Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV I'm Mark Wallace in the
middle of the Australian outback in a
city called Mount Isaac and it is built
around a huge copper mine. You can see
the smoke stack right here, but we'll get
to that in a second. First I want to tell
you about the challenge. The challenge is
this, I'm riding across the Australian
outback and I want to tell stories
for Instagram, for Twitter.
I want to update
my blog all that kind of stuff, but
because I have to travel great distances,
I really don't have a lot of time
to stop and set up a big tripod
to make sure the lighting is perfect
and do all the things I would normally do
if I had the luxury of time
and if I had the luxury of weather
and so I really have
to take pictures where I am
when I'm there and so I can't choose
the time of day all the time.
You can see right now that the light
is horrible, I look like a raccoon right now
with the Sun coming straight down,
so that's the challenge
shoot quickly, without much time
and get some images
that I can post to social media.
So how am I going to do that?
Well first thing I have
is this tank bag full of goodies,
so I have my Leica M 10 ready to go
with all my lenses. It's right here.
I also have a Sony cyber-shot,
this is rx100 version 5 that I used sometimes
it's you know Leica but in a pinch
sometimes it actually works better
and I've got a few other GoPros
and things stashed here and there.
So today what I want to do
is I want to tell the story of Mount Isa.
Mount Isa was built
around this giant copper mine.
You see the smokestack right behind me
it has huge pits dug over years and years
and years that is massive,
massive and I can
see it from satellite photos. I wanted to
take some photos of that. I want to take
some pictures of the actual line and the
smokestacks. The problem is with my 50mm
lens on my Leica I really
just couldn't get the compression that I
wanted and so that meant that really to
make this story work and to get closer
much, much closer, so I thought well
I need to get inside this mine. Well the
mining company said absolutely not,
you can't do that because of insurance
reasons, it's very dangerous, so you can't
actually go in and see that, if you want
to do that they said; really what you
need is a helicopter. They said that sort
of as a joke and you know I don't have a
helicopter but what I do have is my
Mavic Pro, so I told them that I said hey
what if I shot this with my Mavic Pro
can I do that? And they said sure we'll
allow you to fly over two times, that's
it. I got permission to fly it twice
and so that's what we're going to do. We're
going to see if we can tell the story of
Mount Isa, the massive copper mine and
the city using a Mavic Pro, using only
two flights, so I got to get it right, not
much time. Let's see how this works?
It's a photo challenge, alright I got
my Mavic, I've got everything set up.
I checked to make sure that we're in a safe
place to fly. This is a great open area
so let's get this thing off the ground
right now.
Alright and we're flying.
Alright and our flight was successful.
It's time to get the Mavic back out of
the sky, so we'll do that right now
here we go,
perfect!
Alright,
the Mavic Pro touched down.
It is time now to put those photos and the
videos into post-production,
pull some stills from the 4k video
and then post that to Instagram
and social media. I think this was
an awesome challenge
and I think it was a success
but we won't know for sure
until we look on the computer.
The first thing I want to do
is to scrub through the video files
and find frames that I think
would make great images
and the question I know
that you're probably asking is why
didn't I just shoot the raw file still
images right in the Mavic? The reason is
because I was short on time and I really
couldn't see my little screen because it
was so bright out. This is sort of a way
that you can be a photographer after the
fact. I can look and see what I shot and
scroll back and forth until I get
something that is exactly what I want
and then compose based on that timeline.
So that's what I'm doing here. I'm going to
go in, I've found something that I sort
of like. This is this road leading into
this giant pit. Now remember we're not
seeing the full size image here. In fact
I'm using a proxy which is a little bit
smaller than 4k, so I'll turn the proxy
off, you'll see this gets to be a little
bit larger and then if I go in here
and say 100%,
boom! It's much larger,
so these are really, really large files
with lots of detail, lots of stuff that
we can play with and so that's one
of the reasons I love to shoot 4k.
I’m going to turn back my proxy.
If you don't know how to use proxy files,
I've made a video about that,
I've created a link in the description of this video
so you can see exactly what that is.
It just makes
these 4k videos really easy to work with
on a laptop. Alright now that I have my
frame that I want to use, I need to
extract that. Now I can do this
in Adobe Premiere Pro
by just clicking on this little camera icon
or the shift ‘e’
shortcut keys that will export the
frame, you can do this in VLC
or in Final Cut Pro or any nonlinear editor
there's always a way to export a frame so I'm
going to click on that. It's going to ask
me for a name, I'm just going to use the one
that it gives me. I can choose
a different file format, jpg suits me just
fine and it's also going to allow me
to choose where I want to save this? So I've
already selected a folder
called Australia drone stills,
so I'll say okay then I'm just going to zip
through here and when
I find additional frames that I think
will make a good image, I'll just click
this button and do this over and over,
in fact I've already done that and if we
zip over here into my Australia drone
stills folder, you can see that I've
selected a bunch of individual frames
that I now want to play with. I want to
do that in Lightroom, so what I'm going
to do is go over to Lightroom and import
these. So I'll just zip over I'm going to
choose this Australia drone stills
folder and I'm going to add these so I'm
not going to copy these, I'm just going
to add these and then I will import them
and this is going to be very, very quick
because we're just adding them into the
library. Once I have these added in what
I'm allowed to do, when I'm able to do
is then go in through the develop module
and then I can do all of the different
things that you would normally do
increase my clarity, I maybe I can make
this a black and white, I can fool around
with these images and with the magic
of video editing here are my final results.
Well it looks like the DJ Mavic Pro once
again got some amazing imagery. I was
able to pull some great stills from that
4k video and so it was a bonus they got
video and stills that I was able to post
on social media. This little guy is worth
its weight in gold. Sometimes the
simplest solution is the best solution,
so don't try to over complicate things,
when you're out there shooting on a
tight deadline. Thank you so much for
joining me. Don't forget to look at my
Instagram account, you can see all the
updates and photos and things that I'm
posting as I'm riding around the world
on my motorcycle. You can see how I put
my video tutorials into practical
everyday use, also don't forget to
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Subscribe right now. Thanks again for
joining me and I will see you again
next time.