(upbeat music)
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- Hi, I'm Cristina Mittermeier
and I'm a Sony Artisan of Imagery.
In this video you will learn about
some of my favorite Sony equipment.
So these days what's on my bag
is for land shooting.
I usually bring the a7R II
is my favorite camera these days.
And for doing low light video, which I'm quickly learning,
I bring the a7S II.
And I keep a 16-35mm lens on one camera
and a 24-70mm on another.
And then I love the 70-200mm as my long lens.
That's basically my basic kit.
I also bring with me a full underwater system
and I have two lenses that go with that one.
It's the 28 mm lens and that goes into a housing
with a wet wide lens.
And that's a fixed lens.
I really love the discipline of shooting with prime lenses
but I also bring a 16-35mm
and that's a very versatile lens
for shooting most situations underwater.
You know I think I'm really from
an old school of photography where a lot of the things
that we learn in the beginning were with prime lenses.
And it teaches you the discipline of actually looking
at the entire frame and actually moving your body
to create the scene that you want
instead of relying on the zoom.
It also teaches you to rely less on gimmicks
and more on photographic skill.
So I encourage everybody to you know,
every once in awhile take just one prime lens
and find the discipline of shooting with it
for a couple of days and your photography
will improve greatly.
So working in the field you have a lot of tools
at your disposal to let you know to tell you
if the images you're getting are gonna have
a solid foundation to become publishable work.
Among those tools, you know you're histogram
but also you have a lot of information on that LED screen
if you choose to look at it.
Things that will let you know if your parameters
for work are actually gonna translate into something
that looks as beautiful on paper or in a screen
as a way you imagined in the field.
Things like your ISO.
If you go crazy and I don't know what, 30,000 ISO
it might look great in your LED screen
but you need to be cognizant that there might be
some drawbacks to it later on.
So I find that there's no excuse for coming home
with the ignorance of what the image is gonna look like.
You have every tool in your camera to give you
a lot of information as to what you're shooting.
So use that information.
Learn how to use those tools.
This is one of my favorite images of all time
because in my sketches and the things that I imagined
I was going to be photographing when I went to Greenland.
I wanted to make an image to tie the people
to the landscape.
And this happened on the very last day,
the very last afternoon of our shoot
as we were heading back into town.
All of a sudden it started snowing
and a Nunatsiavummiutut looked up to the sky to see the snow
I was able to capture this image with his dog team
in the background.
And to me, you know this is the kind of image I like to make
I like portraits and I love people's faces
but I love placing people in the place and the context
of where they live.
And so having something in the background, like those dogs
or a person that's behind in the background,
giving you context is one of the things that I like to do
in my photography.
And you know, when you're out there shooting
I don't like chimping and looking at the back of my camera
a lot so I didn't know that I had this image
until days later when I was able to download.
You know I think this image really captures
the fate of the inward people to the last ice.
And to me, it has emotional content and it really shows
that when the ice melts from underneath their boots,
their lives will change too.
And then our lives will change too.
I mean it's an important point to make
that when a situation all of a sudden happens
in front of you that you learn to recognize it
and that you are ready with you're equipment.
So when it started snowing and nunatsiavummiutut looked up
I was not the only person standing on the ice next to him.
We had a film crew from National Geographic
and the camera man, who was standing next to me,
went for a really close, tight portrait of him
as he was looking up.
For me, you know I had a 16-35mm lens with me
and so I have no choice but to make a wider image.
And this is where you really need to understand
your equipment.
I had to make a very quick shot and I had to make sure
that my frame was clean.
That I was not including pieces of other people
that were standing around.
And at the same time you want to go as wide as possible
so I chose to put him on the edge of the frame
and use the dogs as the backdrop.
To be able to capture images like this
first of all you need to know what you like.
You need to know what your style is,
the kind of images that you're trying to make.
And then you need to know your gear.
You need to know what the limitations are gonna be
and you need to be able to shoot with whichever lens
you happen to have in your hands at that moment.
You know I didn't have time here to go change gear.
If I had, maybe I would have fallen into the trap
of trying to make a tight portrait of his face.
Well I'm glad I didn't.
I had a wide lens and I think the photo is very successful.
One of the temptations is to try to make a tight portrait
of a situation like this just because his face
is so beautiful, his costume is being covered in snow.
There's a lot happening around just his expression.
But if you want to be able to tell a story
you have to include more elements in the photograph.
For me, there were definitely two very important elements.
One of them was, of course, the dogs in the background.
But also the weather, the snow itself.
You know, to show just how everything is just
this white landscape that's covered in snow all the time.
I wanted to make that connection,
to tie those two things together.
The inward hunter and the landscape that he lives in.
I've heard a lot of horror stories about people shooting
in the arctic and having their equipment malfunction
because of the cold.
That was not a problem I had.
I found that my Sony cameras, I mean they didn't even
have a glitch.
They performed perfectly throughout the whole shoot.
Keeping the front element of my lenses clean
when it's snowing and raining, that's more of a challenge.
So you just have to learn to always keep some dry cloths
or towels in your body that you can maintain your gear with.
But no, it was surprisingly easy to shoot with a Sony camera
on these very, very, cold, harsh, remote locations.
Unless I am shooting on a tripod,
in which case I take it off,
I always have the image stabilization features on
because they really help maintain control of the camera.
Especially in fast moving situations or when
I'm hand holding the equipment.
It's one of the greatest inventions in photography
so why wouldn't you use it.
Trying to hand hold a camera in low light conditions
on a moving boat is one of the most challenging
and frustrating things that you can do as a photographer.
So using the image stabilization helps
and then having fast lenses really helps.
So, you know, pick a lens that's a 2.8 that has
rapid auto focus and, you know, something that's responsive
to what you need to do because everything
is moving and changing very quickly.
And you know whenever you find yourself in a situation
where you have low light and things are moving a lot,
like when you're shooting from a boat,
remember that ISO is your friend.
And with modern Sony cameras, you can actually
lift your ISO quite a bit until you get enough
of a shutter speed to actually freeze the motion.
In this video you learned about
some of my favorite Sony equipment.
I hope that some of the ideas and tips and lessons
and mistakes that I've shared with you
that I've learned along my own journey inspire you
to find your own authentic voice,
to figure out what you're passionate about
so that you can go out there and tell your own stories.
There are no small stories and we need a lot of storytellers
to make a better planet so get your camera
and get out there.
Can't wait to see what your story is.