hello everyone welcome to this wonderful snowstorm in this video i'm going to talk
about how to get some epic shots using only your phone i'm going to be using my google
pixel 4a but this works with whatever camera you have whether it's a samsung
iphone oneplus xiaomi or any other camera let's get right into it for those of you
who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahafford a young photographer and filmmaker
on the journey to become better at this art in this video i will let you know
how to capture some epic shots by talking about the camera settings you should be using the light
conditions you're looking for the weather you want to have and how to compose some epic shots
now let's talk about camera settings if you have a modded smartphone so like my google pixel 4a
you don't have to change much inside of the camera app and this is because the camera app
is already doing the hard work of creating a super high quality picture so it's going
to take multiple frames every time you take a shot and it's going to merge all these frames
together to create a higher quality final picture one thing i would change inside of the camera app
so if we come inside of here and go on our event settings and this works for most smartphones too
is go inside of the settings and make sure we have the option to select
raw files so if we come here we have the option to enable raw and then if we go back
inside of our main menu here we can actually select if we have a raw picture or not and this
is because you're going to have more flexibility instead of the final shots to hit it dim if you
don't know what are raw and why they're useful i'm going to link a video where i talked about that
now let's talk about another very important setting inside of your camera app if we take a
picture here of the trees and the sky and the snow in the front we're going to see that the trees
come out very dark because the camera thinks that they're almost black compared to the sky and the
snow in the foreground to fix this you actually just want to come here we're going to click
on the house here and the trees then i'm gonna bring up the shadows you can see that they put
them almost completely down we're gonna bring them back up to the maximum and now we're gonna take
the picture and we're gonna see that now the camera does a much better job
of keeping a lot more detail inside of the dark parts of the picture
you could also do this using a raw file if you don't have an option like this on your camera
while the sun is slowly coming out let's talk about what are good like conditions
for landscape photography this is one thing when you become better in lansing photography
you're going to realize you pass more and more time chasing the best light conditions possible
to get better shots the first most obvious type of light that everybody likes in landscape
photography is during golden hour if you don't know what is golden hour it's right before and
right after sunrise and sunset where you get the very warm tones and also very saturated colors
which are really great for landscape photography i would highly suggest that if you're starting
out taking pictures to go out during sunrise or sunset because you can easily get unique shots
by taking the sunrise and sunset because these are shots that most people are not as used to see if
you're not sure when it's golden hour or is the sunrise or sunset i highly suggest the app that
is called photo peels it's a little bit expensive but allows you to see when is a golden hour
and where will be the sun situated so this is a really great app if you need to plan your
shoot in advance to know where are the best conditions to take your shots so i highly
suggest you go check out this app if you want to be getting better pictures of sunrise and sunset
in my opinion the most underrated type of light is during blue hours so blabber is a few minutes
before sunrise and a few minutes after sunrise where everything becomes very blue inside of
the photos and this is very good instead of landscape photography because it allows you to get
completely different shots that most people are not using at all so this is a pretty cool
technique one problem with the google pixel 4 is that in the main camera it tends to make
everything way too blue compared to what it should be so a little fix for that is to go
inside of nightside mode that's going to correct the colors and get better looking shots uh when
using this but this is a really cool technique to get some better lights inside of your photos
i think that the biggest mistake that beginner landscape photographers make when taking pictures
especially when you just snap pictures with your phone quickly is thinking that the blue sky day
is the best time to take pictures it's actually probably the worst time to take pictures
because you get very harsh shadows and highlights inside the scene which doesn't make anything look
too good it's a lot better to take pictures with a sky like right now where you get very even
lighting and very soft lighting which just makes everything look a lot better inside of the shot
it's also really great when you have some clouds in the sky that create texture so right now it's
very flat but if you had more texture inside of the clouds it can create very cool scenes where
you have a lot more detail inside of the sky which creates a much more interesting photo in the end
now let's talk about weather conditions unlike most people think a perfect blue sky day isn't
the best day to be taking pictures you actually want extreme weather conditions so like right
now if snowfall or if you have rain mist or fog or any conditions like that are great
for taking landscape photos let's go take a few photos to see how it works in real world
the reason it's important to use extreme weather conditions is that it allows to tell a completely
different stories so for example right now with all the snow in the trees around i'm telling the
story that we went through a complete winter storm this also applies when you're taking pictures
with rain or with some fog where you can show a scene that is completely different than what most
people are used to see and this allows to have a much more interesting shot of the landscape
before the light completely disappears for tonight let's talk another reason why it's so great to
have extreme weather conditions and this one is that allows to put more focus on your main subject
so for example if we're taking a picture of the little island here and we had some heavy
snowstorms some fog or something like that behind the island it would put the focus on the island
and not all everything around it and this might seem unlogical because you might think that when
you're taking a landscape photo you want to get everything inside of your shot but landscape
photography is really about choosing subject and choosing separate parts inside of the photo
and making these parts your main subject and putting them forward
so by using fog or things like that you can really separate different elements in the shot
and bring the focus on the element you really want to have as your main subject in the photo
now if you're telling yourself that you don't have extreme conditions like snow to go take
some landscape photos i will tell you that you probably have rain and rain is really great to
get some landscape photos so first of all rain is going to allow just like fog or a heavy snowstorm
to get these different layers inside of the shop another really great thing with some rain is that
the colors are much more saturated which is really great when taking landscape photos because you
want to have the most colors inside of your scene another really great thing with rain that i love
to taking is after the fact you actually have these water droplets on tree branches or things
like that and you can also get reflection where you can take the really cool landscape photos
using the rain so don't stress if you don't have a winter you can actually go out when you have
some rain and still get some really cool landscape photos if you're not part of this community what
are you waiting for go hit that big red subscribe button to be notified when a new video comes out
also consider sharing this with friends and family because what is even better
than doing landscape photography alone is doing landscape photography with a friend or family
one thing i hope that most of you understood is that you don't need all the conditions i talked
about inside of this video to get perfect landscape shots the most important thing is
actually to go outside and practice you can get some really good shots even you have a perfect
blue sky and you can get some terrible shots even if you have a sunset so you really just need to
go out whatever the conditions are and try and get the most photos and try to understand why
a picture is good or not to be able to improve afterwards up to now we've been talking about
techniques that to a certain point you don't have to control about them composition is one of the
most important parts inside of photography and you have full control about it i'm not going to talk
about some techniques that are in my opinion the most important to get some epic landscape shots
now let's talk about the most well-known photography rule which is the rule of thirds
this basically means you need to align your subject on one of the lines of thirds to help
you with this we're first going to go inside our camera settings so here on the google
pixel 4e we're going to go in the advanced settings then we're going to select
the grid type and i'm going to select the 3x3 grid this works on any cell phone or any
digital camera you're going to have an option to enable a grid like this the error that most
people do when taking landscape photos is to center the subject so in this case our subject
is the little brown house here so if we put it perfectly in the center and take a photo we're
gonna see it creates a result that is okay but it's not a great shot to get a much more
powerful image we actually want to use our rule of thirds so here we're going to put the house
on the intersection of two of the lines of first and now if we take a shot we're gonna see that
we're gonna get a much more powerful image in the end this is a rule that i respect in most of my
shots and i'm going to put a few examples here so you can see how i respect it in most of my photos
now let's talk about the second composition technique and this one is to not limit yourself
to only taking horizontal orientation photos i know that the horizontal orientation is called
landscape orientation but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be taking landscape photos
in a vertical mode the reason i love taking pictures with my google pixel 4a
in a vertical mode is that it has a pretty wide primary lens like most other smartphones this
means that when you're taking a picture in a horizontal mode you actually get a lot of
distraction around your subject and one really important thing to remember inside of landscape
photography is that your subject actually isn't your landscape it needs to be something a little
bit more precise so in this case it's the house i have in front of me but it could be an island
it could be a person it could be anything else that is interesting inside of your shot
so by taking a vertical mode so if you come here and we place our house in the vertical mode we can
actually see that we're going to get a much more interesting shot because you're going to have the
top and the bottom that are going to have white space and this is going to bring more emphasis
on your subject which is the house inside of this photo i'm going to put a few out of polos on the
screen when i skied we have a lot of the sky that brings the emphasis on the mountains in the bottom
now let's talk about another very important composition technique in lansing photography
and this is to change your perspective most people take a picture at the height of their
head or at their chest but you don't want to be like most people i would suggest getting closer
to the ground or using a foreground subject like the little branches in the background here to get
a more interesting shot for example a few days ago i took pictures of these branches and you can see
that by moving just a little bit the camera you can get a completely different result i actually
ended up liking more one other shot where i have to two branches that create a v and put the accent
on your subject in the center here one common mistake i see when people are taking photos with
a foreground subject is actually that you don't want to be hiding your main subject or touching
it with the foreground subject so just be careful how you place the foreground subject in accordance
with your main subject in the photo leading lines is one of the most powerful composition technique
in landscape photography in my opinion the idea is that you want to use lines inside of your shot
to guide the eye towards a subject i'm going to show a few examples because it might be a little
bit hard to understand without any examples in the first shot here the lines of the cables of
the chairlift point towards our subject here the person in the chair and this really helps your eye
go towards it because it's really high contrast with the sky if you ever wondered why roads or
path are so popular inside of lansky shops it's actually because they really help leading your
eyes towards your subject here which is the house in the background so this is a very powerful
technique when you have a role or something like that because your eyes can automatically follow
that road and go towards your subject you can also create your own path so for example in this shot
here i walked in the snow to create a path that goes towards the sunset in the background which
is the subject i was trying to take inside of the picture my last image here is actually one where
it's a counter example so here the leading line of the ski tracks points to the end of the lake
but i actually want the people to be seeing the sunset here so in this shot it would be better if
i didn't have any leading lines or any foreground subject here and just take the sunset right away
because that's the part i want i want people to be seeing inside of the shot so be careful if leading
lines because they can also point to some things in the shots that you don't necessarily want to be
your main subject i won't talk about editing your photos too much inside of this video because
i have more videos where i go in depth about editing your shots there's one error that is the
most common when people ask me for comments that simply drives me crazy this is not leveling your
horizon inside of your shots this is super easy to fix so you can go inside of google photos here
then go in your edit settings go on crop and simply level your horizon pretty quickly now
we're done so you saw it took five seconds to fix so there's no reason at all why you don't do it
inside of your next shot i wanted this video by telling that the only real way to become better
in landscape photography is to go outside and take some pictures you might not know but i took over
500 pictures with my google pixel 4a in the last few days and one exercise i like doing
is taking different shots of the same subject it might not be the most epic landscape shot
here with huge mountains or things like that but i still enjoy going outside and taking some pictures
another very important thing is that once you go inside you want to go and look at your pictures
and try to understand what you like inside of them and what you could improve in the future
this is the only way to really improve indiana i also want to end by telling you that it's not
important the number of likes you get on instagram the only thing that matters inside of landscape
photography is if you enjoy the process i might go out and take pictures during a whole day and
get none that are good but if i had a fun time outside that's really the only thing that counts
with that being said i hope this video allowed you to learn some of the basics of taking epic
landscape photos with your phone if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like
button below and also consider subscribing if you want to learn more about photography
or filmmaking i would also really appreciate if you shared this video with some friends or family
i also have a question for you and i want to know if you would like more tutorials on landscape
photography using your phone please let me know in the comments below see you in the next video
bye