exposure was 1/13th of a second and the focal length was 22mm.
So the last shot of the first bridge I went for a monochrome edit,
this was a shot where I zoomed in a little bit more, again hand held,
the f-stop on this 3.6, ISO 100, focal length is 40mm and a 1/8 of a second exposure. So that's the
first bridge done and dusted under the second one and see if we can get some different shots there.
We've reached the second bridge and I'm going to try and see if I can
find the composition here and we're gonna see if we've got a nice shot.
It's a bit more overgrown with the hanging tree branches same as the last one but I
think and probably a little bit worse but we'll see what we can get anyway.
This is a shot of the second bridge and I'm not really too fussed about this one to be honest, it
was it seemed like a good shot when I was doing it but there's just so much going on in the image too
many branches coming in particularly on that right hand side but you've got them on the left as well
so coming in, yeah nice enough bridge and sort of scene to look at but as an image I think it's just
a bit too complicated. Settings on the camera were ISO 100, we did a focal length of 50mm,
exposure was 1/25th of a second at f3.8. This shot is another shot of the second bridge
and I think I prefer this portrait composition because it excludes a lot of the messy branches
on the right hand side of the shot and I also think it works better with the leading lines
from the broken branch on the left hand side and the river itself taking you your eye up towards
the bridge itself. The settings for the camera were ISO 100, focal length of 56mm,
exposure was one tenth of a second and we were shooting at f4.1
So you're probably wondering why I'm now recording the end of the vlog here in my office and that's
basically down to the fact that while I was out in the field my phone decided to have a little
meltdown and all the footage that I recorded of me sat in the tailgate of the car talking about what
was happening at the end of the video that all just didn't get saved! Luckily the phone recovered
and recovered the images and the footage that I had recorded before it uh all went to chaos.
Overall I must say that I was quite pleased with the shots given the fact that I was shooting with
a £250 bridge camera with a tiny sensor. The only equipment I used other than the
camera itself was a polarizing filter and one of those little plastic tiny tripods.
I'll put on screen now what I think was my shot of the day certainly really like the composition
and uh that as I say those images I took with the first bridge definitely my favourite set.
Now this was a challenge, so we'll show you now a shot that Tim sent through whilst I didn't say
exactly what I was gonna shoot I did elude to Tim that I was gonna be looking for something
that was more like a traditional landscape shot and he said he'd had something quite different in
mind so you saw earlier that you picked that large motorway bridge and this is the photograph. If you
want to see how Tim created that image and several others, why not head over to his channel, I'll put
a link in the description and I'll put a link up here I think that's the right side isn't it
and yeah, check his video out! I'm sure he had a great day with photography just as I did
and yeah I hope you've enjoyed it. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up,
if you like the channel then please certainly consider subscribing, it really does help a lot.
So all there is to say is thank you very much for watching and I'll see you again next time bye for
now.