Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography, right here on Adorama TV.
I'm hanging out it and not so exciting beach here on the Caribbean Sea
and you can see behind me here that we've got sort of cars and buildings, and
all kinds of things going on, and not only that but some of my gear - my video
gear, was stuck in customs and so I'm shooting this whole thing with my Osmo
pocket... that's what's following me around right now... so it's gonna be a challenge
making this video today.
The goal is I want to see if I can take this scene
which is not very pleasing and use the appropriate gear... the appropriate
composition... and the appropriate post-production to make this look like
something that you would want to hang on your wall.
so what we're going to do is we're going to start in the way that
maybe you shouldn't take this photo and
what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my 50 millimeter lens set at f/8 and I'm
just gonna take a picture of the sea here.
S f/8, ISO 100 I have my camera set to aperture priority mode.
When i take this shot... it's at about the 180th of a second....
it looks like right now... and yeah that is absolutely an
incredibly boring shot, we don't want that, we want to make this scene look
more exciting. Now up in the sky we have on and off some pretty exciting little
puffy clouds coming in and out. Maybe we can take advantage of that. Also we have
over here we have this little pier coming out, it's got some rocks and
things behind you... don't think you can see that in the video but what we want
to do here is take advantage of all of that stuff... so I'm going to switch to a
21mm lens, the appropriate gear for the job... the 50 is not what we need
to use so what I'll do here is I'm going to take my 50mm off I'll put
my 21mm on, now we're getting to where we need to be, let's take another
shot and see what our 21mm lens does for us. So I'm going to set that
again at f/8, but this time I'm going to set my lens to hyperfocal... that means
everything is in focus from the very closest, to the very farthest away.
I've made videos about this...
links are in the description below, but now let's check
this out and see what our 21mm lens does for us... so I'm going to take
this right here... level that out.... take a shot
get a little bit of the beach... take this again... get a lot of the sky.
Okay well now what we can see here is... we're getting a little bit more of all
of this stuff that's behind me, and it's a more interesting shot, but I think we
can do better. One of the things that I can do is instead of standing at eye
level... I can actually come down here... and shoot down closer to ground level,
and I'm getting a much more pleasing shot. Let's get a better look at what I'm
shooting here. I've got this these rocks that are going out into the ocean and
then I've got just the sea behind me, and I'm gonna use these rocks here to pull
our eye into the scene. Again I'm getting down low, so that we have more foreground
interest showing us out to the ocean. Alright so that's good we have a
wide-angle lens, we're shooting at hyper focal distance or a shooting closer to
the ground, but we can do even better.. we want to make this into something that is
unrealistically pretty. So what I'm gonna do here is.. in my camera bag I have
another tool that I use all the time, this is a ND filter. This is a 1.6 I
believe or 1.8, it's a 6 stop neutral density filter. Now if you don't know
about neutral density filters... have no fear, I've made videos about those as
well. Links are in the description below. So what I'm going to do here is I'm
going to take and put this on my lens... a neutral density filter by the way... it's
just a little it's a like sunglasses for your lens, and so it's going to make this
darker by 6 stops, and that's gonna allow me to slow my shutter down considerably.
Now slowing down my shutter is going to do some things for us.
1. It is gonna smooth everything out which is really, really good....
and so that will make everything sort of smooth and unworldly looking.
I need to use a tripod to do that, so I have my tripod right here.
I've got this set up, so I'm going to put my camera on my tripod, because now when
I'm doing this.... I look into the lens I'm seeing that my shutter is 1/7 of a second
1/7th of a second... so I'll take a slow shutter here, things are starting to look
really good, so what I want to do is I want to slow the shutter down even more.
So I'm gonna get a manual exposure, so I'm going to manually put this on two
seconds, so now I've got on one two seconds... here, what that's gonna do though...
it's gonna blow out the sky... the sea should be okay... but let's just take a
quick shot and see what happens. I need to make sure I lock this shot in, either
come back just a little bit to make this work.. you need to make sure I lock this
shot in exactly where I want it to be. They've got it all level they've got my
log in the scene, all right I'll take that shot, it's two seconds and it looks
pretty good. The problem with this though is things
are being blown out, so what I need to do is I need to be able to do some
post-production magic, I need to be able to shoot multiple exposures and then
combine all of those things. So I get the sky and the foreground and the sea I can
get that blurred kind of look that I want, and I want to be able to tone
everything in a custom tone, to make it look unrealistically pretty. So what I'm
going to do here is, I'm going to go into my menu and I'm going to set my camera
to auto exposure bracketing... what that will let my camera do is - it will shoot
one photo overexposed, one photo exposed correctly, and one photo underexposed, and
even for some bonuses I'll probably even shoot one way up and one way down.
So it's really easy to do, I'm just gonna go into my menu,s and go into my menu to the
drive mode... I'm gonna go into exposure bracketing... and then set that to five
frames... one stop over and under on each. So once I have that locked in
I've got my image all set... I'll take a picture - my camera's going to take five
images... that's all done, so I've got some that are overexposed, some that are
underexposed, and now what I can do is I can go into post-production take all of
this stuff that we used... interesting composition, slow shutter speed, using a
neutral density filter, a wide-angle lens to pull the viewer, in foreground
interest, and then we can take it to the next level. Another thing I'm doing here
before I go inside, I'm just going to stay out here for probably another hour
waiting for the Sun to change, waiting for the clouds to change, I'm getting
different viewpoints here... I'm using something a little bit closer to the
beach, a little bit farther away, I want to make sure I give myself every single
opportunity to succeed that I can... so I'm just gonna hang out here.. shoot a bunch
of different shots before I go inside.
Well in the middle of the day, I wasn't too impressed with the quality of photos.
it was just too bright in the sky, the dynamic range was too much, and the
clouds were not interesting.
So I just waited until the Sun went just down...
right above the horizon, to the Golden
Hour. We got some sunset,
we got some pinks and blues, and amazing colors in
the sky, and now we're getting much more incredible results.
The Sun is now set, but I'm still out here shooting some images, because again I
want to give myself every possible chance to succeed.
So I'm gonna get back to my camera and we'll just keep shooting and see what we get.
This is so much better... well I'm back from the beach. I think all the hard work
has paid off, we're about to hop into post-production and work on this image,
but let's review the four things that I did to change how things looked.
The first thing I did was... I changed from a standard 50mm lens to a
wide-angle lens, and that opened up all kinds of
possibilities, and specifically when I paired it with the second thing... which is
changing my point of view going from standing at eye level, to getting down
low, that really changes how we view the scene... it allows me to add foreground
interest, and pull our eye into the scene. Later on I went from the right side of
those rocks to the left side of the rocks, just looking for the best
composition possible. The third thing I did was I slowed the shutter speed way
down... that allowed us to smooth out the ocean... and create a look that is better
than reality. This sort of makes the ocean look like glass, which I absolutely
love, and then finally I just changed the time of day, and what that did was it
allowed me to shoot with really slow shutter speeds, even without the neutral
density filter... also added a lot of color to the scene, and then the most
spectacular thing totally by chance there happened to be a storm rolling in, and
there was a lightning strike that happened, and I was able to capture that
on one of the images, and so that's the image that we're going to start working
with right now. So let's hop to it and hop into Lightroom... here's my final
lightening image.
Before I showed you how I edited this... let me just show you the
images that I shot and edited through the day. So these first two images are
images that I created during the day time. You can see that this first image
it's one shot that came out of the camera... it's a two-second exposure you
can see it we're getting this nice smooth ocean. That was using a
neutral density filter.. that technique that I showed you... the other one here
this is an HDR image, and so what I did I can go back and show you that. I took
five images, here are the five images. I shot this using the technique I showed
you called auto exposure bracketing, to shoot these five images, and then I
combined those to create this final HDR image. Now I've created tutorials on
editing HDR images so make sure you look at
the links in the description of this video... to learn how to do that, what I
really want to do is show you one technique using graduated filters.
To create images like this lightning shot so to do that, let's jump over to the
develop module. I'm going to use the shot that came out of the camera because it
doesn't look so exciting at first glance and so what I did in the develop module
is... I first created some basic tonal adjustments in the develop module. So I'm
going to just save some time and click on a snap shot that I created, and what
this does is it applies all those adjustments that I made earlier so I
cropped this... I leveled this out... I changed the white balance, and then
some of the basic exposure contrast, highlights, shadows... etc the thing that
really makes this image work though, is a technique I used using this tool called
the graduated filter, what a graduated filter allows you to do is... edit
different regions of a photo independent of each other... so the sky I want to edit
in one way... the ocean I want to edit in a different way, and then these rocks over
here, I want to edit those in a third way.. so I have the sky, the sea, and the rocks...
three different regions, so we're going to use the graduated filter to edit the
sky and the sea, and then this paintbrush to edit the rock. So let me just show you
how this works... the first thing I'll do is... I'm going to click on the graduated
filter, when I do that I get all these controls that I can use to add to this
filter on the image itself. I get this little square so if I click that and
drag down you'll see that on the top of the screen everything turns blue... so the
sky... so the filters applied opposite the direction that you drag... so I've got
three lines here. Let me show you what they do... the first, the first and last
line here, this shows you the transition area of the filter.
So the filters up here... this blue area, it starts fading out of this first line...
the midpoint of the transition is the center line.... and the
last line here is where the filter is
doing nothing... so down here nothing is happening, the only thing that's
happening is above this middle line here. The center line I can hover over that...
click and drag to rotate this filter. So if I have an even horizon or something,
so these work with horizontal or vertical areas in an image, and then what I can do
on the other lines is... I can click and drag to make the transition sharper,
or much much more gradual. So I want this to be a pretty sharp transition.
So I'm going to drag these together and then I can click on the dot itself to move
the entire thing... so I'm going to move that up so it's right on the horizon,
and I'm gonna make this a very, very, very sharp transition here. So what I want to
do is... I want to take the sky, I want to apply some things... I want to change the
color temperature, and exposure, and contrast, and leave the bottom alone.
So let me just really quickly change these values... all right, clearly I have those
values figured out in advance, but you would be able to experiment with this
till you get the look that you want. So I've applied this to the top of the
scene, and I'm just moving along really quickly, let me just add another
graduated filter to the bottom of the screen. So I'm gonna go here, click new
and then I'm going to click on the horizon and drag up, because I want this
to be opposite where I'm dragging, which is the bottom of the screen - then I will
make this go on the horizon and then I'm just going to really quickly add some
values to this... changing my color temperature, and my exposure and also my
saturation just a hair.... okay that looks pretty good. Now you'll notice that I've
got some issues when I close this, and that is over here on these rocks... I have
this... top of this... that is being impacted because this is not a horizontal.
It needs to be jagged so these neutral dents, and these graduated filters are
affecting this rock there has to be a way that I can change that.
There is... so I'm going to go back up here click on my graduated filter.
I will click on the top one, and we'll just do one of these.
I'll show you how to change this, so I'm going to click on this. If I hover over it you
can see this pink that shows up... that shows me where this filter is applied.
If I click on it, I can now make edits. Notice this filter is just a horizontal
line, so that's why it's cutting across this rock. We want to be able to take
this horizontal line, and make it jagged to match the rock, you can do that by
going over here and clicking on brush, now what you can do is....
you can add and subtract to your filter using a brush... so I'm going to erase this
little part of this top filter.... I'm just going to do this very very quickly and
roughly, because I need to save time. Then what I'll do here is... I'll close that, and
then I'm going to go to the bottom... graduated filter.... I'm going to go to a
brush.. and this one... I'm going to click the A brush - that's going to add... and then
I will add in the filter from the bottom to these rocks, and so I'm changing just
this little shape right here. Of course I would take much more time if I was just
doing this in real time, so what I can do now is I can hover over this, and now you
can see where I've painted on the right side... that the filter is matching the
contour of the rock... so I can manually change this horizontal line when I come
in contact with things like mountains or rocks or something like that. it's really
really simple. Now the last thing I need to do is... I want to change these rocks
over here... so I can just click on this brush, and then what I'm going to do is
I'm just going to use a brush to paint in a filter on these rocks... really
quickly, and then once I'm done with tha,t then what I can do is... I can change the
saturation and some things and I can really quickly bring that to exactly the
point that I want it to be, because this is sort of orange and yaki, and so I can
just play with that just a little bit. Well after spending quite a bit of time...
I was able to dial this in exactly right, so let me show you the final results, so
the graduated filter, I'll click on that. If I hover over the top one... and let this
show me exactly where I've edited things. You can see that it matches the contours
of that rock exactly... and the same thing is true of the bottom one.
It is matching the horizon and the rock exactly, which is exactly what I need this to do,
because I want this to be a nice and clean edit, so if I print this it's going
to match exactly. Also if I click on the brush, then you can see where I have
edited the rocks. I'll go down here and hover over this dot, and you can see that
that is matching those rocks exactly. So I was able to create an image and
isolate three different zones, and then edit those independent of each other once
I set my first tonality and I think the results are pretty spectacular.
Well I hope this helped you out... for basic changes to go from drab to fab...
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Exploring Photography.
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