Good morning everybody today i'm at Cwmorthin slate mine it's also a quarry as well it's this
fantastic devastating and quite eerie landscape but this is an amazing place when you're looking
for some inspiration or you're looking for something different to photograph.
Today i'm going to talk about an exercise that i started a long time ago
and i still do today especially when i'm out of practice or i haven't been shooting for a while
i think this is an exercise that you should do as well it's basically a way of getting to know
all of your three principal settings aperture shutter speed and iso how they work how they
interact with each other and ultimately how they affect your photos what i do
is switch the camera to manual mode and then just play around with the settings now at the
moment the camera is completely over exposed so i need to change aperture shutter speed or iso
so i need those readily accessible i've got aperture on this front dial
i've got shutter speed on this back dial then i've got iso on this lower back dial and that
means i can access my three principal settings really easily and that's the key to this exercise
if your camera only has two dials just make sure you know where the iso button is normally it is
just on the side here and then play around with those settings until you get a good exposure
it will take time and it can be quite frustrating but this is the only way that you can really start
to understand those three different settings so i'm going to take a shot looking down these houses
so you can see it's completely overexposed so i'm going to bring my shutter speed up
so it's going to go faster i'm going to close my aperture down until the photo looks good
and for now we're just going to go with it looking good on the back of the camera there are some more
advanced techniques you can use the histogram or you can use these zebras but for now i'm just
going how it looks on the back of the camera and that looks really good so i'll focus at the end
there and take a shot and that's the principle of this exercise it's about getting shots and
not worrying about getting the perfect shot but just learning about your three principal settings
there is just so much around here to photograph it's a really cool little white hut over there
and we have those buildings that i was at earlier on over there
now there is a little bit of water there and i want that reflection
of that end building now with my settings that last shot it was 1 60th f 6.3
iso 500. i wasn't paying attention to my i say i'm going to knock it down to 100 and that will
give me a nice shot here
although the wind is rippling up that water even though it is well protected
now my settings at 160th f 6.3 iso 100
so i brought my iso down to control the exposure that sky in the background was
really bright so first of all i'm just playing around with those settings to get a good exposure
well that's a lot of white caps that's a lot of wind
so at this time it's really dark on those settings so what i'm going to do is brighten it up now i
can brighten it up by raising my iso but i don't want to do that i'll keep that at 100 i can also
brighten it up by dropping my shutter speed but i don't want to drop that too low because that'll
start blurring the image like this so you can see it's blurry because i'm at 1 20th of a second
so i'll keep my shutter speed about 1 125th so i'm going to open up my aperture
and i'm going to shoot it somewhere there we'll have to raise my eye so actually a little bit
there we go so i'm going to focus on the house and take the shot
then i'm just going to try a few different shots keeping those settings
so i've got a bit of light coming through i'm not sure if it's going to hit this i don't think it is
come on now it's completely overexposed so i have to quickly change my settings to get a good shot
but that's what's happening over there so you can see that light change really quickly and
in manual mode you have to make the changes i very quickly dropped the aperture to f 20
which is not an ideal aperture to be shooting at but it meant that i got the shot of that bright
sky over there just a shame the light didn't hit the building because that had been fantastic
i just love exploring it's just so much to find you can see here there's these trees
it's got a walkway through it it's just so fantastic in finding things like this
so fascinating
wow i mean look at these floors the home is still immaculate yet the building's all gone
there's obviously some old cooker in there or old fireplace or a range cooker or something like that
now the one good thing in shooting in manual mode is that if your conditions stay the same
the settings will be exactly as you left them so if you get a good exposure and you really like it
you just leave your settings alone and keep shooting at that setting
everything's there ready to go it's just a bit awkward and a bit tricky
when things start to change and when they change quickly
so there's a building in a tree right over there there's sunlight coming through
i'm just waiting for it to hit that sunlight i need to get my settings right
so shutter speed drop the shutter speed down oh it's on it's on it let's on it
this wind is just ridiculous look at this
now this looks like one of the entrances into the mine system i'm not going to go in there and i
wouldn't suggest it to anyone unless you're going with a guide but this is a prime example of when
you might want to use iso to just kind of see what's in there or where there's a really dark
situation or a dark place you want to photograph it you can use your iso not
wanting to get too technical all this does is just amplify the signal coming off your sensor
i know there's a lot more to it than that but that's just keeping it as simple as possible
now if i go over here and i have a look inside it's really dark and spooky so with those settings
say for instance i'm shooting at 28 so 30 is probably my lowest shutter speed i'm at f 2.8
already so i just want to raise the iso see i'm over exposing the outside when i poke it inside
now there's something really eerie about that so if i just look at the settings i was using
1 30th of a second f 2.8 iso 10 000. so in boosting that signal by raising the iso level
it's basically able to see in the dark and i think i could probably get a lot more detail
out of that shot as well but yeah fascinating that people used to go in there and work unbelievable
another thing you can do in manual mode is to shoot panos those settings aren't going to change
so if you focus on one point and leave the focus there by switching it to manual
you can shoot a series of images and they'll all have exactly
the same exposure and then you can stitch them together in a panorama
now it's absolutely fantastic from up here you've got the lake you've got all the mine
workings you've got all the bits where they were obviously tipping the waste
out into the lake and the views just ridiculously good i'm gonna try and get a panorama from up here
once that sunlight and those sunbeams come through but um this will be just a waiting
game and trying not to get cold although saying that look at the light beam coming through now
no missed it that time yeah i definitely missed it that time
but that view down there is fantastic see what we can get there again i'm just
playing around with the settings i'm going to shoot to f8 close my shutter speed down
so i just have to wait for that sunlight to come
through shine on this landscape and hopefully get a nice panorama
so here we have another way in so you can see how extensive this mine system was
so many of these things so you can see the tracks coming along here
where they would have had the carts full of slate and full of stone and then all of these bits on
the outside that's where they would have dumped them all i'm not going in there but i'm going to
take a photograph and again i'm going to utilize the i say i'm going to bump it up loads and then
we'll be able to see inside we'll get a bit closer but not too much without standing in mud
wow you can see that just goes on and on that's a deep mine system if you haven't already noticed
i absolutely love exploring places like this it's amazing to see that people used to work here and
you're kind of exploring these old ruins and these old places where people used to live and work
and unfortunately used to die as well now i've looked at the clock
i think i'm going to go up to the top on the other side because there's something
that i want to show you over there which is on another level of fantastic
now that would look fantastic if the light was hitting that building
but hey you can't have everything
by walking around on the surface you can really see how extensive this mine
actually was there's so many inlets so many places where the mines would walk in i think
they're called levels if that's wrong and if you want to correct me let me know in
the comments below but i'm going to call them levels for now but yeah there's a load of these
levels coming out at lots of different places yeah it's just fantastic so much to photograph
wow
wow look at that
this is crazy looking at the vastness of it you look out into the valley
you can see other quarries and other mines with the slag heaps like this one that they were
dumping out all the waste material just waiting for another bit of light to come through i want
it to light the buildings down the bottom and have dark moody mountains in the background
and obviously those dark moody skies it's coming there we go wow look at that that's it
so with a bit of patience i got the shot i was looking for
now at this top point there's loads of big chunks of metal work obviously they couldn't get them
down or they were too corroded like this big reel of cable but there's a hole in the ground and this
dips off and goes down and then if you look at it from the other side there's like a ramp that goes
straight down and again if you come to somewhere like this it's it's just so much to photograph
and what you can do in places like this is really widen the aperture and get those
shallow depth of field shots on this lens the 28 to 200 at 28 i can open it to f 2.8 and
then i'm going to compensate with the other two settings so let's have a look how we can get this
maybe from this side yeah from there i'm gonna get as close as possible
so what i did there and you're getting very wet it's another waterfall scenario we're
gonna have to go somewhere else now in true welsh weather style the rain's properly come
in just as i was taking a photograph of that cog you've even got the tracks coming in still
and i'm not going to go in too far but down here it goes really steep really quickly wow
that goes properly steep i'm not going down there
wow now i am just sheltering from the rain in here you can probably hear how echoey it is but um i'm
going to take a few photographs in here you've obviously got all the holes of the drilling points
where they hammered out by hand put explosives in there and blew out this it's unbelievable
to see what humans are actually capable of the rain looks like it's kind of stopping
so
it's unbelievable it's crazy
at this point i did get a bit carried away but the point i was trying to make
was that you can open up your aperture by producing your f number
you then get close to the subject and blur out the background
and i don't know if you can see it there's a rainbow i did get a photo of it but it's not a
very good one when you are photographing rainbows use a polarizer if you can and rotate it you'll
find that at one point the rainbow will really stand out now that's what i should have done here
there's one other thing that i want to talk to you about and that's shutter speed and the best thing
to take photographs of to get an idea of what shutter speed does is take some photographs of
waterfalls now when you're in front of something that moves like a waterfall it's great to play
around with those shutter speeds i've been taking a lot of different shots between half a second
and a sixth of a second and when the sun comes out faster shutter speeds but you can play around with
your shutter speeds and then compensate with your aperture and your iso i've set it to iso 50 i've
got it at f16 and i'm at one fifth of a second so that's really blurring out that water now if
i wanted to freeze the water maybe at 1 640th of a second i'd have to change the other settings
to suit so i've changed it to iso 200 f 2.8 so you can really see the difference between those
between the slower shutter speeds and the faster shutter speeds and how it affects your photographs
you