happy new year everyone welcome back to my channel this is the first video of my
new path on YouTube where I'm gonna be sharing my photography knowledge and my
journey on becoming a better photographer so right now I'm standing
in front of the nuclear power plants here in the South of England in
Dungeness and there's a pretty epic sunset happening on my right my friend
Michael picked me up with his car this morning and he myself and his two kids
went to a cute little village called RIE where we spent the morning taking
pictures of nice little houses the weather conditions weren't great and the
sky was totally gray which is one of my worst conditions take pictures that but
I always say do what you can with what you have so that is what I did and right
now the sky has opened up and we're expecting a very nice sunset one other
thing I want to talk about on this video is why I almost never shoot on manual
mode and why I don't think you should either
so what I'm looking for a composition to shoot while the Sun is going down let's
talk about manual mode and why I don't like to use it I get a lot of people who
are just starting in photography telling me that they only shoot in manual mode
and some even say that they shoot with manual focus and that's pretty crazy to
me because photography is about capturing a moment and if you're
scrambling to fix your settings while that moment is happening then you're
probably going to miss out on the moment well I do agree that when you're a
beginner photographer you'd really need to learn how to use all your settings on
your camera and you need to know what ISO is and what your aperture is and
what they all do but I think once you have those delve down then it's best to
be ready for whatever is about to happen
okay the nuclear power plant isn't the best subject to shoot but the light is
really gorgeous right now so I'm gonna make the most out of it and I'm gonna
shoot over here there's a lot of houses in front of the actual power plant and
there's a light house in front of it as well and there's a bit of haze in the
horizon so I think it's gonna make a cool image
I'm currently shooting at aperture priority mode because I like to control
the depth of field and I like the camera to do everything else so I set my ISO to
automatic I don't really care if there's a bit of noise as long as the image is
sharp and I also set the shutter not to go below one sixtieth of a second
because I know that I can handheld it at that point and there won't be any shake
so then all I have to do is set the aperture and Bob's your uncle
the light is also hitting some boats right now over here and that looks
pretty nice as well so I'm gonna grab the picture of that as well while we
wait I really didn't expect the light to turn out the way has today because all
morning it was mist and fog and clouds and miserable I just wish I was at a
better location to be honest because just look at it okay the Sun is about to
set now but I'm pretty sure that the color will just get better because the
clouds are right above it and it just looks like it's all gonna get pink so
let's cross our hands and fingers and toes see what happens
one thing that I really like to do is set my aperture high to about 18 to 20
and get the Sun near an edge of an object and get a beautiful Sun flare and
this is quite ideal too for that
still not super excited about the pictures I've taken so far so just gonna
have to keep looking it's always best to know what you're gonna shoot and have a
location scouted before but you don't always have that luxury especially when
you travel when you go somewhere new or I have a look at this house in front of
those big electrical pylon thingies in front of the power plant it looks like
it could make a critical image so I'm gonna capture this so I'm going to
breakfast my exposures I'm going to take three exposures of a dark one middle one
and the bright one so I can combine them later in Lightroom and get all the
dynamic range that I need because the sky is quite bright and the foreground
is quite dark right now I'm actually gonna use the tripod that I've got you
guys on right now to do this because it's always best to have a nice steady
shot when you are combining exposures all right so I've got my camera set up
I've got the composition alike focused on the house
I've got f8 I've set the bracketing to minus one and plus one and got my timer
on you know switch off the screen and take
the shop
so even then I didn't mean to put my camera into manual mode because aperture
priority just takes control of the speed which is what's important when you put
your camera on a tripod I took my ISO off auto and I put it to
the lowest setting so I can have as less noise as possible and yeah the camera
took care of the rest now of course there are situations where putting
manual mode on is paramount and that for me is when I want to do specific long
exposures when it's night start photography if you want to do a bulb
exposure which is as long as you press and hold on to the button it takes an
exposure but yeah that's about it most of the other times I use aperture
priority mode unless I want to shoot something that is quite fast like sports
or wildlife where I set my camera mode to shutter priority and then I adjust
the speed that I want in order for my subject to be sharp and I let the camera
take care of the rest just because you shoot on an automatic
mode doesn't mean you're not a true photographer and you don't know what the
camera does if you can take nice images you're a photographer in my book
that's the end of my first photography video of the year I know it wasn't very
coherent but they'll get better as I do these I'm committing to do one a week
and I would love to actually go out of London and make videos but I understand
that it's not going to be possible to do it every week so expect some videos from
London and some from the countryside as I want to do more landscape photography
this year I do have plenty of trips planned already so expect some travel
photography as well thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video give me a like
let me know in the comments what you liked them what you didn't and consider
subscribing for more weekly videos thanks for watching
did I say that already I did this hey thanks thanks for watching