Hi, I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching AdoramaTV.
We're in and around London today, looking to put some motion into our pictures,
first up is some panning shots, followed by slow motion
using neutral density filters.
AdoramaTV presents, Stay Focused
with Doug McKinlay.
So on the surface
panning looks like a no brainer, you pick up your subject in the distance,
it comes by, you follow it, you press the button.
The reality though is not quite that simple, there's a lot of factors involved
here to get it right.
First and foremost, it's lot of practice, but you need to think about things like
distance from yourself to the subject, the focal length of your lens,
and of course the shutter speeds. After all shutter speeds is the real creative tool
for getting good panned pictures. So what we're going to do today on Southwark Bridge, is I'm using a short lens,
a 24mm lens, I'm going to try pick up some of the cars that are coming past me
at the moment,
and see what we get. I'm going to start with the shutter speed at about 1.30th of a second, we can
always adjust.
I think for people who are just starting to look at this technique, it's a good place to start.
Here we go!
It's good practice to set your focus,
your auto focus to AI Servo, or continuous focusing. Because even though the picture
is going to be a little blurry,
I still want to get focus lock now releasing the shutter is
best when the subject is about, more or less perpendicular to you,
or a little bit off, maybe 10 degrees off. It takes a lot of practice to get this
right and remember you've got to follow through the swing
like a golfer hitting a ball, its probably one of the most important parts,
if you miss that, you'll probably cut your subject in half, it just takes a lot of practice.
So now we're going to experiment a little shutter speeds
and focal lengths. So I'm going to change my 24mm
to a longer lens. Here we're going to use the 70 to 200mm
2.8 zoom lens. Now these things can get a bit heavy
and if you're using them all day you can get a little tired. So what I suggest, if you've got one
is to mount it on to a monopod. Remembering to use the a tripod collar that's
attached to the lens.
Its a simple setup,
just like the
monopod, it just clips in, with the quick release head and locks in place.
Now I know we're doing blurs
but sometimes we want to put a little bit of freezing action into our pictures,
including the blur, and the best way to do this is using a speed light or flash.
So what we do is we take our speedlite, we attach it to the hot shoe, and the flash,
turn it on and then set the rear curtain sync mode, its a little shuttle cock in
the back of the flasher. Now the rear curtain sync is a mode
and allows the flash to fire at the end of the shutter cycle, just as the shutter
curtains are closing.
This will guarantee, almost a little bit of freeze action in your picture.
So what we're going to do with this long lens now is
we're going to start shooting pedestrians, with the camera,
across the road, and we'll get some nice blurs as they're walking past.
So I think we've achieved what we're looking for, we've used our long lens we picked up our
subject which is a
pedestrian across the other side of the bridge, she's a bit soft
like we wanted, the background is soft, but her face has got a little sharpness in it,
so job done. One quick thing about backgrounds,
remember they're part of the image, so picking a good one will only strengthen the picture,
a colorful one will give a great streaky effect in your pictures,
while a neutral one will highlight the subject itself. Next up is putting motion
in the pictures using specialist filters.
Don't forget to check out Adorama's latest contest
where you could win some amazing prizes!
So, we're at a location I like,
right in front of St. Paul's, looking down onto the Millenium Bridge across the river,
and I'm going to get set up.
I've chosen a 300mm f4 lens today,
just because I want a lot of reach, and I want to compress the picture.
Now these longer lenses they come with these tripod colors,
they're really, really great. They help to balance the whole setup,
because if you mount it onto the camera itself
it will get top heavy and it could fall over and smash, or
it could damage the mount between the lens and the camera body,
so I'm going to go on ahead and hook it up to the tripod
So once its mounted onto the tripod there's a couple of things we got to do. One of the things we
have to think about is mirror lockup.
This is an easy thing to attain, its in your menu,
you just find it,
switch it to 'On', and once you've done the mirror lockup
you have to remember to set the the driver to either 2 seconds or 10 second release,
otherwise this won't work. The next component of this is using a cable release,
which I happen to have in my pocket here, we'll attach that to the side of the camera
and what this does, the the combination of
the mirror lock up and the cable release, is allows us to
shoot with the release and reduce any kind of camera shake
that might occur if we're using long exposures,
if you tap it the button with your finger, funnily enough it will move the
the camera and
cause a blur when you don't want it. Now we're almost there, so next up is the bracket,
the filter bracket. Its a pretty easy setup,
its two pieces, the first piece
attach this to the front of the lens, like so,
and then the actual carrier snaps on to the front
and that
gets us all already to attach our filter.
But what we're going to do first though is we're going to find, we're going to think of a composition here,
we want to get ourselves set up with a nice a nice image that we can use for a
comparison later.
Now these are essentially landscape pictures, so you have to think about the landscape
rules, remember your rules of thirds, linear lines,
everything to manual, any kind of perspective you might want to use.
Now remember at this point we've got a cable release to use so
don't touch the camera once you've got it all set up. One more time
remembering to turn the focus on the lens to manual.
So that's not too bad, the will work really well I think for a comparison picture,
and at this point its crucial that we get a meter reading, let me just do that.
This is our baseline reading,
what we're going to work from, so make sure you remember it. At this point I'm going to
add this filter to the front.
You notice with these stronger filters, the 6-stop and 10-stop filter,
they have a a little rubber gasket around the outside edge,
what this does is helps to stop light from leaking into the lens and into the sensor
and ruining exposure. So I'm going to slide it into the filter holder,
making sure the gaskets camera side, and into the the slot that's closest to the lens.
Make sure that you're covering the whole lens
like that, now to calculate the proper exposure within
this filter, 1/15th of a second
will equal...let me just check to Cici
that comes along with these filters which is a really
great little tool, so one quarter second equals 15 seconds,
so we're going to go ahead and expose it at 15 seconds and see what we get.
Now we're ready to go.
Remember don't touch the camera, use the release.
Its a waiting game now
15 seconds, sometimes it feels like an eternity!
Looking at this picture, there are two things I notice first, it's a little under exposed
so that tells me that I have to increase the exposure a little bit. Remember
these CiCi's are great, but they're just a baseline, you have to adjust yourself.
The second thing I noticed is that it's a little bit too bright on the top,
so in order to try and balance that out, I'm going to use a graduated neutral density filter,
and slide it in front of the
the ND filter, this will help to balance the whole picture.
So I'm going to increase the exposure by about 5 seconds,
and using a release,
I'm going to go ahead and watch what happens.
Now our goal is to try and make the people look a bit like
a river but, we'll see.
So we got a couple of pictures in the can,
when I look at these two images, I much prefer the one with the ND filter. The one
without the filter, its a fine enough picture,
but the one with the filter tends to give a little more
action, a little more edge, it's just more interesting, and it does indeed make the people
of London look like a river.
So thats it from me and I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV. You can subscribe to AdoramaTV,
we'd like to hear you think. You can like, comment or share this video, and
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