Today I'm going to give you three creative tips for using the Sandmarc ND
Filters with the Osmo Pocket in the video coming up hi I'm Brett Garamella
with brettgaramella.com and in this video I'm going to go to three different
locations and show you how to use these nd filters which Sandmarc sent to me so
I'm going to show you how to use it in more creative ways or ways that you
normally don't use nd filters so let's open these up and then let's get right
into the video so inside you have these four ND filters okay and this is nice
because it has ND 4 and the 8 ND 16 and ND 32 so you have a wide range and the
thing about these filters they're not just normal and d filters these are
actually ND polarisers so what the polarizer does is it adds more
saturation and more vivid tones to the image it really makes the greens and the
blues pop out from the image the nd part of the ND filter is sort of like
sunglasses for your lens that's what I like to call it so it just makes things
darker it really doesn't change the color too much but I'll explain that as
we go along in this video now these filters come in a nice little case has a
little thing here for your thumb so you can just open it up and inside you have
the four filters I gotta say they're really well made I think it's made of
aluminum so they're really solid they're made of metal not plastic and they're
magnetic so I just put it on the Osmo pocket like that and then it just sticks
right there right on the front alright one thing to know in this video I've
sort of used it as an experiment or as a test to show you both what to do and
what not to do so that you can see the things that I did well and then I'll
explain the things that I could have done better in order to help you as a
filmmaker these three tips are way to add more creativity to your filmmaking
right away but you can sort of implement it to your particular style so as you go
you may change just tweak few things but I'm going to explain all
that in this video so let's get started so since I'm in Florida I went to one of
my favorite places the beach and on the beach I saw this lifeguard house alright
the nice thing about nd filters like I said it makes the sky the ocean anything
with a blue or a green color really pop out basically anything outdoors because
you're always gonna have the sky you might have water plants grass anything
with nature nd filters really helped out a lot especially the ND polarizer is
because a polarizer makes it pop out so I used some of PGYTech accessory
mounts in order to attach the Osmo pocket and mount it to my tripod but I
also added the wireless module because I wanted to see what I was shooting with
my phone so I wanted that screen real estate and using the Osmo pocket a lot I
find the wireless module is really a tremendous accessory to have so I used
that along with the shoot and I just set it up made a nice composition and just
took a picture now one thing to note it was very windy outside so it was a
little shaky so both for the photos and video when you slow the shutter down you
might see some blurriness in your image if you don't have a really good tripod
and a really stable mount and I'm gonna show you how I messed that up and the
way that you can do it in a much better way but we're gonna get to that later on
in the video so I chose to put an ND 32 filter on an MD 32 polarizer filter I
should say because I want to slow the shutter way down first I took a normal
picture and you notice the shutter speed is one six hundred and fortieth of a
second with the same mark nd polarizer filter on I could lower the shutter much
more and with this slow shutter you're gonna add a little more smoothness to
the image you're gonna see that in the water in the clouds you're also gonna
see a little more saturation a little more vividness I notice when you use a
slower shutter the colors tend to be a little more vibrant and pop out and in
addition to that as you can see with this polarizer
it adds even more pop so you'll notice in the sky has that nice rich blue tone
so you can definitely see the gradiation in the sky from the dark blue on top to
the light blue and you can also see more details and contrast in the clouds
they're not just white fluffy clouds all right they have that grayish and even
darker tone to them that you can see this variation the ND filter really
helps bring that out and it adds more of a 3-dimensional feel to your image so i
really suggest using that both for photo and for video so a lot of people talk
about ND filters taking away the glare from an image yes it takes away some
glare but it adds more detail in the highlights in the shadows and adds more
contrast almost to the image so that you get more of a 3-dimensional image it's
not as flat and basic looking it has more mystery and more feel and depth to
it and that's really what you want from a photograph alright guys so it's really
really windy today that's why I wasn't talking over there but I'm behind this
lifeguard house right now so it's sort of protecting me from all the wind and
what I have over here is I have my tripod with my a small pocket and I'm
gonna take a picture of the ocean so the thing about these ND filters is they
really make the greens and the Blues pop out as you can see in those previous
images especially in the sky and in the water now the point of using them with
water is to get that nice slow shutter so I showed you that with the photos but
now I'm gonna do it again so using the ND filter requires you to use a slower
shutter to let more light in because the ND filters making the camera darker so
when I take this image you're gonna see the waves and when I don't use the ND
filter it's gonna be very very sharp because it's a high shutter speed so a
high shutter speed freezes everything but then a slower shutter speed makes
everything look nice silky and smoother so as I was shooting ocean the Sun
started going down and it was at a different spot so I needed a different
ND filter so I put an nd8 I had to experiment with a couple
different filters but I settled on the nd a seem to be right to me and you'll
notice I used a slower shutter I went down to one thirtieth of a second and
this slowed the shutter down a lot but this slower shutter still had a lot of
stuff info it added the part of the wave that moved
the fastest was blurry but the other parts of the wave in the ocean were in
focused so something that's moving really slow if you don't really slow it
down it's not gonna make everything blurry now one really important tip here
in this whole creative process if something is moving towards the camera
or going away from the camera it's not gonna be as blurry with a slow shutter
as something that's moving across the frame from left to right or right to
left so if I were to shoot it with the wave going across if I were to turn the
camera and the wave was going across it would be much more blurry and it would
have that nice smooth look which I probably should have done but I just
wanted to get just the ocean because I wanted a nice clean background so I
should have used a higher ND filter and slowed my shutter down even more so if
you want the water to be nice and silky smooth and almost look more like a lake
than an ocean make sure you have an ND filter like an ND 16 or even an ND 32 or
higher so the second location risked my life walking up this highway ramp with
cars going around really fast around this Bend but I really like the angles
shooting down so what I did was I set my tripod up there and I shot down towards
the road below so the reason I wanted to shoot down at this angle was I wanted to
get the cars going by really fast and I liked the perspective of shooting going
down so if you change your angle shooting really low and/or shooting
really above shooting down it's gonna look more interesting to the viewer
don't always shoot at eye level or sort of at waist level try to go real low or
real high and that's gonna add more interest to your image one thing I
wasn't prepared for was that the highway actually kind of shook and kind of moved
as the cars drove by so this was kind of annoying especially if you're trying to
use a slow shutter with a tripod I learned something from doing this but I
recommend if you can find a sidewalk or somewhere away from the actual road
there will be less movement especially if you're on something like a ramp or a
bridge or something like this try to go on the sidewalk
rather than the extra Road so my second creative tip is to use
an ND filter an ND polarizer with time lapse in order to make the lights on the
cars look like laser beams or make shoot across the image all right so you add
more movement and more feel to the image now I did this both with photos lowering
the shutter way down and I did it with time-lapse video so the thing about
time-lapse video so you notice the mount that I had was not very stable my tripod
is also not a really professional one because my other one got broken so I had
to use this one and said my backup so I recommend you get a really stable tripod
and make sure you mount it like this when you mount it like this it's gonna
be a lot more stable and I found it not to wobble as much so that's why you see
the image shake and I apologize for that but usually as a lesson of what not to
do when you do time-lapse however there are a lot of good things that happen so
you notice that I shot from when the Sun was going down from daytime to nighttime
so I set the shutter for two seconds but I set the time lapse for three second
intervals and that's the lowest it can go for whatever reason it's kind of
strange with DJI and Osmo pocket but the slower shutter you use so I've used like
seven or eight seconds a really long exposure the Osmo pocket will only allow
you to use a much higher interval so an interval every like eight seconds or
every ten seconds which will make the time-lapse go very fast now for this I
was only using a two-second shutter so the two second shutter allowed me to use
every three second interval I wish DJ I added a two second or even a one-second
because these lights are moving so fast so my creative tip here if you want the
lights to move very fast have your interval number every like five or ten
seconds if you want those lights nice and slow the lowest you can go is
three seconds I wish we could go down to like one second that way the lights
still move fast but they're not moving so fast that we can't really see them so
I like more of that fast feel but fast so they stay in the frame a little
longer there's
that we can do about that that's the limitation of the Osmo pocket but it
could be updated with a future firmware but you can see what we get by doing
this so then I took the time lapse down to the sidewalk on the ramp below and on
the sidewalk I also changed the mount as well and that made everything a lot more
secure the wind was blowing like crazy I can't really describe that because it's
hard to see it but the wind was just blowing really fast and the Osmo pocket
was a lot more stable once I change to that different mount and once I set the
tripod down on the sidewalk and as you can see I always try to use ISO 100
always keep your ISO as low as possible that way the image stays sharp for the
parts of the image that you want to keep sharp and then I lowered the shutter
speed as low as possible with Osmo pocket it's 8 seconds and in this image
I really like because the cars came to a stop so you can see some of the
headlights moving across the image but when a car stops for a long time you get
a nice clear shot of the car so it's a nice creative effect so if
you're gonna do this park the car or whatever your have
whatever thing is moving across your image I would keep it stationary or
still for a few seconds I would recommend 10 seconds or maybe a little
longer than that and then have everything move across a frame fast and
you'll get that nice variation something still along with the lights that move
across it now for the third creative tip I wanted
to do a motion lapse so I went to one of my favorite parks in Miami down in South
Miami at Matheson hammock park and it's just beautiful there in the morning
there aren't many people around the birds are flying around it has a nice
feel to it the Sun is rising so you see all those colors in the clouds and I
wanted to get a boat moving across as you can see here the boats come out of
the harbor and I wanted to do a motion lapse of the boat moving of course this
takes a little preparation or you sort of have to get a little bit of luck to
it all right you have to time it when the boat is moving out so I did quite
time it perfectly I didn't get that really money shot that I want if I
really want to do this I would have to talk to one of the fishermen or I would
have to just take a whole bunch of shots until I nailed the money shot but I'm
gonna show you how to get this shot and it's very interesting especially if
you're capturing something on water or if you just want to add a motion lapse
to your repertoire of filmmaking now if you want to shoot video normally you use
one fiftieth of a second if you're shooting at 24 frames per second the
shutter speed should always be about double whatever your frame rate is but
for this I use the motion lab it's the same principle as the time-lapse so you
just go into normal time-lapse mode but then you can press the path button and
then you just press plus so you can add different spots where you want the Osmo
pocket to go so because I had the wireless module I just moved the Osmo
pocket from one point to another point with my finger on the screen just
dragging my finger across my phone on the screen and then I set those
different points you have to experiment with it but I set the interval to the
lowest possible which was three seconds and as you can see it's going to do the
time-lapse but now it's gonna move across and you're gonna get that nice
slow shutter because the clouds the water the whole environment had that
nice soft feel so I wanted the image to mimic that so that's why I used a much
slower shutter you can use a higher shutter if you want and experiment with
that as well it's just two different ways of looking at it but I like I
prefer the slow shutter and it moves across the image and I
wanted to get it perfectly aligned with a couple of the boats and of course it
would have not been nice if it had a much slower interval time but again like
I said before the Osmo pocket goes down to three seconds which is what I
recommend you use alright guys thanks for watching to the end I hope you found
this video helpful if you did press that like button if you want to pick up the
Sam mark nd filters I put a link to them in the description below and as always
if you want to get more tutorials like this press that subscribe button and I
will see you in the next video