hello guys hello thanks so much for joining me again we're doing
a bit of a walk around today it is 8:25 a.m
essentially I'm just about to start my workday but I've had an idea to do
something this afternoon because it is a beautiful day let me show you outside if
we're not blinded beforehand so can you see how nice is that what I'm
thinking of doing essentially is taking you guys outside and taking it some dogs
and actually just sitting and walking you guys through how to shoot a portrait
because I think portraits are potentially one of the more difficult
ones to do well so I was thinking of doing that however it's just me today so
I'm flying solo I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this also I've got a full
day of work and I might be dead by the end of it in terms of exhaustion I'm
gonna try and do it so in today's video and we're gonna shoot a portrait and I'm
gonna talk you through it
she's like I play with me play with me - I didn't want this to be a super long
intro but essentially yep I've got full day of work but in today's video we're gonna
be going out later on this afternoon probably in golden hour or as close to
golden hour as we can possibly get and we're gonna be shooting one of the tribe
whoever it may be as a portrait and I'm gonna walk you through how I would get that
portrait what the settings would be I'm gonna go into everything in as
much detail as physically possible but I'm not going to do it planned so it's
just kind of gonna be on the fly god this is heavy if you can do have a
notepad ready before we start this because as I fire stuff out just want
you to make a note of it I will probably not look like this at the end
of the day I will see you later on this afternoon
I don't know what is going on with my audio today but in the meantime please do try
and enjoy this video as best as you can even with the audio maxing out - like a
broken record please do subscribe
welcome to the paddock oh let's get comfy let's get comfy feels like this is
like story time this is not a story time you guys okay so I'm going to talk you
through how to get a solid portrait and the first thing that we want to be doing is
using a really low F number now using a wide aperture if you don't know
what I'm talking about please go ahead and watch the exposure triangle video
because that will basically get you up to speed with what we're going to be
discussing right now we do you have some trees and the trees have got light
coming through them and that means that we can create bokeh as long as we set up
our settings correctly what we want to be doing is using a super low F number
which is a really wide aperture and what that's going to do is that's going to
drop the background out of focus the more out of focus you can get it the
better the bokeh is they always just have to be you know bouncy bears in the
way so once we have got our super low F number what we need to make sure is
we've got the dog as close as possible to the camera and as far as
possible from the background so the reason why those distances really matter
is because the further the dog is from the background but the closer they are
to the camera in a relative terms the more the background will be blurred out
and therefore the larger bokeh circles you're gonna get - does that make sense I hope
that makes sense so the next kind of ingredient in terms
of the whole thing is to make sure that you are low down
because where you take the picture in terms of the angle and the height that
you are in comparison to the dog the better the picture is going to look I'm
going to include an example of a few different pictures one shot high up as
some people are actually taking their pictures one shot at a middle height or
basically where I would be sat now if I was taking a picture and the last one
will be shot where I probably will be shooting these pictures from today which
is where you should be shooting which is either on the floor very close to the
floor technically on the eye level of the dog or below I guess you can
make your own judgment up to which picture of these you think looks
the best but I think that we probably will all agree that the best one is the
one where the photographer was as close to the ground as possible
the important thing about when you're shooting super low is to try and get
some foreground interest in there whether you have that foreground
interest in focus or not is completely up to you personally I prefer to blow it
out I want where the focus is on the dog to be set back a little bit
from the front so that the front foreground is completely out of focus as
well and what that does is that draws your eye to the point of the focus which
is the dog which is the point of photography does that make any sense I feel
like I'm just waffling okay so once you have got your aperture nailed the
distance from the subject and the angle of the shot sorted you just need to make
sure that you've got enough light coming through do not go too low on your
shutter speed make sure that your shutter speed is at least two times the
focal length of the lens and ideally higher than that because we're shooting
dogs and dogs move - i'm talking quite quick because I know we're losing the
light and all we've got is cloud so as soon as it gets nice light I'm gonna
want to shoot straight away I think we're gonna use Pippi for today just
because Piper looks adorable which is a given also because Alfie's dark coat is
quite dusty at the moment and editing it all out is gonna take a billion years
so Alfie's face he's got an eye bogey so another really important
thing to do is before you take any pictures ...
is to make sure that there is no eye bogeys on the dog that's really
important as well and essentially what that's going to do is
make sure that you've got a little editing to do as physically possible
which was always a win in my book the next thing really that we want to make
sure is that we've got something that the dog likes so we've got something
that gets their attention and we'll hold it so there is a toy out here and I'm
just gonna use that for today so I'm
gonna use this toy and basically because they both love it
... what we wanna make sure is that we've
got a toy that the dog is absolutely in love with or if that's not gonna case
for you and your dogs then make sure that you've got some food or some
rustles or some noise whatever it might be
keep the session as short as physically possible you want those expressions you
want to be ready for it make sure if you haven't already there you've got your
focus set up on spot focus mode whatever that might be on your camera and if
you're using a Sony camera with Eye-AF make sure you've got Eye-AF enabled it doesn't
matter if you're using continuous focus or single-shot focus or AFS if you're on
the cameras that use that it doesn't matter if you are using those settings
because what we also want to have already done is set up back button focus
now if you don't have back button focus set up not a massive deal but as you will
know my previous video which I will link above I do think back button focus is the
best way to go and I also explain why in that video as well essentially we're
going to be shooting at that fence line because that's gonna give us as much
separation as we possibly can ...
another thing to note is if you can see the fence line behind me there are some
fence posts so we want to make sure that we have not got fence posts coming out of
dogs heads that is extremely important I think I might just pick up the camera
and go handheld for a second okay so we're now at 70 mm and I know that you
guys can't see much right now but but I'm going to lie down so you can already see
the background going totally blurred out she's a little close but I'm hoping that
you guys can super see how much bokeh we've just achieved by getting
down super low by being far enough away from our background and by also making
sure that we using a nice long lens and a low aperture (f number) and I mean guys that's
pretty much all there is to it what we're going to do is we're going to shoot
we're gonna get the shot and then we're going to go back into post-production
and we will edit it and if you guys have any questions about what we've covered
today ... then please do just drop them into the comment
section below I will get back to them as soon as I possibly can
okay I'm losing the light I'm gonna shoot I'll meet you back in a sec so
we're back in the office now we're going to go through the editing of this shot
it's not the one that you can see on the screen right now
this is my desktop picture but we do need to edit the picture that we've
taken today before I do that I'm going to ask you all very nicely please do
subscribe to my youtube channel even if you never watch any of my videos ever
again although it might not seem like a big deal to you guys it really is to me
so just thanks so much to everybody who has subscribed so far I absolute love you
I appreciate you and I just hope that you are all safe and well at the moment so
what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and open Lightroom classic I'm
gonna keep this video as short as physically possible I'm gonna not show
you me opening up Lightroom classic just because I don't know if I've got some
client images on there so I'm gonna open it up and I'm gonna go to the import
module and we're gonna go from there okey doke so we're in the import module now
I've already moved the raw files from my SD card to a folder on my computer I
don't usually do that that's not usually the method that I would take but in this
instance it was important because I had to put everything from the camera
including the video files I'm gonna find them on my hard drive right now and make
sure that they show up here okay so here we have everything that is on the card
at the moment I'm gonna just run through them pretty quickly in terms of the ones
that we actually want to look at I'm only gonna add in the ones that we want
so I'm just gonna uncheck anything else that was on the card when you're
happy just click import and then then wait for that to do its thing
okay so then as soon as we've got to this point we want to go into the
develop module and that is where we will have our best view of the images that
we've taken I am aware of the fact that my exposure was slightly low for the
conditions that were outside but that's just something I need to sort with my
camera screen to make sure that it is more accurate in sunlight there are a
few in here that I have selected just so that I can illustrate other things in
the future so I'm not gonna worry about those too much but as with my previous
Lightroom handling video which is linked above if you want to go ahead and look
at that I'm gonna just flag and cull the ones that I want to keep and we're gonna
end up with the best picture in my opinion okay so I've kind of got to
these five I'm just gonna do my base edit before I make a final call so I'm
gonna make sure that my white balance is exactly where I want it to be so it was -
a reference point just to give you guys a bit of a heads up obviously Piper is
ginger and her coat color does change a lot but what I'm looking at is I'm
looking at the white coat as my reference point on her - I'm just gonna go
ahead and do my usual little bits that I would normally do I'm gonna zoom in to
200% for you guys to talk to you see what I'm working with right now you
can put a little bit of vignette on that okay it's time to crop so this
is a bit confusing because there is a ridge of the ground that goes here but
there is also straight line in the back
beautiful and then I just want to go ahead and add a little bit of softness
on the background using a radial filter nice and big I'm gonna change
that just to anything it's not important and
then drop my clarity drop my texture and drop my sharpness on that and then I
will just bring the exposure down a touch bring the highlights down a touch
and then it bring the contrast back up and add a little bit of saturation to
that area so what that has done is that has just softened off super quickly very
rough everything else that's going on I'm gonna warm it up a little bit as
well so I'm gonna get before-and-after - where we're at now
final thing we'll just run our sharpen eyes brush if you don't know how
to make it there are two videos I will link the first one up here right now and
then the second video which goes into the noise reduction as well will be
linked above - I'm gonna push the sharpness on this just because of the
sharpening effect that I've already done so before and after before and after and
I know some people will say you know this is too warm this is too yellow but
actually if you look at the white this is actually pretty accurate in terms of
the natural light that was already available so we've not really gone any
further than was in the natural environment at the time I think that's
really important to note I'm not - oops - I've not overcooked it
deliberately or dramatically I've just really reverted it back to its natural
form which was quite warm she's ginger it's hard it's hard to
manage
just turn down my sharpening a little bit I'm not happy with how much
is going on there that's better I'm using back into a hundred percent so not
two hundred percent and that is where we're at to remove the eye bogey I will
just open it up in Photoshop let me unselect everything because nobody
needs that I'm going to edit in Photoshop and just take out that little
eye bogey that's going on there r
so I'm in PS now I will zoom all up in there super
zoom let's do some cleaning you know I haven't even picked if this is the shot
that I want to add - this is probably bad bad practice there is a fence post
here but it's not distracting enough for me to be worried about it there are
these here and some leaves which I am going to remove so to remove them we're
going to right click over here on whatever tool is visible and we're going
to choose the patch tool so I make sure that these are my settings I'm not
sure if you can see that okay we've got patch normal clicked on source and
not transparent diffusion of 5 and then what we want to do is circle the
things that we don't want and let Photoshop make the choice what you want
to try and do is with these patches that you select don't put it on something
that's going to be just as distracting as the original item because it would be
obvious you've cloned something there so you just kind of want to stay away from
doing that if you can
I know I'm not gonna get this perfect and it's gonna irritate me but to be
fair no one would be able to tell with that anyway so I'm kind of okay yeah I'm
cool with that okay so that's pretty much where I would
stop of course you could run one of the sharpening tools that we've gone
through recently I'll probably do a high pass on this because why not with that
and then when you are happy just click the X and what that will do is it'll push
that straight back into Lightroom so we've got a new image here this
was when it went to photoshop and this is now afterwards I'm just gonna assess
my other pictures just to see if there is one - I mean I love that her little
expression is so cute I also love these because she again just looks so freaking
adorable but what I don't like about these is just the angle of the shot is
just too high for me there's not enough in the foreground that is blurry if you
look at the difference do you see how this is lower down by maybe an inch two inches
and it's such a difference - it makes such a difference so I'm gonna stick with my
picked image here which looks like this and what I'm just gonna really
quickly do is change this into a 16 x 9 crop so that I can drop it into
the video and it doesn't look ridiculous so I mean really guys that's kind of all
there is to it and then I would just do my normal exporting procedure as I would
do in any other given situation and I think it's just important to note you
guys that this is practice and I think people think that this just easy - easy to
get to kind of the stage where shooting is straightforward and easy and simple
because it's not - it is practice and if you're not gonna put the time in to do
the practice you're not going to see the amazing results so just try and get out
as much as you possibly can make sure that you are editing as often as
possible so that you know like most of this was just done in
lightroom it's not a lengthy time-consuming procedure and if you're
feeling super stuck then just drop drop something either in the comments below
on this video because I really really appreciate audience participation on
YouTube itself or just drop it into our Facebook group as well because either or
I will be there and I will answer it as best as I can as soon as I can I hope
you enjoyed this video if you did please do subscribe like I've already mentioned
today like this video leave a comment do all of the things that are engaging and
I will see you all again very very soon