In this episode were gonna look at four small things to make one big improvement to
your photography.
Adorama TV presents Exploring Photography
with Mark Wallace where you'll learn innovative techniques
on shooting a wide-ranging of photography. Here's your host.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on
Adorama TV.
It's brought to you by Adorama the camera store that has everything for
photographers.
Well in today's episode I'm going to be talking about four small things,
individually these things don't really add up to individual videos
but I think together these four small things can make one big difference to
your photography. Now
before we do all that, I wanna remind you that Adorama has some amazing contests you can
win some great prizes.
So click the link and enter it right now.
Well I'm here at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos
Islands and just up the trail here there are some lizards I wanna take pictures
of,
but those lizards are little bit squeamish so I want to be as quiet
as possible. So I want to tell my camera to calm down a little bit. Now you might
wanna do this if your
shooting maybe a wedding, maybe an event at a school or church
were you don't want your camera make a lot of noise. So I’m only gonna do two things. The first thing I
want to do
is normally when I take a picture, when my camera focuses
there's a little beep to tell me I'm in focus and so I want to do is turn that
off. So I can go into my menu
and one of the very first things I’m gonna see here
is the ability to turn the beep off. So that is done
and then secondly when I take a picture normally, I get a really loud shutter
sound and what's happening is the shutters opening and closing
and the sound is coming from the speed of the reset of the shutter.
So what I can do here is I can change my shooting mode
from single to going into
single silent shooting. Now this might be called something a little bit different
for your camera and not all cameras have this but most
newer DSLR's do so check your user manual. Well I have set mine to silent single
shooting and now when I take a picture listen to this. It’s a much much softer sound.
So now that we have our camera set up to be quiet
let’s go take some pictures of lizards.Well their actually called Galapagos land
iguanas, their not lizards. There’s one right below me right now.
So I've got my camera set to silent mode. We’re gonna start shooting right now.
Well I've seen some incredible things here on the Galapagos Islands
unfortunately
a lot of those things happened unexpectedly so I didn't have my full
fledged DSLR camera and my lenses and everything
but I did have was my trusty iPhone. As my good friend Chase Jervis says
the best camera is the one that you have with you
and so I have three tips for making better photos
with smartphones. The first tip is very simple, just take it with you,
take it everywhere you go because you never know what you're going to see.
In fact I was out with friends and we were on a snorkeling trip
and we were expecting to be in the water all day but I want to get pictures of us
on the boat I brought my iPhone
and guess then what? We actually had a little hike, and on that hike we saw some
blue-footed boobies were amazing and
I was able to get some of these photos as well as some video.
Well tip number two is don't be afraid to use your smartphone. I know a lot of
people that have
iPhones and smartphones an Androids whatever you have and they just think well the
camera isn't as good as my big professional camera
So I’m not gonna use it as much. That's a mistake. If you have your camera
use it, you never know what you're going to get. So take it with you everywhere
and use it as much as possible and then the last tip is simple,
get closer. We were able to shoot some shots, here's a picture of me
shot by my friend lex and I'm hanging out with a blue-footed booby and you can see
how close we were able to get to these birds.
That also applied to the camera so I was able to take this get some shots
of a group of birds, but then I got even closer
and you can see how these pictures really improve the closer I was able to
get
to the birds. So take it with you, use it and get closer.
Well we have some giant tortoises right behind me right here
but there's a better location for shooting these guys just down the trail
so we’re gonna go there next, let's go.
Well for these shot's I’m going to be using my 70-200
millimeter lens and a tripod for stability
but what I really want to talk about is this thing right here.
This is a tripod mount ring, sometimes people call it a tripod mount
sometimes they call it
a lens ring, but what that does is it allows you to put
a tripod plate on the lens itself.
That way the lens is actually supporting the camera not the camera supporting the
lens.
That's really important with a big heavy lens like this. If you put your tripod
plate on the camera
and you mount that to the tripod, overtime this lens is actually going to break the
connection between your camera body and lens you’ll have send it back in for repair.
You don't want that so make sure that you leave your tripod ring
on your big lens. The second thing that I love about these
tripod rings the tripod mount rings is that you can actually rotate your camera
inside. So you can
loosen this, now you're camera can rotate. So you can go from horizontal to
vertical
and back. I get so many emails asking what kinda special attachment I have on my
camera. Well it’s just
built into the lens. So if you have one of these big heavy metal lenses like this
it’s gonna come with a tripod ring and now you can rotate that and it's really
awesome. Now one other thing that people ask me about a lot
and sometimes you have a big extended body or a battery pack,
and some cameras there’s a little lever that comes out here on tripods
and it's hard to mount you're camera to that tripod.
What you can do is actually flip the ring
upside down like this, mount on your tripod
click it and and then rotate it and that will help you have one last big battery
grips
on the bottom of your camera. That’s just a little tip. Well now that we know about all that
stuff let's shoot some pictures of these giant tortoises.
Well all over the Galapagos Islands there are birds and iguanas and giant tortoises
and there's this wildlife
everywhere. Ive been ably to take photos of a lot on this wildlife
but sometimes a still photo just doesn't tell the entire story. You don't really know
how fast those turtles are going to be moving
or how fast the iguanas are crawling across the sand and so it's great to be able to
shoot video
on a DSLR camera. Now if you're brand new to shooting video on a DSLR camera
that might be a little bit scary to you but there are three things that you can
do to really improve the quality
of your videos. The first is to always use a tripod,
any tripod is better than no tripod that's going to stabilize your camera.
Now this tripod does not have a video head it's got a normal
ball head but thats even better then no tripod at all so
it doesn't matter if you have a video tripod or not always use a tripod unless
you just
can’t. The second thing if you want your videos to look a little bit more
like cinema
make sure you're shooting at 1/160th of
a second. I’m not even going to even tell you why because I created a five-part series all about
Shutter angles and shooting video on a DSR,
and it took us 5 videos to talk about all that stuff. If you're really
interested
in great detail. Why don’t you check out that series its on Adorama TV. We’ve
included a link for you so you can click the link ether in the description of this video
on the video itself
and you can check all of that out. So shooting a 1/60th of a second use a tripod
and lastly
if you're new to shooting DSLR or video on a DSLR
you might have noticed that the focus is a little bit sticky. In fact on a lot of
cameras most to them
you can't use autofocus you can have to manually focus the camera so just put
your lens in manual focus
manually focus and then start the video.
On some cameras there is manual focus assist
on a 5D mark III you can push the little magnifying button right there, a little
magnifying glass.
It’s gonna zoom in so you can really see what your focusing on and that'll help
you out a lot.
Make sure you check your user manual to see if your camera has some sort of help
with the manual focus
in video mode. So use a tripod, shoot at 1/6th of a second
and then manually focus and if you want more information check out the links
for Adorama TV you can see that being long series we did all about shooting
video
on DSLR cameras. Well now we know about that let's shoot some video ofsome the
wildlife around the island
they will be on to our next thing I'll
Well thats it here at the Charles Darwin Research Center it's been a lot of fun
and I hope these four small tips make one big difference
in your photography. Now don't forget you can subscribe to Adorama TV
absolutely free so click the subscribe button so you don't miss a single thing.
Also check out the Adorama Learning Center you can see all kinds of articles
and videos
and all the stuff I talked about as specifically about shooting video
on DSLR camera. That whole series its at the Adorama the Learning Center
so check that out and thanks again so much for joining me
and I’ll see you again next time.
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