hey everybody I have three things to show you in this video the first one is
I'm going to show you a really cool hack that will allow you to be able to know
the conditions of a landscape photography destination without you
actually going there the second one is I'm going to show you the winning photo
from the cityscapes photo challenge and thirdly I'm going to
tell you about an extreme weather event that is nothing short of an emergency
for landscape photographers and it's to the point where I'm about to jump in my
truck and camper and drive for 12 hours tomorrow in order to get to a location
and I'm going to tell you all about it
so let's start with the weather event first this is Moraine Lake and what I'm
about to tell you is all about Moraine like I actually think that Moraine Lake
is the single number-one most beautiful place in all of Canada I absolutely love
this place I think it's probably my most favorite place on the planet Earth
this is what Moraine Lake looks like in the summer time I'll show you one other
photo from here this is a sunset and the color of the water is turquoise it you
just can't beat this place as far as beauty goes this is it's the Eiffel
Tower of Canada if there's one single destination that you must visit as a
landscape photographer you need to visit this place
Moraine Lake now there are two issues that come up with Moraine lake and as we
get closer to the winter time number one is that the road that accesses Moraine
Lake which is seven miles long or eleven kilometres it closes on October the 8th
so you can't get there any more and number two is that any time now the lake
is going to freeze over so that beautiful aqua turquoise blue color is
going to be gone for the entire winter and it won't be back until the very
beginning of June so here's what the weather event is I happen to be looking
at the weather forecast for southern Alberta and I saw that there was a
snowfall warning in southern Alberta and it's 10 to 20 centimetres or that's like
4 to 8 inches of accumulation and that's going to snarl traffic on the highways
but of course I'm thinking Moraine Lake what is Moraine lake going to look like
underneath a blanket of snow well here is this is not my photo but this is the
photo I've always dreamed of getting here's what Moraine Lake looks like when
there's fresh snow on the trees I mean as as a landscape photographer it does
not get any better than this and again the clock is ticking because next week
the road closes and then the lake freezes over
so it's very rare that you get an opportunity like this where there's
fresh snow now the other kicker is that sure it may snow in October before the
closure of the road but the sky isn't clear or it's just going to be
completely fogged in but here is the stars aligning so this is tomorrow
it's going to be snowing all day and here is Wednesday and it's going to be
pretty much completely clear and just below freezing temperatures so this is
the absolute perfect scenario so my plan is to drive all day Tuesday and then
arrive Tuesday night sleep over in close by or in the parking lot in my camper
and then be on the lake at the time that the Sun rises on Wednesday morning as
the sky is clearing and there's eight inches of fresh snow on the trees I mean
does it get any better than that no it doesn't the only kicker is that it is a
it's a long way so look at this map of North America here here's me in White
Rock British Columbia and Moraine Lake according to google maps is basically
nine hours but I know that that's never true you can never trust what it says on
Google Maps because it just never works for me so with my truck and camper I go
a little bit slower it's probably about a 12 hour journey for me so here is the
little trick that I'm going to teach you here so the question is how do I know
that the lake has not already frozen over and the photo opportunity is lost
and there is no internet at Moraine Lake there's no webcam so there's no easy way
of finding out but I figured out a cool little trick and it involves Instagram
so what you do on Instagram is you're going to look for the hashtag of the
location that you're interested in so for me I just type in Moraine lake all
one word and then you can see the top entry there it's hashtag Moraine lake so
we know that that's the location that people are tagging when they take their
Maureen link photos so let's click on that
and here's the response and what you'll notice is that the top
nine posts this big block of nine these are the top posts so you want to ignore
them because they can be dated there from sometime back if you scroll up and
then the next block of posts are the most recent so these are the ones that
have just been posted so if you look at this one this was posted 20 minutes ago
the next one is posted 29 minutes ago 41 minutes ago that's not Moraine that's
spirit island that's my other favorite place
that's bow lake there's Moraine Lake and moraine peyto lake Moraine
so I can see that with all the most recent photos none of them are showing
that the lake is frozen over if you just scan all of them you kind of get a good
idea based on the average of what you're seeing here the snow is falling on this
one let's just try it one more time and let's look at the very famous Japanese
maple sorry the portland japanese garden where there is the very famous maple
tree portland japanese garden there's the hashtag you don't want to click on
an actual instagram account you want to click on the one that has a hashtag so
there it is I skipped the top nine because those are the popular posts now
I go to the most recent and then I just scan down to kind of get that average
look and I want to know with this garden have the leaves started to turn yet is
it time to actually travel to Portland to go to these Japanese gardens in order
to capture the fall colors and as you look at the average across all of the
most recent photos that of people posting on Instagram you can see that
the gardens are not ready yet so we still have some more waiting to do and I
know from last year it was somewhere around October 23rd 24th that everything
was in full reddish bloom and now for the third thing I was going to discuss
and that is the Tim's photo Facebook group challenge this one was for
cityscapes and we had the members of the group vote
for their top photo and the top photo is this one and it's a beauty now this is
from a photographer whose name escapes me because he uses his page name which
is gold and our photography in our group this is New York City and it's shot from
the Brooklyn side I like a lot about this photo I will give it a bit of a
critique here and I'm going to point out this foreground so either we have
foreground or we don't have foreground this is so little foreground as to be on
the borderline of becoming a distraction do we want the viewer to look at the
foreground or do we not and this may have been better to have been cropped
out or else actually show this rock foreground so that it can be seen across
the bottom another thing about this photo is that the buildings are
extremely dark and that's probably the look that the photographer was going for
but I think that it would have looked a little bit better if these lights have
been pulled out just a little bit more because really what is the main subject
of the photo and I would say that the main subject of the photo is the skyline
it's it's the downtown buildings and so we need to see those downtown buildings
they need to pop they need to stand out remember that photography is about
storytelling and storytelling always has a hero so who is the hero of this story
the hero is the downtown core all of the buildings and they're very dark in this
photo but this photo has so many good things going for it so the photographer
used a very slow shutter speed maybe one or two or maybe three minutes and that
gave the movement of the clouds it also smooths out the water because this is
normally very choppy water here but it has that effect that is being applied to
the water that makes it look nice and smooth and it gives it the nice
reflections also there are beautiful colors in the sky we have the warm
oranges and yellows on the left side going up into the cool blues at the top
and that often makes for a very interesting photo when there
is not only contrast in the light and what I mean by that is with lights and
darks but there's also contrast in the color temperature in the photo so we
have cool tones in the blues and we have warm tones in the yellows and that's
another form of contrast in the photo also
aside from reflections in the water we've got the leading lines with these
rows of piles and it just makes for a very interesting composition so this
photographer once I get his name it's golden our photography is the name of
his Facebook page he wins a set of my signature landscape profiles for
Lightroom and these are a plugin that you can install into Lightroom and
Photoshop that helps you to process your photos faster and easier than ever
before and you can see them at Tim's photos calm I'm going to also just show
you two photos that really stood out in this particular photo challenge and one
of them is leonid Schekman and his photo of mont saint-michel in France in in
Normandy France was spectacular this sky is a photographer's dream when does this
ever happen on the particular day you happen to be visiting Mont saint-michel
and you have your camera it's absolutely stunning now I will say again that there
is something that's I find to be just a little bit distracting and it's this
walkway down the left-hand side we could say oh it's a leading line but yes it's
a leading line that's pointing down off to the left of the photo so if I start
to look at the bottom left of the photo my eye drifts off and leaves the photo
so I would have rather have seen that there was not that walkway in the photo
that could be cropped out actually in Photoshop it could be cloned out because
we've got all this sand here and it's quite easy to clone sand overtop of
something that's a distraction very easy to clone sand so that would be my
recommendation for this photo is clone out the bridge and
this is a stunning photo Leonid you should be very proud of this one and I
hope that you print this and put it on your wall because you know I'm not gonna
say it's once-in-a-lifetime but given how far away this location is and how
difficult it is to get there it's once-in-a-lifetime one more that is
a notable photo and this one is from Wendy Klein Wendy lives in Australia and
she has been posting some absolutely stunning photos in our Tim's photos
Facebook group and this is one of them and once again she has used a long
exposure technique to get that movement in the clouds we've got the reflections
in the water and the water has been smoothed out because of that long
exposure and of course the way that we do this is to put a very dark neutral
density filter over top of the lens of our camera make sure that the camera is
on a tripod make sure you're not touching the camera as you set off the
trigger you're either using a timer so you're
not touching it or a wired shutter release and that way you won't get any
blur any jiggle of the camera as you touch it and with that long exposure of
one to three minutes she's smoothed out what is most likely ocean water very
rough ocean water that creates the reflections those reflections on the
bottom have created leading lines that go right towards the building and then
those amazing warm streaks in the sky so fantastic job Wendy on this photo so
that is it I need to go because I have to pack the truck the camper I have a
thousand things to pack I have twelve hours of driving tomorrow I'm going with
my son Andrew we're gonna have a great time and hopefully we're gonna have
fantastic conditions on Wednesday morning at sunrise I will post those as
soon as I get back into civilization and I look forward to seeing all of you in
the next video take care and happy shooting