In this video I take on another fifty-minute photo challenge finding pictures
on a red London Routemaster bus.
Adorama TV presents
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you are watching Adorama TV brought to you by
Adorama the camera store that has everything for us photographers
and today I've got a London bus to photograph because I'm gonna do
a 15-minute photo challenge.
So fifty minutes to photograph as many interesting shots as I can
in and around the bus and only one camera and lens
So my camera is my Canon 60D, but lends
It was a tricky choice for lens on this one but I opted for my Sigma
10-20mm lens because there is loads of big things and I think that's gonna
be my
ideal choice to try and get in some of the larger parts of this shot.
So that's what I am going to use. Where do you start with something this big.
I guess you start at the front because it's got this iconic
route master red bus the front of the bus
is pretty much in line with the sun for me so
if I come back and I get the shot I had in mind, well it's all gonna be
pretty much in silhouette, so I have got to watch that a little bit and I reckon if I just
drop down a tiny bit
that will work, here we go...
Yeah I can just get the Sun behind the bus, that's teriffic,
that's looks fine, that's good.
Now this bus is just covered in small details and I'm probably gonna run around
and shoot some of the small details in a bit but the front of this has
got the
the London Transport logo, it's red, lets get a shot of this,
gonna come in and get it absolutely bang in the centre.
I really like that, I like that little bit of paint just peeling on the side.
It just gives that little bit of character to the shot.
Ah you've got to love this, this is the classic
Route master bus entrance back of the bus, just jump on and off as it was running.
This one isn't running, this one is at a garden center and going nowhere, but thats
handy for me as a photographer I guess.
I love the button, that's got to be a good picture in there.
How do I photograph that because I'm not tall enough to
get up and kind of get to the same height. I think that's where live view is going to come
in. So lets
just switch over to live view mode. I'll drop my aperture down cause ,
I don't need a massive dept of field in this shot
and I'm gonna try and get live view to focus for me now.
Modern cameras are better at focusing at live view than my camera. This is a few
years old now
so I might might need a bit of patience for this. We'll see how this goes.
Ok, wait patiently
come on camera this is a fifteen minute challenge we don't have long.. There we go
How fast is that at focusing?
Not very at all, not very at all but got there in the end.
Right ok, let's go up stairs see what I can find up there.
I love the the top deck of the bus, it's always the place to be,
great views from up here thing is the contrast range up here is enormous.
It looks fine in the video but it's not dark in here but it's very bright outside, so if
I try and take a shot. Have a look at this,
I can see, I can see detail on the bus but the windows
a fairly blown out, so I'm probably gonna need some
HDR or at least some exposure blending to get the shot I want up here
so fortunately I did bring my tripod with me and
I'm gonna swap over to that and use that for some more shots.
So with the camera on a tripod
I am going work a little bit slower but I'll try and stick to my 15 minute
challenge.
But I don't where we are, this bus is located
and Wychcross Garden Center up here on the Ashdown Forest.
It's not the centre of London, and when I take a shot
and I look through the windows, what I'm seeing is
forest which is is beautiful so I got a little idea which is if I just dropped
my tripod even lower
and then re angle myself up then hopefully what I should see is a bit more
sky
and a little bit less garden centre, but it is really dark
down here and it's really bright through the windows so
I'm going to blend these exposures together, but I'm looking at it and I'm thinking
actually
they should be somebody in this shot this is an empty bus and there
needs to be somebody in there so I'm gonna sit, where am I gonna sit?
couple or rows along, lets just see where we are. So this is one row
I'm gonna go 2 rows along, I'm just going to dial in
to my camera - into the menu system somewhere would dive
in and put three
shots together so I'll get it to automatically exposure bracket shots and on the Canon
60d that's three shots.
If I switch my drive to attend second self timer,
that will run through the three shots after 10 seconds. All I need to do
is flip the mirror out so I can see myself and then run into the shot,
here we go - like that,
okay and I'm just sittin here, here we go
and it takes all three shots for me.
We will do that once more just to be on the safe side and it's flashing
and that was pretty good that gives a
nice sort of human interest in the shot. I kinda like that, that works pretty well
I reckon. I reckon there is one more shot we can do with some human interest as well,
down on the steps. there's a shot there, so let's just spin this round
and do that. So before I do this I just need to reset the menus
I'd love it if there was a quick reset button on these cameras but there isn't
so I just need to remember to go into
the menu and turn off the self timer - I actually might leave the self-timer on because
the shot I've got in mind is a view down the stairs with a sort of human interest,
namely me... moving on the stairs so I will need a bit of time to set that up and
get down there myself, lets get the camera in position, we'll kind of
lean it over the top and try and get it as
firm as I can. There we go and I'll
frame this up, yeah that works quite well.
We'll start the the self timer and then I'm gonna run down - there we go
well
the shutter went, but I think I'm just a little bit too in focus
and if change my aperture.
So lets dial it down to f22 that brings me down to half a second.
So I got half a second of motion blur.
Let's give it a whirl and I'm watching little flashy light while it stays on,
Right well there you go, so some great shots but 15 minutes - it's no where near long. Gotta come
back here and shoot some more pictures
but for now I'm at the end my 15 minutes so let's get my favorite picture into
Photoshop
and do some editing I'm gonna do that right now.
So the picture I want to work on well
is not ready 1 it's 3 - it's the
multi-exposure shot, it's the HDR exposure blending
call it whatever you like it's become so much easier to create
a blended image inside of lightroom 6
or Lightroom CC. So let's see how I'm gonna do it. So I got the three images
here in Lightroom
already I got the image that's the correctly exposed one
according to the camera but as you can see there's no information in the
highlights and
the shadows look pretty dark then I've got one that's three stops
underexposed so have detail for the highlights and three stops
overexposed to give me details in the shadows.
Now to blend these together I just need to select
all three here on the film strip at the bottom to hold control
or command on a Mac and click all 3 right click on any of them.
doesn't matter which one and there I can find photo merge
and HDR and that brings up the HDR
merge preview and is a preview so it's not going to be the full quality
but there are a couple of settings you can change. You can automatically align the images,
if you have any slight movement between shots mine are fine.
You can auto tone the image although I prefer to do that myself
and if you have any moving objects you can't use the deghost
which I don't so all need to do is click on
merge and that will merge those down and create a brand-new
image which I can then go and edit further. Now this is very similar to the way
that
I did the panorama in my previous fifteen-minute Photo Challenge
over in the bluebell woods and it is just as good at doing that in Lightroom
and is to make HDR's, really is a great step forward.
So let's have a little look at the editing, I click on the image
and this is no ordinary image this is a 32-bit
file, that means that I can come along here and I can take my exposure down
-5, -10 stops and the same in the other direction
So, I've got 20 stops of adjustment to play with
and this is why these are such great things to be able to create
now at this point it's really a matter just doing whatever editing you see fit.
So in this case I think maybe I'll bring back some highlights open up some
shadows
I think it'll probably make a good black and white so lets choose that
and keep going with a bit of clarity and a bit more contrast just to really give this
a bit of an
edgy feel now even if I really open up the exposure
and I zoom in there is no noise in the shot
that's the beauty of these HDR or exposure blended images.
They just don't have noise if you taken a range of exposures.
So lets just bring this down, cause I reckon what I want is a kinda gloomy feel for this shot.
So we'll
bring this down about a stop underexposed and then I'll get the
adjustment brush
and I'll get the brush about a stop overexposed and just sort of paint a bit more
exposure in there just to give a sort of
vignetted feel. Give it a real dark moody feel something like that I reckon that
looks
pretty good few spots here and there. Okay I'm done with that,
I think really then all I need to do is just a little bit more fine-tuning.
Tweak the whites, tweak the blacks, there we go.
Come down here to the effects, actually we will go with for lens corrections and we'll just do the
auto cause then I can see everything's a bit wonky
and then I'll come to FX maybe just added a bit a grain in here just a
add a little bit and knowing is a texter into the image nothing too heavy
just to give it back
nudie gritty feel so there you go
there is my exposure blended image completed
well if you enjoy this video and you won't see more from myself
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